It does render columns though. Maybe we are talking about different things but the algorithm is essentially: for x = 0 to 319 draw_vertical_line(x, height). The detail there though is whether you cast a ray for each column or do what this does and go from far plane to near plane drawing the columns.
When this was first posted I made a game with a port of this approach to AGS Engine. Nowadays AGS is much faster since we have improved a lot of things, but this wasn’t the case at the time, so I had to make a few little tricks to make the rendering work well with the engine at the time.
Technically this is not related to voxels ("volumetric pixels", so to say), which split the 3D space equally along all three axes. This is just a height map, a set of prisms, not entirely unlike a Doom map. Every prism has a regular fixed-size square base.
Technically you could say that it is volumetric pixels though, no? The height map and prisms are an _implementation detail_. What is being rendered is pixels with volume.
I remember how groundbreaking Comanche was. Now I learned that it was a result of the programmer's experience in the medical industry (CT/MRI scanning): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voxel_Space
I remember figuring all this out as a self-taught teenager (pre-internet) with some books, a whole lot of time, and only a high-school level understanding of trigonometry. I built different versions - first in Pascal, then C, then Assembly.
Figuring out the algorithm was hard, but one of the optimizations I was most proud of was inventing (or so I thought) lookup tables to get around the slow floating point multiplication of my 16MHz 80286 CPU. I also remember "inventing" (ha!) the old bit shift + add technique.
There was something immensely satisfying about squeezing every last drop of performance out of a machine.
Nothing ever came of it. It was more or less a demo, but man did it make me feel like I accomplished something magical. I'd give anything to have a look at that source code today, but this post is the next best thing. So thanks for sharing. This made my day.
The 286 didnt have an integrated floating point unit so you would have been using a software floating point library that came with your compiler. That would have been very slow indeed!
This rendering approach reminds me of a project I saw a while back that explored what the world would look like from the perspective of a 1D or 2D being. Someone actually built a interactive demo based on that exact premise.
First thing that comes to my mind is the procedural generation in Rescue on Fractalus! (Behind Jaggi Lines) 1984 by LucasFilm Games which blew my mind on Atari 6502.
Reading Voxel always takes me back, way back.. I played Comanche for hours and read up on Voxel tech in various magazines of the day; so clever and easy to implement. Nice demo and thanks for the trip down memory lane.
Off topic: The very first assignment in this game is called “oil tank holiday”: fly the chopper to unguarded oil tanks, shoot and watch them burn, and then fly home. No enemies. Just learn to fly and shoot.
I apply this in testing code. After you write some code, try to think of the absolute minimal test to prove that your code does anything at all without crashing. These are my “oil tank holiday” tests. It is always humbling to see those fail.
I would love to see somebody code this up to run in the browser -- it's from 2003, so I bet it could now run really fast with lots of voxels. It will steal your face right off your head. Happy Halloween!
1,367 views Jul 31, 2009: A prototype user interface for browsing volume data. Presented at IEEE VIS 2003 by Michael J. McGuffin, Liviu Tancau, and Ravin Balakrishnan. For more information, see
Delta force 2 for me [1]! The only real problem with it was you could see characters as moving single pixels across the map...and hit them without too much trouble.
I played hours and hours of it, networked multiplayer version, with my work colleagues .. it was part of our regular TGIF team-building exercises, among a few bouts of Descent2, some Warcraft2 and the odd Quake .. ah, halcyon days indeed .. we all had our joysticks at the office, lol.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 58.3 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/ericoporto/i_rented_a_boat
Wait why do they say painter's algorithm. Comanche and other such voxel terrain engines went front to back and never had overdraw.
For 1992, this was mind-boggling though.
I remember figuring all this out as a self-taught teenager (pre-internet) with some books, a whole lot of time, and only a high-school level understanding of trigonometry. I built different versions - first in Pascal, then C, then Assembly.
Figuring out the algorithm was hard, but one of the optimizations I was most proud of was inventing (or so I thought) lookup tables to get around the slow floating point multiplication of my 16MHz 80286 CPU. I also remember "inventing" (ha!) the old bit shift + add technique.
There was something immensely satisfying about squeezing every last drop of performance out of a machine.
Nothing ever came of it. It was more or less a demo, but man did it make me feel like I accomplished something magical. I'd give anything to have a look at that source code today, but this post is the next best thing. So thanks for sharing. This made my day.
edited, I found it: https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/m19vl2/1d_game_pro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Carpet_(video_game)
I apply this in testing code. After you write some code, try to think of the absolute minimal test to prove that your code does anything at all without crashing. These are my “oil tank holiday” tests. It is always humbling to see those fail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SplEU05z64
Using Deformations for Browsing Volumetric Data
1,367 views Jul 31, 2009: A prototype user interface for browsing volume data. Presented at IEEE VIS 2003 by Michael J. McGuffin, Liviu Tancau, and Ravin Balakrishnan. For more information, see
https://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/research/#mcguffin_vis2003
https://profs.etsmtl.ca/mmcguffin/research/volumetricBrowsin...
I tried to replicate the effect in Visual Basic, albeit with very limited success at the time.
[1] https://youtu.be/SyBh91UYVS8