stb/docs/stb_voxel_render_interview.md

   1 # An interview with STB about stb_voxel_render.h
   2
   3 **Q:**
   4 I suppose you really like Minecraft?
   5
   6 **A:**
   7 Not really. I mean, I do own it and play it some, and
   8 I do watch YouTube videos of other people playing it
   9 once in a while, but I'm not saying it's that great.
  10
  11 But I do love voxels. I've been playing with voxel rendering
  12 since the mid-late 90's when we were still doing software
  13 rendering and thinking maybe polygons weren't the answer.
  14 Once GPUs came along that kind of died off, at least until
  15 Minecraft brought it back to attention.
  16
  17 **Q:**
  18 Do you expect people will make a lot of Minecraft clones
  19 with this?
  20
  21 **A:**
  22 I hope not!
  23
  24 For one thing, it's a terrible idea for the
  25 developer. Remember before Minecraft was on the Xbox 360,
  26 there were a ton of "indie" clones (some maybe making
  27 decent money even), but then the real Minecraft came out
  28 and just crushed them (as far as I know). It's just not
  29 something you really want to compete with.
  30
  31 The reason I made this library is because I'd like
  32 to see more games with Minecraft's *art style*, not
  33 necessary its *gameplay*.
  34
  35 I can understand the urge to clone the gameplay. When
  36 you have a world made of voxels/blocks, there are a
  37 few things that become incredibly easy to do that would
  38 otherwise be very hard (at least for an indie) to do in 3D.
  39 One thing is that procedural generation becomes much easier.
  40 Another is that destructible environments are easy. Another
  41 is that you have a world where your average user can build
  42 stuff that they find satisfactory.
  43
  44 Minecraft is at a sort of local maximum, a sweet spot, where
  45 it leverages all of those easy-to-dos. And so I'm sure it's
  46 hard to look at the space of 'games using voxels' and move
  47 away from that local maximum, to give up some of that.
  48 But I think that's what people should do.
  49
  50 **Q:**
  51 So what else can people do with stb_voxel_render?
  52
  53 **A:**
  54 All of those benefits I mentioned above are still valid even
  55 if you stay away from the sweet spot. You can make a 3D roguelike
  56 without player-creation/destruction that uses procedural generation.
  57 You could make a shooter with pre-designed maps but destructible
  58 environments.
  59
  60 And I'm sure there are other possible benefits to using voxels/blocks.
  61 Hopefully this will make it easier for people to explore the space.
  62
  63 The library has a pretty wide range of features to allow
  64 people to come up with some distinctive looks. For example,
  65 the art style of Continue?9876543210 was one of the inspirations
  66 for trying to make the multitexturing capabilities flexible.
  67 I'm terrible at art, so this isn't really something I can
  68 come up with myself, but I tried to put in flexible
  69 technology that could be used multiple ways.
  70
  71 One thing I did intentionally was try to make it possible to
  72 make nicer looking ground terrain, using the half-height
  73 slopes and "weird slopes". There are Minecraft mods with
  74 drivable cars and they just go up these blocky slopes and,
  75 like, what? So I wanted you to be able to make smoother
  76 terrain, either just for the look, or for vehicles etc.
  77 Also, you can spatially cross-fade between two ground textures for
  78 that classic bad dirt/grass transition that has shipped
  79 in plenty of professional games. Of course, you could
  80 just use a separate non-voxel ground renderer for all of
  81 this. But this way, you can seamlessly integrate everything
  82 else with it. E.g. in your authoring tool (or procedural
  83 generation) you can make smooth ground and then cut a
  84 sharp-edged hole in it for a building's basement or whatever.
  85
  86 Another thing you can do is work at a very different scale.
  87 In Minecraft, a person is just under 2 blocks tall. In
  88 Ace of Spades, a person is just under 3 blocks tall. Why
  89 not 4 or 6? Well, partly because you just need a lot more
  90 voxels; if a meter is 2 voxels in Mineraft and 4 voxels in
  91 your game, and you draw the same number of voxels due to
  92 hardware limits, then your game has half the view distance
  93 of Minecraft. Since stb_voxel_render is designed to keep
  94 the meshes small and render efficiently, you can push the
  95 view distance out further than Minecraft--or use a similar
  96 view distance and a higher voxel resolution. You could also
  97 stop making infinite worlds and work at entirely different
  98 scales; where Minecraft is 1 voxel per meter, you could
  99 have 20 voxels per meter and make a small arena that's
 100 50 meters wide and 5 meters tall.
 101
 102 Back when the voxel game Voxatron was announced, the weekend
 103 after the trailer came out I wrote my own little GPU-accelerated
 104 version of the engine and thought that was pretty cool. I've
 105 been tempted many times to extract that and release it
 106 as a library, but
 107 I don't want to steal Voxatron's thunder so I've avoided
 108 it. You could use this engine to do the same kind of thing,
 109 although it won't be as efficient as an engine dedicated to
 110 that style of thing would be.
 111
 112 **Q:**
 113 What one thing would you really like to see somebody do?
 114
 115 **A:**
 116 Before Unity, 3D has seemed deeply problematic in the indie
 117 space. Software like GameMaker has tried to support 3D but
 118 it seems like little of note has been done with it.
 119
 120 Minecraft has shown that people can build worlds with the
 121 Minecraft toolset far more easily than we've ever seen from those
 122 other tools. Obviously people have done great things with
 123 Unity, but those people are much closer to professional
 124 developers; typically they still need real 3D modelling
 125 and all of that stuff.
 126
 127 So what I'd really like to see is someone build some kind
 128 of voxel-game-construction-set. Start with stb_voxel_render,
 129 maybe expose all the flexibility of stb_voxel_render (so
 130 people can do different things). Thrown in lua or something
 131 else for scripting, make some kind of editor that feels
 132 at least as good as Minecraft and Infinifactory, and see
 133 where that gets you.
 134
 135 **Q:**
 136 Why'd you make this library?
 137
 138 **A:**
 139 Mainly as a way of releasing this technology I've been working
 140 on since 2011 and seemed unlikely to ever ship myself. In 2011
 141 I was playing the voxel shooter Ace of Spades. One of the maps
 142 that we played on was a partial port of Broville (which is the
 143 first Minecraft map in stb_voxel_render release trailer). I'd
 144 made a bunch of procedural level generators for the game, and
 145 I started trying to make a city generator inspired by Broville.
 146
 147 But I realized it would be a lot of work, and of very little
 148 value (most of my maps didn't get much play because people
 149 preferred to play on maps where they could charge straight
 150 at the enemies and shoot them as fast as possible). So I
 151 wrote my own voxel engine and started working on a procedural
 152 city game. But I got bogged down after I finally got the road
 153 generator working and never got anywhere with building
 154 generation or gameplay.
 155
 156 stb_voxel_render is actually a complete rewrite from scratch,
 157 but it's based a lot on what I learned from that previous work.
 158
 159 **Q:**
 160 About the release video... how long did that take to edit?
 161
 162 **A:**
 163 About seven or eight hours. I had the first version done in
 164 maybe six or seven hours, but then I realized I'd left out
 165 one clip, and when I went back to add it I also gussied up
 166 a couple other moments in the video. But there was something
 167 basically identical to it that was done in around six.
 168
 169 **Q:**
 170 Ok, that's it. Thanks, me.
 171
 172 **A:**
 173 Thanks *me!*