--- /dev/null
+# An interview with STB about stb_voxel_render.h
+
+**Q:**
+I suppose you really like Minecraft?
+
+**A:**
+Not really. I mean, I do own it and play it some, and
+I do watch YouTube videos of other people playing it
+once in a while, but I'm not saying it's that great.
+
+But I do love voxels. I've been playing with voxel rendering
+since the mid-late 90's when we were still doing software
+rendering and thinking maybe polygons weren't the answer.
+Once GPUs came along that kind of died off, at least until
+Minecraft brought it back to attention.
+
+**Q:**
+Do you expect people will make a lot of Minecraft clones
+with this?
+
+**A:**
+I hope not!
+
+For one thing, it's a terrible idea for the
+developer. Remember before Minecraft was on the Xbox 360,
+there were a ton of "indie" clones (some maybe making
+decent money even), but then the real Minecraft came out
+and just crushed them (as far as I know). It's just not
+something you really want to compete with.
+
+The reason I made this library is because I'd like
+to see more games with Minecraft's *art style*, not
+necessary its *gameplay*.
+
+I can understand the urge to clone the gameplay. When
+you have a world made of voxels/blocks, there are a
+few things that become incredibly easy to do that would
+otherwise be very hard (at least for an indie) to do in 3D.
+One thing is that procedural generation becomes much easier.
+Another is that destructible environments are easy. Another
+is that you have a world where your average user can build
+stuff that they find satisfactory.
+
+Minecraft is at a sort of local maximum, a sweet spot, where
+it leverages all of those easy-to-dos. And so I'm sure it's
+hard to look at the space of 'games using voxels' and move
+away from that local maximum, to give up some of that.
+But I think that's what people should do.
+
+**Q:**
+So what else can people do with stb_voxel_render?
+
+**A:**
+All of those benefits I mentioned above are still valid even
+if you stay away from the sweet spot. You can make a 3D roguelike
+without player-creation/destruction that uses procedural generation.
+You could make a shooter with pre-designed maps but destructible
+environments.
+
+And I'm sure there are other possible benefits to using voxels/blocks.
+Hopefully this will make it easier for people to explore the space.
+
+The library has a pretty wide range of features to allow
+people to come up with some distinctive looks. For example,
+the art style of Continue?9876543210 was one of the inspirations
+for trying to make the multitexturing capabilities flexible.
+I'm terrible at art, so this isn't really something I can
+come up with myself, but I tried to put in flexible
+technology that could be used multiple ways.
+
+One thing I did intentionally was try to make it possible to
+make nicer looking ground terrain, using the half-height
+slopes and "weird slopes". There are Minecraft mods with
+drivable cars and they just go up these blocky slopes and,
+like, what? So I wanted you to be able to make smoother
+terrain, either just for the look, or for vehicles etc.
+Also, you can spatially cross-fade between two ground textures for
+that classic bad dirt/grass transition that has shipped
+in plenty of professional games. Of course, you could
+just use a separate non-voxel ground renderer for all of
+this. But this way, you can seamlessly integrate everything
+else with it. E.g. in your authoring tool (or procedural
+generation) you can make smooth ground and then cut a
+sharp-edged hole in it for a building's basement or whatever.
+
+Another thing you can do is work at a very different scale.
+In Minecraft, a person is just under 2 blocks tall. In
+Ace of Spades, a person is just under 3 blocks tall. Why
+not 4 or 6? Well, partly because you just need a lot more
+voxels; if a meter is 2 voxels in Mineraft and 4 voxels in
+your game, and you draw the same number of voxels due to
+hardware limits, then your game has half the view distance
+of Minecraft. Since stb_voxel_render is designed to keep
+the meshes small and render efficiently, you can push the
+view distance out further than Minecraft--or use a similar
+view distance and a higher voxel resolution. You could also
+stop making infinite worlds and work at entirely different
+scales; where Minecraft is 1 voxel per meter, you could
+have 20 voxels per meter and make a small arena that's
+50 meters wide and 5 meters tall.
+
+Back when the voxel game Voxatron was announced, the weekend
+after the trailer came out I wrote my own little GPU-accelerated
+version of the engine and thought that was pretty cool. I've
+been tempted many times to extract that and release it
+as a library, but
+I don't want to steal Voxatron's thunder so I've avoided
+it. You could use this engine to do the same kind of thing,
+although it won't be as efficient as an engine dedicated to
+that style of thing would be.
+
+**Q:**
+What one thing would you really like to see somebody do?
+
+**A:**
+Before Unity, 3D has seemed deeply problematic in the indie
+space. Software like GameMaker has tried to support 3D but
+it seems like little of note has been done with it.
+
+Minecraft has shown that people can build worlds with the
+Minecraft toolset far more easily than we've ever seen from those
+other tools. Obviously people have done great things with
+Unity, but those people are much closer to professional
+developers; typically they still need real 3D modelling
+and all of that stuff.
+
+So what I'd really like to see is someone build some kind
+of voxel-game-construction-set. Start with stb_voxel_render,
+maybe expose all the flexibility of stb_voxel_render (so
+people can do different things). Thrown in lua or something
+else for scripting, make some kind of editor that feels
+at least as good as Minecraft and Infinifactory, and see
+where that gets you.
+
+**Q:**
+Why'd you make this library?
+
+**A:**
+Mainly as a way of releasing this technology I've been working
+on since 2011 and seemed unlikely to ever ship myself. In 2011
+I was playing the voxel shooter Ace of Spades. One of the maps
+that we played on was a partial port of Broville (which is the
+first Minecraft map in stb_voxel_render release trailer). I'd
+made a bunch of procedural level generators for the game, and
+I started trying to make a city generator inspired by Broville.
+
+But I realized it would be a lot of work, and of very little
+value (most of my maps didn't get much play because people
+preferred to play on maps where they could charge straight
+at the enemies and shoot them as fast as possible). So I
+wrote my own voxel engine and started working on a procedural
+city game. But I got bogged down after I finally got the road
+generator working and never got anywhere with building
+generation or gameplay.
+
+stb_voxel_render is actually a complete rewrite from scratch,
+but it's based a lot on what I learned from that previous work.
+
+**Q:**
+About the release video... how long did that take to edit?
+
+**A:**
+About seven or eight hours. I had the first version done in
+maybe six or seven hours, but then I realized I'd left out
+one clip, and when I went back to add it I also gussied up
+a couple other moments in the video. But there was something
+basically identical to it that was done in around six.
+
+**Q:**
+Ok, that's it. Thanks, me.
+
+**A:**
+Thanks *me!*
projects / henge / apc.git / blobdiff