Voxels & Command and conquer: Tiberian Sun

In earily 2010 EA was hyping up for the release of its anticipated Command and Conquer 4, the last installment of the highly renowed Tiberium RTS series.  For one of its promotional acts, they decided to release one of the older games in the series Command and Conquer (2):Tiberian Sun, released in 1999. I immediately downloaded the game as soon as it was released, due to its sci-fi nature. This was also due to the fact I enjoyed the 1^st C&C, developed by Westwood studios, despite playing it 14 years after its release.

Marco Molecule

Interesting in C&C: Tiberian Sun not only were some of the units 2d sprites, but also units that were 3D volume pixels(VOXEL). This was the first time I discovered what a voxel was, essentially a 3d version of a pixel. A voxel is point in the data structure, or our case the 3d model, which contain information about its color, opacity, and other visual aspects. Unlike points, their position aren’t directly expressed, therefore their position in the object is interpolated. From these properties, voxels are good at creating 3d models which are made of multiple materials, or contain MANY strange contours, such as this marco molecule. Because of all these features, Voxels were large in their sizes, however we have developed compression and manipulation methods to reduce these sizes.

In the game, infantry units were designed to be 2D sprites, while mechanical units were 3D Voxels. This design choice was most noticeable, as vehicles looked different from infantry. Animation would also look different, where voxel units could rotate 360 degrees, the pixel were unable to. Unfortunately this design choice was as the result of Westwood’s new publisher, EA which pushed for the game to have a earlier release date. Though full voxel units were present in future games, like Red Alert 2, a lot of gameplay features, were lost due to this push.

Crysis environments using Voxel

Despite the fact voxels are not used widely today, as they once were in the early 2000, they still have a major application in the world. Voxels are used for rendering in the medicial world, and surprisingly still in the videogame world. The CryEngine 2 and 3, uses a combination of height maps and voxels to generate its terrain. Unreal engine 4 uses real-time global illumination with full secondary lighting and specular reflections with voxel raycasting. In CT scans, values stored in voxels are based on the opacity of material to X-rays. Since voxels can contain multiple scalar values ; in ultrasound scans with density and volumetric flow data are captured as separate channels of data relating each voxel in the data structure.

In the end, despite the graphical inconsistency, I still enjoyed the game for many reasons. One of which was the atmosphere, enhanced both by the music, graphics, and great cut scenes. The game’s sci-fi and post-apocalyptic atmosphere, transferred over to its sequel, Command and conquer 3: Tiberium wars. Despite playing a 10 year old game, the game still was fun, and memorable.