#voxel engine

Sooooooo I kinda accidentely made a minecraft clone....

Hi, I'm Auri and I'm reinventing the wheel making a voxel game / engine. Recently I've managed to scrape together a really cool RGB voxel lighting algorithm so I'm going to make a post about it!

One thing that was really important to me when designing my game's lighting was that I wanted the static lighting to fit in with more fancy graphical effects. That means that Minecraft's lackluster diamond-shaped lighting wasn't going to cut it. I wanted spherical light and I wanted colors!

To accomplish this, I split the lighting into 6 channels. RGB for block light, and RGB for sky light. (technically there's 9 channels but that's too complicated to get into right now). I also store the direction that light comes from so that I can build a pseudo-sphere of light around the source.

To make things performant, I had to delve deep into micro-optimizations like Word Level Parallelism, which is a technique to do the same operation on multiple numbers packed into a single integer. The algorithm supports a huge dynamic range for colors and brightnesses, and operates in real time.

Any color can be used, and bright lights even overexpose. Lights can span chunks in radius!

If you're interested in the project, and want to see more, please join my Discord! I do weekly livestreams and I post updates often! Thanks for your interest ❤️❤️❤️

I've been digging through my old Twitter posts recently, trying to get everything of "value" off of the platform, and I found a bunch of posts with glitched / broken images of my game in it, and I thought, hell, why not? Here's a little gallery of the neatest bugs that I bothered to take pictures of.

This funky grass happened when I was working on leaf swaying particles. I accidentally applied it to the grass blocks instead of the tall grass, and I had the intensity multiplied by a factor of 10.

This was... meant to be a wireframe model, to show you what you're pointing at. I don't even know what happened to it here!

Shaders breaking can sometimes lead to really satisfying results... I believe I accidentally routed texture coordinates directly to the fragment shader output somehow, resulting is this very dreamlike effect.

Back when I was still storing partial chunks -- chunks containing only structure data that spanned a chunk boundary while generating -- in the regular chunk array, it was possible for the game to mistakenly believe these chunks were complete and render them. These chunks were default-filled with id 0, the invalid block, which only meant to appear when a block from a mod that has been removed is loaded. They were a slightly scary sight, looming over the horizon.

A while back, when I was working on the GUI system of the game, I added an API to programatically crop and resize textures, which caused a lot of problems and memory corruptions. I'm not a very careful programmer :)

Despite how annoying debugging can be, it can be fun seeing the chaos that bugs can throw at you. I just wish I got more stuff like this and less Segmentation Fault (Core Dumped).

Do check out our Discord server if you want to see more nonsense, or if you'd like to involve yourself with the project. I'd love to say hi!