I’m curious to know why a lot of people are spending their time working on voxel based engines and games.
I don’t see the difference between voxels and Minecraft and it doesn’t look realistic at all (unless they are shrunk down a LOT)
Can someone explain?
Because they teach you allot, and they’re hella fun to make as a first project w/ 3D
it’s the secret sauce in unreal 4 
the blocky visuals are just one facet and close to the metal - but if we filter voxels trilinear by cone tracing, we get nice smooth reflections, shadows and lightning. not matching brute force offline render quality but “good enough” for games.
another thing is - octrees come with the magic of z-curve/morton space filling. yet another space partitioning, worth comparing to r-trees etc. for primary-raytracing or physics/collision tests. visualising octrees in the process will always look a bit minecrafty 
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I think you just answered your own question.
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Not every game developer’s goal is to make the most realistic-looking game out there.
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Voxels are an easy way to get into 3D, so they’re the focus of a lot of novice “engines”.
I personally find their aesthetic boring (probably because everybody is doing it), but to each their own.
@Everyone else: Thanks for the responses, especially basil_.
@KevinWorkman: I think it’s aesthetically boring as well.
Voxels don’t need to be boring cubes… theres a project under development called “Voxel Farm” which looks very interesting, lots of videos of it on YouTube.
Voxels are very interesting topic - while voxel based game can be made basically by (almost) everyone, making them right is very difficult task. It is usually much easier to put together complex, never changing static world than a map that can be changed at any time, or even grow when you are near its edge.
This combined with possibility to put voxels in almost any kind of game makes them perfect both to learn coding and face some new challenges.
In my projectzs there are no voxels (yet). I also fail to see their benefits. But the whole minecraft hype passed me somehow, so maybe that’s why I don’t get it.
The thing is, minecraft actually isn’t even a voxel engine in the strict meaning of the term. It uses polygons to render cubes, hence the subsection “cube worlds” instead of “voxel engines” in this forum.
To see a real voxel engine, take a look at Atomontage: http://www.atomontage.com/ (which will probably never be released ;))
Voxels are everywhere for pretty much the same reason as pixel art.
And this is pretty much it. There is a difference between whether you want your games to look as close to reality as possible, which usually doesn’t work out very well (hell, even some AAA games don’t get that any right), or whether you want them to look… well… good, as in having any coherent style.
We could use photos as the textures in our 2D games, but most of us don’t, because it most likely just looks ugly, and so we opt for simple art we can actually produce - usually vector or pixel art.
Voxels might or might not be something we aesthetically like, but at least they allow to produce some kinda decent looking 3D art without having to take years to do so.
EDIT: And yes, Minecraft. There are of course different approaches. But usually, we call those “Minecraft clones”.
You say voxels…I think Comanche.
Great game!
Me thinks “Delta Force” (1998), too.
[quote]I don’t see the difference between voxels and Minecraft
[/quote]
Minecraft is a game, voxel engines aren’t. You could build many different games, of different generes, on top of a voxel engine. We associate voxels with minecraft probably because it is more or less the only really famous voxel-game out there.
I played a voxel-shooter some time ago, which basicly had nothing to do with minecraft (except for the voxels). It was a FPS, in a blocky, destroyable world.
Also, I don’t think there is anything that prevents you from creating a clone of a AAA-Title on top of a voxel engine.
So i don’t think it is fair to call every voxel-game a minecraft clone.
A voxel-engine has the great advantage of heaving a fully customizable world (if you want it to be fully customizable). This is verry hard (or maybe almost impossible) with “usual” engines. The drawback (which might be an advantage for somebody to) is, that they look blocky.
light-field displays/glasses are gonna use voxels in some sort with synthetic graphics.
