[HN Gopher] VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than...
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VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of
code (2020)
Author : lnyan
Score : 57 points
Date : 2025-01-03 20:01 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| khedoros1 wrote:
| [2020] could go in the title (or even [2017], looking at other
| comments in the thread in the following discussion link).
|
| There was also a discussion in 2021 of the same repository:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26631995
|
| (and that thread links to other discussions too)
|
| It's not quite the same, but I remember when I was first learning
| programming, I wrote a program that would generate a terrain
| heightmap, and do an isometric-style rendering using similar
| techniques. It was in QBasic, running on my middle school's
| 386-era DOS machines, and used graphics memory as its scratch
| space. Slow as heck, but I was fascinated with the output. It's
| one of the things that encouraged me to keep going with
| programming.
| louthy wrote:
| Voxels was an interesting technique for about five minutes in the
| early 90s, but they could never really be rendered at a high
| enough resolution for them to look good imho.
| parlortricks wrote:
| John Lins https://youtu.be/8ptH79R53c0?si=33yYWMbfNAiJw0X8
| Crystal Island looks amazingly detailed and smooth. Wish he
| would continue or share how.
| mllev wrote:
| You should check out the game Teardown and then perhaps you
| will modify your perspective
| elpocko wrote:
| Or maybe not, because it looks really bad compared to other,
| more or less state of the art engines. The most remarkable
| thing about Teardown is its physics, not its graphics.
| big_paps wrote:
| Outcast was such a beautiful looking game !
| harha_ wrote:
| It looks really good for such a simple algorithm. I love this!
| NKosmatos wrote:
| I remember reading about this somewhere (could be from an older
| HN post), but this time I decided to add a comment so that I
| don't lose it. Being a flight sim fan, I still remember playing
| Comanche for the first time and the wow factor. It was something
| from the future or from the movies, you got the feeling that you
| were leaving in the computer era :-)
| layer8 wrote:
| I'd love to live in an alternative timeline where GPUs were
| voxel-based.
| mthoms wrote:
| I have such fond memories of building a terrain viewer like this
| (first in Pascal, then in C & Assembly) in the 1990's at the same
| time I was learning the requisite trigonometry in high school.
|
| Back then, all kinds of low-level optimizations were necessary to
| make it work.
|
| Figuring out how to do it, and optimize it with no books or
| internet to reference is one of the most personally rewarding
| things I've ever done.
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