The author mentions simplicity in their Readme. I would be very interested to read their journey and some of the decisions they made where they preferred simplicity. More of this please !
It's actually more efficient to do a hybrid approach, especially at high view distances. Rasterizing triangles is extremely fast, and is basically a perfect primary-ray intersection. Ethan Gore recently did some experiments with raytracing and said that for large scene volumes (his engine comfortably renders the entire 32-bit range, or 4B^3) it turns out to be faster to do raster for primary rays and raytrace shadows/GI.
I've always wondered why voxel engines tend to produce output that looks so blocky. I didn't realize it was a performance issue.
Still, games like "C&C: Red Alert" used voxels, but with a normal mapping that resulted in a much less blocky appearance. Are normal maps also a performance bottleneck?
Before Minecraft, basically all voxel engines used some form of non-axis-aligned normals to hide the sharp blocks. Those engines did this either through explicit normal mapping, or at the very least, by deriving intermediate angles from the Marching Cubes algorithm. Nowadays, the blocky look has become stylish, and I don't think it really even occurs to people that they could try to make the voxels smooth.
Voxels have been around since the 1980s. The smoothness came from that beautiful CRT and its inability to display crisp images. Normals weren’t really used until early 90s and used heavily by games like Comanche by NovaLogic.
The reason why Minecraft voxels are blocks is because Notch (Markus Persson) famously said he was “Not good at art”. He didn’t implement the triangulation and kept them unit blocks. Games that had voxels AND were triangulated that came before Minecraft were Red Faction, Delta Force, Outcast just to name a few.
The point is, voxels aren’t anything special, no more than a texel, or a vertex, or a splat, a normal, or a uv. It’s just a representation of 3D space (occupied/not occupied) and can just as easily be used for culling as it can for rendering. The Minecraft style because popular because it reminds people of pixels, it reminded people of legos, and Minecraft was so popular
It depends on how the voxels relate to the gameplay.
Regardless of the original intent, in Minecraft the voxel grid itself is a very important aspect of the core gameplay loop. Smoothing the voxel visual representation disguises the boundaries between individual logical voxels and makes certain gameplay elements more difficult or frustrating for the player. When the visuals closely (or exactly) match the underlying voxel grid, it's easy for the player to see which specific voxel is holding back some lava or if they're standing on the voxel they're about to break.
In Minecraft you can, for example, clearly count how many voxels wide something is from a distance, because the voxels are visually obvious.
In Red Faction, you're never concerned with placing or breaking very specific voxels in very specific locations, so it's not an issue.
I don't think this should be understated. LEGO are easy and fun to build with and don't require a lot of artistic talent. The same goes for block-based games like Minecraft.
Can you add more details? This seems to directly contradict GP. GP said ray tracing can do higher voxel counts = ray tracing is more performant (than rasterization).
Off the top of my head the CAPITALIZED WARRANTY DISCLAIMER is specific to a subset of states in the US. If you’re outside those jurisdictions (or any other where it is required) then for aesthetic or principled reasons I can see why you wouldn’t kowtow to the legalese spiral.
> Surely the warranty and liability disclaimer found in licenses like MIT exists for a reason
Obviously IANAL, but I entirely don't see how the WTFPL (which does not ask the consumer to accept any restrictions) would create an implied contract (which would seem to be a necessary precondition for a warranty obligation)?
IANAL either, so my own legal theories are as creative as yours, but I'd like to offer the following data point: All unrestricted open-source licenses that were written by actual lawyers, from MIT to CC0, have found it necessary to include such a liability clause.
In the sense that when people want to use a piece of MIT-licensed software in another piece of software, they don't in practice find themselves restricted from doing so by the conditions of the license. "Permissive" might be a word I should rather have used.
The MIT license does place one specific license restriction on its users. Specifically: "subject to the following conditions: the above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software"
https://dubiousconst282.github.io/2024/10/03/voxel-ray-traci...
It's actually more efficient to do a hybrid approach, especially at high view distances. Rasterizing triangles is extremely fast, and is basically a perfect primary-ray intersection. Ethan Gore recently did some experiments with raytracing and said that for large scene volumes (his engine comfortably renders the entire 32-bit range, or 4B^3) it turns out to be faster to do raster for primary rays and raytrace shadows/GI.
Still, games like "C&C: Red Alert" used voxels, but with a normal mapping that resulted in a much less blocky appearance. Are normal maps also a performance bottleneck?
The reason why Minecraft voxels are blocks is because Notch (Markus Persson) famously said he was “Not good at art”. He didn’t implement the triangulation and kept them unit blocks. Games that had voxels AND were triangulated that came before Minecraft were Red Faction, Delta Force, Outcast just to name a few.
The point is, voxels aren’t anything special, no more than a texel, or a vertex, or a splat, a normal, or a uv. It’s just a representation of 3D space (occupied/not occupied) and can just as easily be used for culling as it can for rendering. The Minecraft style because popular because it reminds people of pixels, it reminded people of legos, and Minecraft was so popular
Regardless of the original intent, in Minecraft the voxel grid itself is a very important aspect of the core gameplay loop. Smoothing the voxel visual representation disguises the boundaries between individual logical voxels and makes certain gameplay elements more difficult or frustrating for the player. When the visuals closely (or exactly) match the underlying voxel grid, it's easy for the player to see which specific voxel is holding back some lava or if they're standing on the voxel they're about to break.
In Minecraft you can, for example, clearly count how many voxels wide something is from a distance, because the voxels are visually obvious.
In Red Faction, you're never concerned with placing or breaking very specific voxels in very specific locations, so it's not an issue.
I don't think this should be understated. LEGO are easy and fun to build with and don't require a lot of artistic talent. The same goes for block-based games like Minecraft.
I’ll have to try some of my assets out in this engine.
> I’ll have to try some of my assets out in this engine.
The asset loading is currently broken in Bonsai after a big rewrite, but it's the next thing on my list to fix! Would love to see your art :)
"I Optimised My Game Engine Up To 12000 FPS" ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40JzyaOYJeY )
https://github.com/vercidium-patreon/meshing
Obviously IANAL, but I entirely don't see how the WTFPL (which does not ask the consumer to accept any restrictions) would create an implied contract (which would seem to be a necessary precondition for a warranty obligation)?