[HN Gopher] I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed dis...
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I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields
(SDFs) [video]
Author : imagiro
Score : 120 points
Date : 2026-01-08 10:34 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| rjh29 wrote:
| Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able
| to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make
| the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them
| around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any
| terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities
| here and surprisingly performant!
| yunruse wrote:
| The physics engine mentioned towards the end, Jolt Physics [0] is
| used in the frankly blockbuster games Horizon: Forbidden West and
| Death Stranding 2 and yet opens its description with
|
| > Why create yet another physics engine? Firstly, it has been a
| personal learning project.
|
| which is really rather wonderful and inspiring to see.
|
| [0] https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics
| V__ wrote:
| It has also become the default physics engine in Godot.
| thom wrote:
| Also increasingly well integrated into Godot.
| armada651 wrote:
| Its use in those games is no mere coincidence though, the
| creator of that physics engine, Jorrit Rouwe, has worked at
| Guerilla Games since the Killzone days.
|
| https://jrouwe.nl/games.php
| msephton wrote:
| Great video. A new game engine powered by SDFs is the sort of
| thing I want to find out about. Not the next game in a long
| running franchise that looks the same as all the others that
| preceded it. One for the from-scratch game dev nerds like myself!
| mbullington wrote:
| Go Mike! Been seeing his progress for a while on Bluesky, I knew
| exactly (and who) what this was when I saw it on HN.
|
| I was rendering-curious when we overlapped together at Figma.
| Mike was super patient and giving with his time, answering all my
| dumb questions and aiding with my Maker Week projects. Excited to
| see him take on something so ambitious next.
| deckar01 wrote:
| Dreams on PS4 had an SDF modeler, but I'm not sure if the runtime
| was SDF. Now that I think about it, the rendering engine had a
| Gaussian splat look to it years before that paper.
| koolala wrote:
| They discuss Dreams in the video and even explain Brick
| rendering.
| matt3210 wrote:
| Dang! Very nice!
| num3ric wrote:
| I wonder if ReLU fields could help reduce cache grid resolution
| while improving reconstruction precision? See
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10824
| cubefox wrote:
| Almost every 3D game uses textured polygons almost everywhere
| (except sometimes for fog or clouds), so this SDF engine is nice
| to see.
|
| However, he doesn't mention animations, especially skeletal
| animations. Those tend to work poorly or not at all without
| polygons. PS4 Dreams, another SDF engine, also had strong
| limitations with regards to animation. I hope he can figure
| something out, though perhaps his game project doesn't need
| animation anyway.
| Boxxed wrote:
| I'm not super familiar with this area so I don't follow... Why
| is animation any more difficult? I would think you could attach
| the basic 3D shapes to a skeleton the same way you would with
| polygons.
| jacobgorm wrote:
| GameGlobe from Haptico and Square Enix, the engine of which also
| powered Project Spark from Microsoft, also used an SDF engine.
| Former colleagues of mine built the tech in Copenhagen and I
| remember getting a super impressive demo back then. This was the
| first time I heard of SDFs.
| DetroitThrow wrote:
| Such impressive demos and great explanations in the video. Mike,
| if you're reading this, keep making videos!
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