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@@oneandonlyarajivp desktop

@@GabeRundlett you've got a really good graphics card. Do you need that high spec for the work you're doing? Am trying to figure out what to buy. Thanks

@@oneandonlyarajivp I do think you need a powerful GPU for the kind of thing I'm going for. I wouldn't say that's advice for what to buy tho

@@OhHaiC the terrain is procedurally generated in a voxel grid. The way that that's stored in memory is not relevant to how it looks, just that it's a grid. I then render this grid similarly to an octree via an acceleration structure. The code is fully open source.

@@GabeRundlett I see, thank you! I'll look into that!

@@OhHaiC I will note that the data structure used, like octrees, is sparse. Meaning that it does it's best to remove regions of empty space from memory. On top of this, it also losslessly compresses the per-voxel attributes in a way that preserves fast random access reads. These things are very important because the voxel grid (if stored as a flat array) would consume tens, hundreds or even thousands of gigabytes of memory.

@@CastleRene thanks so much. It means a lot. I only ever post when I really feel passionate that what I made is interesting and worth sharing... So that's why it's so rare 😔

@GabeRundlett Aw, thank you! I feel honored to be responded to. You're doing a good thing, and there are people out there who know it. The more you do, the more you will find them. Stay hopeful, and keep on walking the good walk. 👍

@GabeRundlett And don't worry about the frequency of your post! Find your rhythm, and stick with it. I myself have been making a game, and finally got the ray direction correct. I can't seem to get the DDA to work, but I know it will come with time. Be proud of yourself, and anytime you're feeling down, you can look at your work. You're helping people, so keep going! :)

@@CastleRene My videos got me hired at Tuxedo Labs (the guys who made Teardown). I quit my job and spent the last couple months moving to Sweden. I just started working 2 days ago. I need to make a video about this to let everyone know what's going on in my life 😅. No more videos about my voxel engine, since I'm not allowed to keep working on an open source voxel engine 😔

@GabeRundlett You know what? That's pretty cool! I'm happy for you, and I'm sure the rest of your viewers will be too. If you ever need anything, call on your fanbase, and I'm sure they will be happy to help out! Thank you for all your contributions to the public! Can't wait for teardown 2! ;)

added a bunch of ideas/feedback in the github tracker, might look into some of them myself at some point...

@@JadeCoffi thanks jade!

@@thebozbloxbla2020 thank you 😊 if you're interested in the code specifically for this video, check out the compute-rt branch. After this video, I started experimenting with hardware ray tracing (in master and its own branch), and then even rasterization (in a separate repo called voxel-raster... because I didn't know where I was going with it. I essentially rewrote the core of the engine in voxel-raster and I am probably going to merge that code into gvox engine master soon)

I just quit my job since I was hired by Tuxedo Labs (Teardown) tho... So I am contractually disallowed to work on this voxel engine tech publicly after I start in August. Trying to get as much out there as possible before I'm silenced 😆

@@GavinMockett I absolutely could add audio support eventually. I just recently did the first audio programming I've ever done

@@GabeRundlett That would be amazing, I was trying to port my audio visualizer shader over to pure opengl. I started with some smaller shaders and then moved to the decent visualizers but got completely locked up on the audio part. Least to say I am super happy I found this project.

The engine is already free and completely open source. The code is MIT licensed, so essentially anyone can use it for anything they like. I'm going to make a video about this soon, but I was just hired at Tuxedo Labs (the guys who make Teardown) and won't be able to work on this engine, since I'll be working on their new engine!

I think it was about 10 milliseconds at 1080p upscaled to 1440p on my 3070. I don't really remember - I can check again though.

@@GabeRundlett is there room for optimization? Oh and GI is actual raytracing or something else?

@@the-guy-beyond-the-socket in this video, both the primary rendering as well as the global illumination are rendered with ray tracing in compute shaders, implemented with a custom acceleration structure. There's definitely room for optimization. After this video, I ported the renderer to use hardware ray tracing shaders, which gave a minor lift in performance.

Yep, that was definitely on the to-do list. However, this project is being put on hold for a while because I got hired at tuxedo labs (makers of Teardown) so my voxel efforts are going to go into making their next project a reality!

