First light

I've been poking at this voxel engine for a while now and never written anything down, which I always regret later — you forget why you made a decision about three weeks after you make it. So this is me starting a devlog. Nothing fancy: Markdown files, a few screenshots, the occasional GIF when something finally moves the way it's supposed to. It builds to a static page and goes up at voxel.gamebench.dev.

Here's roughly where things are.

The world

The terrain streams in chunks and renders deferred on Metal. This is a fairly typical frame — 854 chunks loaded, 50 little agents milling around, sitting at ~94 fps with the day/night cycle running:

I've been deliberately keeping the terrain gentle and buildable rather than going for dramatic mountains. The plan was always to hand-place structures on top of it, so cliffs everywhere would just get in the way. You can see the roads and powerline runs threading through it — those are generated, not placed.

It's more convincing in motion than in a still. Quick flythrough:

The editor

The buildings, props, and creatures all come out of a separate voxel editor. It's grown into its own little tool — scene tree, part-based rigs, a material inspector with the usual roughness/metallic/emissive sliders, palettes, grid snap. Here's a walker I was messing with, ~4000 voxels:

The part-based rig is the bit I'm most interested in right now. The idea is that each limb is its own rigid part so I can pose and eventually animate these things, then bake them down for the runtime. Still early.

Why bother with the diary

Mostly so future-me has a paper trail. But also because a lot of this stuff — the lighting, the water, the way the editor and the runtime hand models back and forth — only makes sense once you see it change over time. Easier to show than to explain.

Next time I'll probably get into the lighting, since that's what I'm in the middle of breaking.