docs/stb_voxel_render_interview.md - third_party/stb - Git at Google

 # 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!*
	# 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!