TINY voxels NO TRIANGLES! | Voxel Game Devlog #1
*** LINKS *** # Voxel DDA rendering algorithm: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4dX3zl # DDA algorithm by Amanatides and Woo: http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~amana/research/grid.pdf # https://www.youtube.com/@frozein # https://www.youtube.com/@DouglasDwyer # https://www.youtube.com/@johnlin9665 Rendering is a hard computer science problem to solve, but there are thousands if not millions of renderers out there that solved the problem more or less. So why reimagine how rendering is done to make a voxel game? Especially as an indie dev, it’s hard to put in the work and the hours to make a game, let alone an engine. Well, making projects like the one john lin showcases on his channel requires some custom rendering techniques, here’s my take on the issue. Based on my work here, I am going to develop the engine to a point where I can create an indie voxel game and hopefully leverage the advantages of voxels, like procedural generation, fully destructible terrain and physicalized items/objects etc. Have fun watching me lose my mind and feel free to participate in the project by leaving your suggestions in the comments! Music: "Ebbs and Flows" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Video Chapters
- 0:00 Embarking on a 'From Scratch' Game Dev Journey
- 1:48 Introducing the Brickmap: A Revolution in Voxel Data
- 2:03 Brickmap Deep Dive: Unpacking Hierarchical Voxel Structures
- 4:06 The 'Why': Unveiling the Vision Behind Building From Scratch
- 5:33 Vulkan Breakthrough: Our Renderer Comes to Life
- 5:43 Behold! The Beautiful Voxel World with Per-Voxel Lighting
- 6:55 Glorious Light Beams: Per-Voxel Lighting Activated!
- 8:11 From Alps to Voxels: Importing Majestic Matterhorn Terrain
- 8:59 Vast Landscapes Unveiled: Multi-threaded Terrain Generation Fixed
- 10:10 Unveiling the Path of Light: Visualizing Brickmap Ray Traversal
Original Output
0:00 Embarking on a 'From Scratch' Game Dev Journey 1:48 Introducing the Brickmap: A Revolution in Voxel Data 2:03 Brickmap Deep Dive: Unpacking Hierarchical Voxel Structures 4:06 The 'Why': Unveiling the Vision Behind Building From Scratch 5:33 Vulkan Breakthrough: Our Renderer Comes to Life 5:43 Behold! The Beautiful Voxel World with Per-Voxel Lighting 6:55 Glorious Light Beams: Per-Voxel Lighting Activated! 8:11 From Alps to Voxels: Importing Majestic Matterhorn Terrain 8:59 Vast Landscapes Unveiled: Multi-threaded Terrain Generation Fixed 10:10 Unveiling the Path of Light: Visualizing Brickmap Ray Traversal Timestamps by StampBot 🤖
Unprocessed Timestamp Content
0:00 Welcome to the new game dev series: developing from scratch 0:19 Unveiling the enigmatic project and its from-scratch philosophy 0:44 A nod to John Lin, the inspiration for voxel magic 1:00 Simple 3D rendering using points and triangles, oh my! 1:24 Performance test in Godot reveals triangles are slow-poke geometry 1:48 Enter the brickmap: a smarter way to manage voxel data 2:03 Breaking down brickmap's efficient, hierarchical data structure 2:48 The magic of ray casting: turning screen pixels into world voxels 3:12 Smart memory reads and empty space skipping for speed 4:06 Why building from scratch? Modern engines feeling a bit... bloated 4:34 Embracing Vulkan for raw GPU power and delightful boilerplate code 5:08 Initial Vulkan rendering attempts were a colorful, chaotic mess 5:33 Success! The core Vulkan renderer finally starts making sense 5:43 The beautiful, blocky world with its intriguing per-voxel lighting 6:25 Testing per-pixel lighting: a dazzling, dizzying display of color 6:45 Per-voxel lighting's rocky start: glitchy, dark, and utterly perplexing 6:55 Per-voxel lighting activated! Witness the glorious light beams 7:13 Generating basic terrain with a default 3D noise library 7:38 Seamlessly importing custom voxel art from MagicaVoxel 7:55 Discovering a cool Sierpinski fractal cube on the map 8:11 Importing real-world terrain: a majestic Matterhorn made of voxels 8:32 Initial multi-threaded terrain generation: a glitched out digital wasteland 8:59 Multi-threaded terrain fixed! Generating vast, beautiful voxel landscapes 9:22 Bug hunt: lighting data position encoding creating abstract art 9:56 A mesmerizing visualization of a broken ray distance function 10:10 Visualizing brickmap ray traversal: seeing how light finds its way Timestamps by StampBot 🤖