A very basic voxel engine using WGPU as a rendering library. The goal of this project is to be able to render lots of voxels with (almost unique) properties such as a color for every voxel.
- Raytracing using compute shaders (or Vulkan Raytracing)
- PBR: Physically based rendering
- Collision so the user can walk
- Ability to edit the world such as by placing and breaking a lot of blocks at once (this data manipulation may also be done using compute shaders)
- Efficient world persistence
- Fast world generation on the GPU using compute shaders
Some possibilities for what this voxel engine could turn into include:
- Visualization of fluid simulations
- Realistic procedural world generation
- An adventure game
- A highly-configurable voxel engine with focus on performance
A huge amount of chunks can be loaded at once. This is because one chunk only stores data for every contained voxel, if
the voxels are of different types.
Ambient Occlusion is enabled on the left image. It is a per-vertex value describing the amount of nearby occluding
blocks. This value is then used in the shader to darken the affected areas and simulate a soft shadow.
Here is an overview over a procedurally generated world. The chunks inside a specific radius around the camera are
loaded. They stay loaded until they reach a certain unload threshold -- the maximum render distance. (In this image are
also some visible holes in the mesh between two chunk borders.)