[HN Gopher] High Performance Voxel Engine (2021)
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       High Performance Voxel Engine (2021)
        
       Author : bibanez
       Score  : 46 points
       Date   : 2023-12-30 10:49 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (nickmcd.me)
 (TXT) w3m dump (nickmcd.me)
        
       | bibanez wrote:
       | A showcase of the techniques explained in the article:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFUj53VwYvU
       | 
       | https://douglasdwyer.github.io/octo-release/ (online demo)
       | 
       | Lately I've been addicted to watching (micro) voxel engine videos
       | on youtube. I need to resist my urge to write one (not that I
       | think I would do a particularly good job). I've also found the
       | voxel engine by John Lin to be particularly impressive.
        
       | bun_terminator wrote:
       | I'm not a professional graphics programmer, but I dabble in it
       | occasionally and hang out in GP communities. It's fascinating to
       | see the wealth of voxel engines being written. Minecraft really
       | had a massive cultural impact on the tech scene. Or maybe it's
       | just that voxels are a particularly good target for various
       | optimization techniques. Interesting either way!
       | 
       | For the author: Any particular reason you don't seem to be using
       | DSA in your OpenGL code? ie glNamedBufferData() and friends. I
       | found it the single thing that transforms OpenGL into something
       | very user-friendly.
        
         | phero_cnstrcts wrote:
         | Has the definition of voxels changed recently? As far as I know
         | voxels are pixels in 3D space. Minecraft is just a low poly
         | engine based on marching cubes.
        
           | paholg wrote:
           | I think voxel has grown to have two meanings. One is as you
           | describe, another is systems like Minecraft.
        
             | broast wrote:
             | As an example, a more modern and higher resolution
             | implementation of this style can be seen in "Teardown"
        
           | bun_terminator wrote:
           | Minecraft is just polygons sure, but it has a "voxely" look,
           | that's what I was getting at.
        
           | badpun wrote:
           | If you want to use rasterization part of your GPU, you're
           | going to have to eventually convert the voxel data into
           | triangles.
        
           | rzzzt wrote:
           | I'm also thinking Novalogic games and Voxlap:
           | http://advsys.net/ken/voxlap.htm
        
           | paulddraper wrote:
           | If you're familiar with pixels, you might be familiar with
           | "pixel art", even though you every image on a screen has
           | pixels
        
           | Jasper_ wrote:
           | Huh? What about it uses marching cubes?
        
       | pixelpoet wrote:
       | I'd rather just directly raycast against a nicely compressed
       | hierarchical representation than create horrendous amounts of
       | triangle geometry and rasterise that. The code would be
       | absolutely tiny, and not mostly a bunch of calls into someone
       | else's code.
       | 
       | But, you know, gotta do the OpenGL / DirectX / whatever vanilla
       | API thing... that's what graphics programming is, isn't it...
        
         | eddd-ddde wrote:
         | Would you happen to have a sample / example of this technique?
         | I'd like to explore it.
        
           | pixelpoet wrote:
           | It's just normal old raycasting through a voxel grid a la
           | Amanatides and Woo:
           | http://www.cse.yorku.ca/~amana/research/grid.pdf
           | https://github.com/cgyurgyik/fast-voxel-traversal-
           | algorithm/...
           | 
           | Casting the rays from the camera will be nice and coherent,
           | plus you probably get much better and easier shadowing using
           | ray casts compared to shadow maps.
        
         | pton_xd wrote:
         | That's the future but raycasting currently has some major
         | drawbacks... namely that everything looks like a noisy mess
         | when you look around.
         | 
         | Curious if anyone has plotted GPU compute increases against
         | display resolution + update frequency increases? When do the
         | two lines cross?
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-12-30 23:01 UTC)