I will say this it looks cool and could add to the game,
but given the "get it out the door and working" thought, I don't think they have time to put this in and it could cause other problems with what they had envisioned PFO.
That and adding it now would be feature creep.
Yeap. That is of course a problem.. especially as they are already in production.
But on the other side, it could enable a lot of stuff, which might add to the game.. especially a game like Pathfinder.
There are just a few questions to answer:
- How difficulty is it to implement this technology in the existing framework
- How much performance does it actually cost? What would be possible to go around of that?
- How much time and money does it costs, and how much additonal time and money will it cost.
- Can we realise our targets with it?
- What additional benefits do we actually have?
A lot of those answer cost even time to find out. Like to build a test suite first, try how things can be included in existing framework.
A few thing we can at least discuss.. like what additional benefits would be possible with this technology.
About the performance issue. As much as i remember from the world building panel.. they said something like that the world is prodecural generated, so say have basicly just to save that and not every voxel.
And therefore the world heals beak to their original state.. which defeats somewhat of the purpose of a voxel world and reduces it somewhat do a gimmick.
Another point made was that they actually transfers voxel objects into meshes (3d polygon object) and vice versa on the fly.. to save the permanent changes.
Nevertheless with all possible problems and drawbacks the theoretical possibilities from such a voxel world are amazing.
For better graphical represtantion for:
- cutting trees
- maybe even for some crafting professions like smithy, carpenter
- siege warfare, catapults, mining(military)
which would all just temporary voxel changes for some time
But even more important would be permanent world changing possible with it, like
- digging actually a mine to find different ores
- building stuff
- overall changing the world
how all that could work out, and how much performance all that would cost.. i don't know, but i think it is worth thinking about it, or even to waste 1 or 2 weeks to test some stuff. I don't know how much of a problem it is to get the voxelfarm engine just for testing purpose.
Anyways.. just a view thoughts from me. But i think that voxel engines will play a big part in the future.. maybe it is to early to do it in a big way(permanent changes) on a greater scale like for a MMO, or Pathfinder in particular. But i guess we will see a lot more of that stuff in the future.
As much as i know the new ID6 engine from carmack will also based on voxels.