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I had a dream. That every one of the "I made a voxel engine" youtubers came together to code an open-source voxel engine and put it on github under an open-source license, and it was so awesome and slick and efficient that the open-source community came together and rebuilt minecraft and hundreds of other games/mods on top of it. Then I woke up and I had to go to work :( Great video.

This small niche of voxel engine ytubers is so comfy

Not only have you gotten better on the technical side of things, but you have also improved a lot in video quality! Keep going man, love your stuff!

The data structure you're describing is called an N^3-tree which generalize octrees. Since you use a branching factor of 4, that would be a 4^3 tree. As you noted, it's possible to efficiently traverse this structure thanks to the bitmask trick. A very efficient algorithm for traversal is called hierarchical DDA (digital differential analyser), which is more commonly used for dense voxel grids but can also be applied in a hierarchical fashion on each level. Note that you may use a different branching factor on each level in order to reduce the depth of the structure while still retaining good sparsity. There is a paper describing all of this called "VDB: High-Resolution Sparse Volumes with Dynamic Topology" in case you need a reference. In my own work, I use a 3 level hierarchy where the first level is dense and the following two use a branching factor of 4. Hope this helps :)

THC Tree 😅. I've heard it referred to before as a 64-tree

Welcome back to raytracing! I’m really excited to see where you take this engine.

DUDE! 10:49 This reminds me of the old "Ace of Spades" game. Basically a voxel fps that could run on anything when I was a kid. I would love a sandbox game or anything really in a retro style like this! Keep going I got really excited while watching this video :D

The low-res style is sick! I think it would suit a horror game very well.

GPU memory isn't slow, it's way way faster than standard system memory. GPUs aren't designed though to be programmed like CPUs you need to take into account the architectural differences and leverage the GPUs huge advantages when designing memory structures to be run on them.

Lower resolution looks perfectly fine. imo it will create better result if used well

Holy crap that church looked amazing

Awesome! It's incredible that you had the motivation to re-write all of that.

Lets go!

Also known as a multi-layer grid, I have used these a lot. You can actually make it a little more efficient memory wise for spatially by hashing multiple values in the same nodes. The first low resolution grid is sometimes also called a bloom filter. You can use a processor's vector instructions like SIMD, openvc or cuda to skip many empty bits at once.

Amazing progress, I love your devlogs! :)

just started my data structure/algorithms course and seeing why the efficiency can be so important even on personal projects is motivating

Well DonE! I absolutely love the new vid style! Please keep up your good work!

Loved the video! also thanks for linking Gabe's channel that one's new to me

Really beautiful! And the performance is insane 😲

I think it is amazing what you were able to achieve with the surface normals. Not using polygons frees you of building the chunks with this geometry to render the voxels. Nice idea, really amazing !

Love this! I saw some other comments on further ways to optimize traversal & memory usage, but from now on the common term for the 4^3-tree models should obviously be the THC-tree model 😄

The low resolution has a really cool old-school feeling to it; you should play around with a CRT post-processing pass, could look awesome with the right resolution settings!

I tried the demo, I was quicker than expected. Good work.

That church looks oddly familiar 🤔

I've always loved voxels, since Ken Silverman's Voxlap engine. I love the destructibility in particular, since polygons can't really do this. I think you have the rare opportunity to push the medium. So if we take the concept of destruction and voxel physics. What other cool things can we do that is only achievable with voxels? What are the limitations with polygons? I really feel like the future of game dev will be in a medium similar to voxels but something like gaussian splatting. Where the engine works with atoms. Maybe it's best to think of voxels as atoms. It's really an exciting area that has been so neglected by developers. You're very lucky to be working in an area that is yet to be fully explored creatively.

Super awesome! It is pretty funny how many dev log videos start with. “I decided to reprogram it from scratch” 😂 I am also guilty of doing this tho so can’t say much

The resolution and resource scaling is perfect on this lol. 100% gpu and cpu usage across 32 threads, and 1100fps default window size to 280 at 1440p. Looking forward to seeing how this project progresses, great job on it!

First time I've come across your channel. I've always felt voxels are like a computer making graphics like (checks notes) a Post-Impressionist oil painter. The church and village at the end of the vid? Both facinate and excite my brain for reasons I simply can't fathom. Love, love, love voxels and if that's your engine? You've absolutely cracked it visual wise. Subscribed.

This has to be the most immersive voxel engine I’ve seen so far

10k UKpostsrs - "I'll optimize this engine, even with the cost of rewriting 11 thousand lines of code." Multimillion companies hiring hundreds of programmers - "It reaches 48 FPS on RTX 4090, that should be enough!" Thank you for the video, it's very informative. Great job!

real scan environment looks so sick. with a little bit of hand finishing it would be an amazing level generation tool

That's a very nice acheivment. Congrat

Absolutely love the photoscans!!! Also, i think the formal term for a tree with 8^3 sized nodes is a B+tree, B as in binary, + as in more than two children.

Excellent work. I'm happy you went back to ray tracing. It does look much better. I love the idea of using photogrammetry to build out levels. I think this would make a really interesting almost PS1 looking game.

