Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language • Hacker News Board

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#81

Post by voidUpdate » Thu, Mar 05, 2026, 7:58 AM UTC

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #70

voidUpdate wrote: post #53

It always mildly annoys me when a game says that it is all voxels, but clearly isn't, since the little cubes easily move off the voxel grid. Its just geometry moving around, like normal games, but modelled in little cubes, instead of being fully restricted to voxels. I would really like to see a fully voxel game, where all geometry is "rendered" to voxel space before being rendered to the screen, so that everything i…

Lexaloffle's Voxatron is what you're describing: https://www.lexaloffle.com/voxatron.php IMO the effect is less compelling than you might think.

looks great to me, if that little gif is anything to go by

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#82

Post by gazook89 » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 4:01 PM UTC

Aardappel wrote: post #11

OtomotO wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any ideas how to increase the render distance way further? Because that's where I always get stuck. There are so many cool algorithms and ideas that I have like combining ray tracing with meshing and even like imposters for the distant chunks. But this is getting very complicated with contrees and raytracing/marching etc.

With raytracing having a far render distance is actually fairly cheap and simple compared to polygonal worlds (good looking LOD is hard). Some reasons why we don't have a super far render distance, in order of importance: The biggest is GPU memory. The octree that holds the world gets gigantic at large sizes. We'd have to swap parts out as the camera moves. We can do that but haven't gotten there. Noise: raytracing l…

Is it possible to fake a world curvature so that using a fog isn’t as necessary, as far items sink below the horizon?

Re: Voxile: A ray-traced game made in its own engine and programming language

#83

Post by Aardappel » Sun, Mar 08, 2026, 4:44 PM UTC

gazook89 wrote: post #82

Aardappel wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With raytracing having a far render distance is actually fairly cheap and simple compared to polygonal worlds (good looking LOD is hard). Some reasons why we don't have a super far render distance, in order of importance: The biggest is GPU memory. The octree that holds the world gets gigantic at large sizes. We'd have to swap parts out as the camera moves. We can do that but haven't gotten there. Noise: raytracing l…

Is it possible to fake a world curvature so that using a fog isn’t as necessary, as far items sink below the horizon?

That is tricky with raytracing, since rays would need to be curved, and at least in this raytracer, ray steps are not all equal in size so doing that correctly could be very expensive.

But is generally a cool idea.

Fog is good too, though. It helps with a sense of scale, and it helps colors and distance noise not be too busy.