Voxels (Patreon)

Playing Ion Fury, it becomes obvious that implementing voxel support in Retroquad would make a lot of sense.

Voxels would be an intermediary option between 2D sprites and 3D models:

• Very easy learning curve for content authors. Lone developers could benefit from this.
• Good for very complex geometry on small objects.
• No gouraud shading - Only ambient shading would be supported, just like in SPR sprites.
• No frame-based animations; there's no way to interpolate that smoothly.
• Offseting, scaling, shearing, rotation and other kinds of per-plane animations could be implemented, probably. Waving grass would be possible. Per-plane animations would likely be smoother and less computationally expensive than the vertex animations of 3D models.
• Dithering should be possible. I'm sure I could find a way to dither voxels so they'd be smoother when up close.
• Quadricolor voxels should be possible, but I'm not sure how good they would look. Dithered particles doesn't use quadricolors because of how sparse their pixels can become, so this is something I'd have to do some study on.
• Voxels could be mipmapped (mivmapped?), but trilinear dithering them could be impractical. The good thing is, there would be no need for anisotropic mapping modes.

Anyway, this is not in my to-do list yet. But it's something I'd like to put on the roadmap when possible.