I probably missed some, but every inspired-by-minecraft voxel game i've seen uses the same scale. For them all 1 cube is 1m3.
While this may be mathematically nice and neat, measuring stuff in even meter lengths isn't a killer feature of voxel games-- so i must assume that most everybody is blindly copying this paradigm without considering alternatives.
This scale has some negative consequences. To move around on anything but a flat plain you must hop everywhere. Exploration means constantly slamming the spacebar. To make blocks you can walk up, half-blocks and stairs were introduced, which caused trouble with targeting, lighting, and interact weirdly with fluids.
Alternatives:
1) Make the fundamental building block of the world, not cubes, but half-cubes (i.e. 1 m wide, .5 m tall).
To maintain the general speed of excavation, these blocks should be harvested twice as fast.
Pros:
At this scale people would be ~ 1 block wide and three blocks tall, so entities could automatically walk up (without jumping!)any 1 block high obstacles. Jumping could get you up a 2block high obstacle. Crouching could plausibly get players through 2 block-high tunnels.
Half-blocks and stairs could be omitted.
Pros:
While this may be mathematically nice and neat, measuring stuff in even meter lengths isn't a killer feature of voxel games-- so i must assume that most everybody is blindly copying this paradigm without considering alternatives.
This scale has some negative consequences. To move around on anything but a flat plain you must hop everywhere. Exploration means constantly slamming the spacebar. To make blocks you can walk up, half-blocks and stairs were introduced, which caused trouble with targeting, lighting, and interact weirdly with fluids.
Alternatives:
1) Make the fundamental building block of the world, not cubes, but half-cubes (i.e. 1 m wide, .5 m tall).
To maintain the general speed of excavation, these blocks should be harvested twice as fast.
Pros:
- * More naturalistic landscapes
* Half-blocks can be used everywhere of any material, without weird limitations
* Thus more detailed buildings
* No need to Jump everywhere
- * Measuring by meters: Worlds would take up 2x the disk space, or only 1/2 as much could be held in memory at a time
* The half-block shape may be a little weird for some uses.
At this scale people would be ~ 1 block wide and three blocks tall, so entities could automatically walk up (without jumping!)any 1 block high obstacles. Jumping could get you up a 2block high obstacle. Crouching could plausibly get players through 2 block-high tunnels.
Half-blocks and stairs could be omitted.
Pros:
- * More naturalistic landscapes
* No need to Jump everywhere
* More detailed buildings
* Everything is still a cubes
- * Measuring by meters: Worlds would take up slightly more than 2x the disk space or a little less than 1/2 as much could be held in memory at a time