I posted this yesterday on the Imperial Seige forum, but I'd like to get comments from here as well:
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What was ever wrong with sprites? I just got into RA2 modding recently, but I must admit that Voxels seem problematic (mostly due to the normals) just to get an image that is sub-standard to sprites in many aspects. After all, one of the greatest things ever invented in computer graphics is anti-aliasing, and since voxels don't really support that, they will never look as good until we use them on super hi-res monitors where the blockiness isn't so apparent.

The only practical use seems to be where the little planes fall to the ground and crash (rotating as they fall)...at no other time do we see any more than the top of each unit at the same camera angle. (Except for the vehicles going up and down hills, but honestly I could live without that.)

I'm asking because I'm interested in doing a space-based mod; basically using the RA2 engine and completely redoing the graphics. Yes, starships are 3d and rotate on all axes, but I would personally rather have a cleaner, sharper image than a blocky semi-3d voxel. Sprites seem to be the only logical method even though the RA2 program itself seems to be geared toward voxels. From what I've found, sprite-based vehicles have not been explored much in RA2, and it is requiring a good amount of trial and error to get them to work.

So I'm curious, what advantage(s) do you modders see with the voxels?