I'm making a voxel engine and I can afford a few physics properties besides the usual stuff like color.

What properties do you think they should have that would add to the game play experience?

Here's a link of stuff I was looking at physical properties.

This really depends on what you need. Using a lookup table for materials is a good approach and allows you to encode as many properties as you want per material. So you'll end up having to look at your own gameplay and rendering requirements to decide what you need. We could tell you that temperature is important when it doesn't make sense in your game. Definitely look into a material system though.

I'm just looking for some ideas... I don't have any special mechanics in place... that's sort of what I'm looking for ideas on. Like what properties I could include that would add something interesting to the game play.


Thanks for the material lookup idea though, I was gonna add each property seperate.

Maybe density? This way you could simulate buyoancy and have voxel-based fluids (altho that would kill performance pretty quickly). Could be fun for a "design-your-voxel-ship" type of a naval game.

Yeah, I can't be doing the physics stuff every frame... I'd either have to progressively do it or a limited number of voxels per frame or something. I'd have to limit the simulation somehow.

Maybe density? This way you could simulate buyoancy and have voxel-based fluids (altho that would kill performance pretty quickly). Could be fun for a "design-your-voxel-ship" type of a naval game.

Density would be useful outside fluids too for destructible environments, which are a bit more realistic for voxels than fluids atm.

Most of these voxel games are not using real physics like you would see in a game like Battlefield. They are using cellular automata, similar to what you would see in sand games, which also have discretized pair based interactions .. If written correctly they can be very fast.. I believe this is also how Dwarf Fortress do their physics, which also include customized special case rules. Interestingly enough cellular automata go way back in games, Sim City used it at its core as well..

More modern sand games also include real physical effects like magnetic field, wind, etc.. Which combined with their powerful cellular automata models, produces a true "sand" box game..