A 3D Medikit in voxel format
The Doom Voxel Project is a project to convert many of Doom's items to a 3D voxel format. It began on 23rd February 2004 as the result of a thread posted on the Doomworld forums by Tony "Ghostpilot" Lindberg. Other forum members took an interest, and Lee "DooMAD" Wallis joined the project.
Despite suggestions that such a feature would never be supported in any source ports, work continued on the new voxel items. A simple web page was setup in order to show progress, but it disappeared shortly after, and development of the project ceased for several months. The project was revived on 1st January 2006, when DooMAD created a new webpage.
Problems to overcome
- It is claimed that voxels are inherently incompatible with OpenGL rendering, which many Doom source ports now use. OpenGL's polygon routines cannot be used to rasterize voxels, so unless a suitable method is found to display them, they would be limited to ports using a software renderer. The developers of such a port would also have to implement support for voxels before they can be used, and there is no guarantee this will occur.
- There is currently no accurate way to automatically convert a series of Doom sprites to a 3D voxel model. The work must be done by hand, which is very time consuming.
- The program being used to create the voxels uses a propriatary voxel format not supported by any known engines. GhostPilot has made numerous attempts to influence the creators of the program to support the .KVX and .VOX file formats. The .KVX format is supported by the Build engine and would allow testing of the voxel models in a game environment.