Follow me on Twitter for more updates: https://twitter.com/ProgrammerLin
This scene is composed entirely of voxels. What started as an innocent attempt at increasing the view distance evolved into a 4 month quest to achieve not only that, but rewrite a brand new voxel engine from the ground up that would feature:
– An 8x (512 cubic) detail increase with animation support, high compression rates, and per-voxel material attributes
– Fast collision detection that physics and player walking will utilize
– Full fracture and mutation of objects
– Improved path traced global illumination that features 5 bounces from the sun, atmosphere and all emissive objects
– A powerful asset pipeline that can utilize Quixel Megascans, PlantFactory/PlantCatalog’s detailed vegetation, and other highly detailed polygon models after being converted and processed into voxels (all 3 seen in this video)
– Ray-traced world generation that could easily place trees, grass, flowers, and other assets (eg. crystals) in designated areas: eg. in sunlight, on cave walls, in big open areas, and so on
– A 10x speedup in rendering over the previous engine
Most of these features are showcased in the video. Of course, there are some kinks to work out, like you can see object intersections occurring or being placed in odd places, and the path traced denoiser is lacking a spatial filter, but I got too excited with how this looks that I couldn’t wait any longer to share. The effective world size here is 256K^3 and the island is generated once upon startup (like Terraria for instance), which takes about a minute. Things won’t look this chaotic in whatever the final version is, as it’s more a feature test than anything else.
To those who prefer the charm of the old engine, there is a low-detail mode that will be toggleable. More likely than not, this level of detail will be reserved for RTX graphics cards, and the low-detail mode will be the fall back for older ones. I don’t have exact spec predictions yet, because there are so many tweaks to be made like level-of-detail threshold, lighting refresh rates, and the world size itself, so general performance requirements remain to be outlined.
Stay tuned for more updates, as in the future we’ll soon see that this world is dynamic and not just there to be looked at. Rigid body physics will make a return, so will fluid dynamics eventually, and really everything seen here is only the beginning. Thank you to everyone who supports this project, and doesn’t leave mean comments calling out how I keep saying the next video will be the official announcement. Soon(tm) 😉
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37 comments
I want to thank everyone for all the feedback I've received over the past few weeks. After a lot of consideration, I've decided to shelf micro-voxels for now and instead put the optimizations towards the "pixel art" style that many of you said you preferred.
There were other factors that went into this decision too, ultimately boiling down to the gameplay possibilities and end-user experience being much better this way. I know the description said that the resolution could just be turned down, but trying to properly create and maintain two unique art styles is overly ambitious and prioritizing one style dictates the features that are possible in the engine. In the future I'll likely revisit this once the game is developed.
Fortunately, all these improvements open some new doors that were previously closed in the lower detail style. For context, this scene used 3GB of VRAM and ran 10x faster at the high resolution than the engine did previously at the low resolution. You can probably gauge what this means going backwards. Voxel manipulations are now way faster and it's significantly less costly to store and trace individual voxels, allowing things like procedural snow build-up, mossy vegetation to grow on user builds, way fancier world generation, seasonal vegetation with growth stages (this was possible before but not realistically feasible), more sophisticated building, smaller file sizes, and the list goes on.
I've been working on a new codebase with these realigned goals that mixes C/C++ for the heavy lifting and C#/.NET for content & modding. There's some more information on my Twitter (https://twitter.com/ProgrammerLin) if you're curious.
As always, big thank you to everyone that found this cool and supported it, and to those that helped make this decision. I'll be back to showcasing some of these new features in no time. 🙂
Cant believe this guy made projects this impressibe that make me insanely excited now that ive discovered them
Only to discover he's completely vanished 3 years ago, damn
Edit: To note, I know he's showed some activity elsewhere and hearting comments as of a year ago, and he's probably just cooking in the background lol. Would still be nice to see some updates.
This is amazing. I can't even imagine how much work went into this.
That's amazing! Please, make Noita 3d!
Continu ur chanel, it is fire
bro i miss you, i often think about your projects please come back
I heard this from no cap gaming and damn, this stuff is impressive! When I went over the channel though, my heart dropped when I saw the last post was 3 years ago. But I hope we get to see this come to fruition in the future.
i can barely even tell that theyre voxels
wooooooooooooooooow
Any source?
Hello! 😀 Can you make an update video, on your current progress? It has been 3 years since. Would be awesome. Whatever state it is in, we are interested in it.
Hey, how is this project going! It's been a while since you've made an update. This technology is absolutely amazing, and it would be amazing to see a game released using this!
We need your help running 7 days to die lmao
we need more updates!
hey John, 3 years ago you uploaded this video, we are still impressed. know that over 3 years we still be impressed. know that you can make alot of money just to impress us that you did it 3 years ago.
"Lay of the land" seems to be a close competitor to this engine. Very similar games.
Sorry where can i download this
Very impressive! More micro-voxels!
I found a new game – Voxlands.
Take my money now!
the anti-voxel assassins got him
should have some eerie, cool transition music when u enter the really dark low pits of the caves; and then cloud layers above ground with mini cloud creatures & cloud songs occuring…
open source?
What ever happened to this project. I was so hoping to see a game or something but no updates in 3 years.
How TF is this even possible?!
As a filmmaker, I love just shooting trailers for films I never plan to make. Trailers are cool!
come back
this is you from the future. It is Time to return to this game. We are all proud of you.
I can tell this guy's gonna be famous, and so is his game.
How do i play that?
cool
it is time to return to this project. excited for and proud of you. bless
awesome! how to animate voxel like leaves and stuff in this scale??
it's amazing to see how far voxel based rendering has come. Imagine if one day we can render voxels at such a high density that you could zoom in almost indefinitely
3 years ago? 😢 Don't tell me this project is dead…
Imagine a world which is build up from very tiny particles, let's call them atoms . I think a set of 118 different kinds of them should be enough for a high level of complexity.
hhmm i wonder where that voxel guy is?
cookin; thats where he is.
exciting dude keep it up!
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