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I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

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Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#71

Post by hahn-kev »

program_whiz wrote: post #65
rjh29 wrote: post #2

Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!

I really respect his work on the engine, the math, and the engineering is excellent, but I'm not sure it makes for an interesting game above and beyond what we already have. Adding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either). As for "create a hol…

Yeah that's what I felt watch that video.

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#72

Post by mikkupikku »

kaoD wrote: post #56
cepacked wrote: post #48

I use SDFs on my render engine to render text. It allows me to debug values inside shaders. (I can print value of an uniform, texture value etc.) (It's a combination of line segments for each letter and digit)

Are you aware of Valve's paper[0] for glyph rendering via SDFs? You can get amazing results from a low res glyph atlas. [0] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

From what I understand, that paper was extremely influential and the technique has been widely adopted.

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#73

Post by mikkupikku »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #45
andrewstuart wrote: post #35

There’s game developers who develop games. And there’s game developers who develop game engines thinking they are developing games.

Nothing wrong with that - Engine developers often have "defining" titles - aka tech demos they work on to push the field

Townscaper is a nice one like this; it has very few features or gameplay, just a sandbox tech demo for a very cool take on model synthesis / "wave function collapse" on an irregular grid. The game is mostly carried by the novelty of this mechanic (and also the pleasant art.)

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#74

Post by mikkupikku »

program_whiz wrote: post #65
rjh29 wrote: post #2

Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!

I really respect his work on the engine, the math, and the engineering is excellent, but I'm not sure it makes for an interesting game above and beyond what we already have. Adding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either). As for "create a hol…

HyperRogue pulled it off.

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#75

Post by nnevatie »

turtledragonfly wrote: post #69
nnevatie wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems you're not familiar with how game projects with a custom engine typically go. Let me elaborate on this - the steps involved are: 1. Create a custom game engine.

Why must you attack me personally like this?! ⠀(:

Heh, I'm as guilty of this myself. Here's one example of mine: https://github.com/nnevatie/paybacktime

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#77

Post by nkrisc »

jakkos wrote: post #67
nkrisc wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Basically it's the result of a smoothing function that blends the sampled SDF value of the two nearest bodies. You can simply pick the minimum SDF value and get no blending at all.

> You can simply pick the minimum SDF value and get no blending at all. While this true for traditional SDF rendering (e.g. raymarching), the method of "interpolating cached distances" used here means that you will always get blending between objects.

Oh right, of course. I wasn’t thinking about the specific implementation in the video. Thanks.

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#78

Post by GuB-42 »

Archit3ch wrote: post #62

Is there an easy way to go from Blender model to SDF?

The way he approaches the problem, which essentially uses voxels, it shouldn't be too hard: for each voxel, compute the distance to the closest triangle and you have your SDF.

The thing is, you have a SDF and now what? What about textures and materials, animation, optimization, integration within the engine,... None of it seem impossible, but I won't call it easy.

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#79

Post by nineteen999 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #72
kaoD wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you aware of Valve's paper[0] for glyph rendering via SDFs? You can get amazing results from a low res glyph atlas. [0] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...

From what I understand, that paper was extremely influential and the technique has been widely adopted.

UE4/5 implement fonts this way.

Re: I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs) [video]

#80

Post by ehnto »

vivzkestrel wrote: post #34
ehnto wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A big challenge of game dev is the asynchronous nature of all the requirements, and that the game will develop its direction continuously throughout dev. That is to say you don't know what assets etc you need until you've developed the part of the game that generates that requirement. I find it hard to imagine even a 2000 page pre-planning could capture that process. You could try planning ahead and restricting asset…

out of curiosity, i want to experiment creating a third person shooter from scratch with vibe coding (yes third person, i wrote FPS above by mistake). think of a proper military game with actual uniforms, movements like walk, crouch, jump, take cover etc. and being able to fire bullets, ballistics, grenades, explosions etc. what do you think is the process to vibe code something like this. obviously i ll need to give…

I think the best approach right now would still be to pick a game engine, and start learning it, in this case with heavy assistance from LLMs. Unity will have the most training data in it for this approach. There is actually a lot of game development that happens outside of code, and in the editor. So having coding done for you can only help so much anyway.
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