Favorite Kind of 3-D Game?

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Personally, I don't think I've played enough video games to answer this question.

I think voxels are super awesome, but there aren't very many games that actually use them. Ken Silverman (of BUILD fame) made a really neat voxel engine, but it's mostly only been used for silly little homebrew games.

PS. Minecraft is not voxels

So, Minecraft isnt voxels? Hm, I have to say I'm a bit unclear on the definition of those, then. Everyone constantly says that Minecraft and it's brethren are voxel-based, so.... yeah, that's confusing.

What are some good examples of that, then? I'm curious now.

My understanding is that Minecraft doesn't use voxels, but does look a lot like them, so it's definitely confusing. A good example I can think of is Trove.

Voxel are the 3D equivalent of 2D pixels and consists of rendering the graphics with cubes rather that polygons. In the case of Minecraft even though the world is made of cubes the cubes are rendered with textured polygons; the "voxels" of Minecraft are too big for the graphics need. As for why video games are using polygons rather that voxels, I guess it must be because of the square cube law; as voxels take all the volume to reduce by half the cubes edges you need 8x the cubes, while you only need 4x the polygons to reduce polygons edges as only the surface is rendered.

The data for Minecraft's world is stored the same way that voxel information is stored, but that's about it.

Yes, voxels are basically 3D pixels. So if you could get the pixel resolution high enough, you could render something much more realistic/organic looking than polygons.

If you've ever played Shadow Warrior, they used voxels to make pickup items look more like 3D models.

I kind of like both. I also like how Fire Emblem Fates uses animated cutscenes and battle/normal cutscene polygons.

Blood also uses voxels for pickups and you can get voxel mods for Duke Nukem 3D and even Doom.

I don't see any reason why voxels aren't totally superior to polygons. But you don't see them all that much. Maybe they take a massive toll on performance and modern computers just aren't able to deal with them. Or maybe polygons are easier to work with. I don't know, I'm not a developer.

I don't care as long as it looks cool, I have even heard of these types of graphics. I play games like Minecraft and I play triple-a titles and I'll play anything if it looks good. Hell I don't even need 3D to be impressed, Terraria looks freaking amazing. Good 3D graphics doesn't fix bad gameplay, not by a long shot.

Skyrim is fine right now and it could be all blocks for all I care, I play for the game play. In fact I am playing with undead horses and lightsabers right now because f**k making sense.

If I remember correctly, the biggest reason is because there is no hardware acceleration for them, so it's all running on CPU.

I'd probably have to 90s-style "2.5D" FPS engines, things like the ones used by Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Hexen, etc. They have a neat look to them and a different feel than polygon-based 3D engines, which I really like. Voxel engines can be neat too, but I haven't seen a lot of games that actually made good use of them.

That said, I remember Worms 3D had a hybrid polygon/voxel engine that it used for its terrain deformation effects, which I thought was pretty cool. I'm pretty sure it used polygonal models for the characters at least, since I remember running into this one glitch on the Gamecube version where all these polygons started stretching out really long distances, and it looked crazy. It only happened to me once, and it sucks that I never bothered to take a picture of it.

That's only because no one has ever bothered to come up with hardware to accelerate voxel rendering. I'm sure it could be possible, but I also think the main reason no one's thought to do it is because it's more computationally expensive than polygons.