Easily my favourite UKpostsr, another great upload!

Oh also wanted to say that I found your channel (which has been great by the way). Because of a random video "You can Parry Nukes" for that V.A. Proxy game. I thought, Man it would be cool if that slash or explosion could slice a mountain in half as it traveled forward. Then I started thinking of Voxel destruction and how Voxel art would be pretty good for showcasing that kind of destruction. (Even that game looks like it be transformed into a Voxel art style. Then ended up down a rabbit hole of Voxel plugins for Unreal then custom Voxel engines and such which led me here.

this looks so good, i find the low resolution version charming

Beautiful work.

I believe the "higher levels" of searching through the voxels is some form of spatial hashing (you "hash" the ray positions to a coarser grid, which is then used to iterate through smaller grids).

Imagine Magic Carpet remake with this tech!!!! Destructable castles, volcanos, tremors, everything. :DD

This is amazing, continue your good work

One of the things I always wanted in AoS was vehicles. Imagine driving around a map in a Jeep, or driving a self-propelled artillery to a strategic high point? I could never figure out how a vechicle would navigate voxel terrain, but this idea of "normals for each voxel" could make it work.

considering how fast these engines are at lower window resolutions, exploring upscaling options similar to DLSS might be a valuable win for lower end hardware. i think the nature of voxel scenes could lend themselves extremely well to certain upscaling techniques (or look ugly idk). would be fun to expiriment

Love your work. Voxel engines have a nostalgic place for me. Games like the original Outcast or Comanche (this dates me) had astonishing visuals for their time. That a voxel engine was possible on 1992 when barely any games were 3D at all is testment to their potential. There's a certain charm and art style to low res combined with a blocky world that is worth exploring. Bonus if that means it can run on a potato or a very old machine. Great potential there.

This is so awesome!! The game looks amazing keep going!

Your brick tree is similar to cone marching just in grid aligned space, and could also be thought of as a sort of acceleration structure.

The low resolution gives me 90s vibes in a good way.

I really like the low res look, especially if you add moody lighting and fog

Wow, great job! Hope you can also implement reflection and refraction!

damn dude, this is the coolest stuff in CS in my opinion. Such a good combination of math and algorithms/data structures, to make something that looks so cool, and if it wasn't for job prospects, I'd totally go for it. I'm in second year uni, in cs and physics, and I'm so split in what area I want to go in. I worked on my own shitty, completely entry level 3D rendering/physics engine, and it was so much fun. But the game industry is going through so much layoffs right now, and if I want to work on other physics simulations like robotics or autopilots, it seems like I'd need a masters, which idk if I'd go for. I'm so torn on what I should work on this summer, if I should continue working on my game engine, or get into AI which is probably the more employable path, but doesn't seem as interesting as this. Also from what I hear game devs don't earn as much as other software engineers, but I wouldn't call this type of thing "game dev", more like engine designer, right? does it pay adequately to how much work you have to put in? maybe I care about the pay too much...

that looks amazing!

I love how the game looks on the IC, maybe even better than on the GTX.

Very intresting to watch, thank you

I think global illumination could really make your engine look *even* better. I recently learned about an interesting technique for global illumination from a channel called xima. In his voxel engine he is using a cellular-automata based global illumination model that runs in a compute shader(to great effect).

11:10 Looks even more nostalgic really.

The lower resolution + voxel style together looks very nice. Perfect for lower end GPUs as well like you said.

just here to say I love the low res look, look like one of those "demake" but with its own style and not just PS1/2 look

Woooo! He's back at it again with the rewrite! This guy is gonna be the next Notch!

Wait a sec.. i recognize you. I used your fork of cpal for getting audio to work on the web in my game engine. Thanks and keep it up with the rust graphics content!!

I get around 8 fps on integrated graphics in the church which is 8 more than I expected, good work! (laptop defaults to IGPU with chrome)

Video quality is great!

Honestly, the low resolution example at the end looks much more interesting in my opinion. The high resolution shots, especially of the mediterranean cityscape, look sort of uncanny and moreover kind of lifeless. Could be sublime for horror games though I suppose.

wow this looks amazing

The photoscan stuff is the best reminds me of Vagrant Story on PS1, some of the best lo-fi graphics ever made!

Fantastic! Is there a game / project in mind for the engine, or are you planning to release the engine itself? Either way, great work and I enjoyed hearing about the more granular GPU challenges and solutions you encountered - thanks for sharing!

Great video! I am curious if you plan on tweaking the shadows and lighting to make it more realistic? I noticed that there is a lot of ambient light being used. Any plans to use a raytracing/phong lighting system in the future?

Try and add FSR 3 for lower resolutions on integrated video cards. You might end up gaining quality, even with high-end specs for this specific engine. You can also consider exchanging the language to Zig, as benchmarks show it can be up to almost 10x faster than C.

That low res version reminding me of a game called Carpet or is it Magic Carpet released in late 90s or early 2000-ish I think.

awesome demo!

