My First Voxel Engine

Building

1. Run setup_windows.bat (or use command premake5 vs2022 if you have premake)
2. Open generated Visual Studio Solution to build code

Technical Information

Features:

• Infinite terrain generation (using basic perlin noise)
• Dynamic chunk remeshing (multi-threaded)
• Static skybox (just using a cubemap)
• Greedy Meshing (unoptimized, but still reasonably fast)
• Basic diffuse + specular lighting
• Outline post processing pass using the depth buffer
• Textured blocks with mipmapping

Wireframe view

View under the map to verify back face culling

Further improvements to be made:

• Smaller vertex size (currently 24 bytes per vertex 😞)
• Optimized meshing (using SIMD extensions + bigger chunk size)
• Dynamic skybox with sun as directional light source
• Shadow mapping
• Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion
• Distance Fog
• Frustum Culling
• Add/Removing blocks
• debug outline flickering
• debug mipmap edges

References

Greedy Meshing: https://0fps.net/2012/06/30/meshing-in-a-minecraft-game/

Initially copied the meshing code directly from Javascript and translated to C++; but the algorithm did not provide face normals, thus I had to ultimatly write my own greedy meshing that did give normal data. However, this article did give me a better understanding of the greedy meshing algorithm.

Outline Post-Pass: https://omar-shehata.medium.com/how-to-render-outlines-in-webgl-8253c14724f9

Got the method of how to get a basic outline from this article, but I wanted only a basic outline, so the depth buffer was enough.