It's because there aren't any vertices! The voxel data is raytraced in a compute shader. I recently have been experimenting with a GPU voxel mesher that can update in the same speed though!

@@GabeRundlett Oh I see, it's still impresive handling that many voxel updates! Thanks for the reply btw.

It's sort of like apples to oranges, usually the serve completely different purposes. Voxels are all about interactivity, so like modifying the scene however you like. This is an issue because it means no lighting can be baked. In this regard, a voxel engine is usually more demanding than a traditional game engine. Specifically for raytracing, voxels have some benefits though. You can make raytracing pretty darn fast

Hi tooob! Thanks for the detailed info, that's not common 😅 I use some widely supported but still relatively new vulkan features, which may necessitate a driver update for you Intel iGPU. When is the last time you updated your graphics driver on your laptop?

@@GabeRundlett The T570's are using 31.0.101.2114, which I installed to see if it fixed the issue. Before that it was 2111. ... So now I just went and found this version and installed it : 31.0.101.2127 (Feb 2024).. It claims to provide Vulkan 1.3 among other things. Your 0.4.2 EXE still just won't start. No window, no error, nothing. Maybe I should open an issue on your Github? The problem is it really doesn't matter a whole lot to me - I just wanted to compare how fast it ran versus the website on the T570's.

@@Tooob You absolutely can open an issue on GitHub with all this info, though I personally don't have any way to reproduce the issue at this point in time, so it may be tricky to fix. Regarding speed of the desktop vs website, they should be pretty similar because they are running the same GPU code. It's almost definitely GPU-limited, and so the desktop app won't make much of a difference.

Yeah it's really useful for debugging purposes because you can use renderdoc and step through the code!

You should have just checked the description, it is open source! Vulkan 1.3 is required. "True" voxels, though the particles are triangles or splats depending on distance. I don't really care about the distinction between "true vs true", I just do the thing that is the simplest/fastest to render. I raytrace the rest in compute shaders.

i see now, its gvox. I would love to port this library to homebrew via devkitpro.

@@michaelmueller5211 I specifically mean gvox engine... I did a bad job with naming, as I also have a library called gvox. I have no clue what homebrew is

@@GabeRundlett homebrew is home made games for jail broken Nintendo consoles and nintendo emulators such as dolphin. I'm currently working on a voxel game for the Wii but I need to optimize it. Glad I found you!

Haha, I get where you're coming from based on the name. I didn't think of that! That's not currently part of the plan. Like I said in the description (and the original video I made about it a few months ago) I created desktop-shadertoy in order to allow people to use existing tools for debugging shaders, such as renderdoc and nsight graphics.

You can already set Shadertoy shaders as your background on KDE using an extension

this man is my wife

Check the description, it has always been open source 😉😊

@@GabeRundlett awesome! is there a timeframe you are targeting for 1.0?

@@boot-strapper I'm sorry, but no. I actually just got hired by Tuxedo Labs (Teardown). My future voxel efforts will be focused there instead.

@@GabeRundlett bummer! But I totally get it

Like I said in the video, I actually ported a Rust/HLSL codebase to C++/GLSL to use it in my engine

Yes it is. It's based on SebH's sky: github.com/sebh/UnrealEngineSkyAtmosphere

@@GabeRundlett thank so very much this is very useful 🔥

No, not really

There's no reason besides performance. In this video, the SDF range was only ever 256 voxels, so the whole SDF wasn't rebuilt, just the nearby chunks. The issue is that even though it is possible to accelerate via a discretized SDF, the computational cost of updating it is still an issue. That's GPU compute that could be used elsewhere, wasted.

They absolutely can and are

@@GabeRundlettWouldn’t the reflection rays intersect the voxels they are being reflected off of? Are you adding an offset along the ray to prevent self intersection or is the ray ignoring the voxel it just reflected from? I’m working on my own voxel engine using ray casting and would like to implement something similar. Unless this renderer uses meshes than never mind.

@@jonahgordon2642 Yes, I start the ray about 1.5 voxels away from the voxel center

👋

I didn't... I did a lot of work for it but never finished it

They are not

@@GabeRundlett Gotcha, makes sense