Now I really wanna see it with multiple ray bounces. Deeper shadows would go a long way in bringing out the details.

I'm curious if you have ever tried the BrickMap data structure, which is very similar to yours, but its 8x8x8 instead of 4x4x4, though, I don't believe its organized in a tree structure. Great video as always!

Wow, that "low resolution" looks very interesting IMO. Idk why, but it reminds me ps1, and it's fascinating that it's all voxels. I think there would be a lot of cases of making use a such style. And it's true pixel-art (without shifting and rotating pixels)

This is incredible!

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuude this is awesome. All these voxel games 😊

Fantastic! Why oh why don't we see more retro-style games using voxels? I guess the engine programming is difficult and non-standard, but old games like Outcast and even older games like Ecstatica were fantastic, and the low-rez example in the end of this video reminds me a lot of Ecstatica for example. More! More!

Wow, this is so cool!

I think the low res looks really good. Reminds me of an Windows 98 game called Outcast which used voxels for the terrain.

It all looks really good. Will other things, like transparency or volumetrics, be easier with this new method?

Incredible! 😮

Amazing work! I think you might have found the method Euclideon unlimited detail uses...

Another optimization I've seen for ray marching is "cone marching". It's an obscure term but there's a fairly understandable Powerpoint presentation that comes up when you Google it. It relies on having an actual signed distance function, so I don't know if you're using one/it's well defined enough for the method. Neat project, anyway!

You should also sometimes give each of the edges of a voxel a color. Otherwise surfaces often look like just a single color with no 3D dimension to it, not even like it's a 2D surface in a 3D world but like it's just some color added on top of the screen (like the wood of the well at 5:54). A voxel shouldn't ***have*** to have special color for the edge (to boost performance when it doesn't), but should be able to. When it does, it should maybe even be able to have different colors for different edges, thereby creating less uniform textures with irregular short stripes

Looks great ! I'm not an english native and not a dev by any mean so I might have missed something in the video, but I was wondering after toying with your mod if you would be able to make a "scale factor" that increases the further a voxel is from the camera, instead of doing the entire screen ? So that tiny voxel cubes we can barely see can be regrouped with other voxels nearby, to make a bigger cube. Hopefully this can allow less calculation to be done afterwards for lighting, "painting the scene" :) Maybe even simplifying physics if the calculations uses big cubes instead of doing it voxel by voxel. Or a combination of both (rendering tiny voxel cubes while doing all the calculation with cubes 2/4/8 times biggers) ? I honestly dont know, like I said I'm not a dev so it's just wild guesses. But that's what I'd personally do if I wanted to improve performance :D

You know the rust BTree is actually split into sixteen at each level instead of 2 for speed. That's fascinating to see the same kind of memory speed dynamics play out on the GPU. Also maybe you could look into using something like AMD fsr for low end GPU's. Amazing work!

11:08 super cute, love it

Man keep It up! The best voxel engine will be the one that gets published

I'd definitely appreciate being able to set the resolution if my GPU can handle it. Look beautiful either way

Something to consider (if you haven't already) for the tree structure you're using, a way to potentially be even more efficient might be to use a BVH BVHs are commonly used in many raytracing programs already because of their efficiency. It's basically LoD, but for the raytracing algorithm itself

Always enjoy watching yours and Gabe's progress. I've been wondering how one might implement soft body physics in a voxel engine. The material point method en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Material_point_method (demonstrated in youtuber Grant Kot videos) seems to be a way to get really interesting physics that can include melting, sublimation, cracking, bending, fluids, etc. I'm wondering if a voxel grid could have a few voxels that serve the fixed "background calculator grid" purpose, and also select some voxels to become "particles" and undergo simulation. I'm not smart enough to know if this is possible with any kind of acceptable real-time performance, but it sounds like there may be some promise there.

Looks really good 😊 I wonder if you could get the empty space traversal even more memory compact with something like a Bloom query

ok, you've conviced me to look harder into making my own engine. I am an unreal engine programmer so my current knowledge set is locked within that engine. need to expand man, but feels like there is little out there

This is so impressive dude! Is the brick tree only a 2 level tree? How do you handle off grid voxels and all that? At a high level obviously.

This looks cool

Amazing :) What do you think could be done to prevent the low res version from "flickering"? Also, how do you calculate the voxel normal? From what I've seen you color the whole voxel one color instead per voxel face, no?

Damn, this is impressive.

This is nice!

a crazy idea i had to optimize my raycaster was to do a fairly low poly mesh generation that essentially “shrink wrapped” every single voxel chunk, as if you saran wrapped the entire world convexly. then that mesh would have the fragment shader applied with the triangle location data. even wrapping each non-empty chunk with quads might work starting the fragment at a position that was MUCH closer to voxel data should save a lot of iterations on empty space. most non collision rays into the sky would be skipped. was wondering if you think that would work? i haven’t even began discovery on this technique to see if it was doable yet. i think fragment shaders on meshes provide world coordinates in the invocation function? in which case this would definitely be doable i think

Wow! (11:00) a multiplayer map for Gears [ War

This video was great