r/VoxelGameDev

I’ve been working on this for the past few weeks, and it’s finally starting to come together.

This is a DDA-traversal-based renderer. The world is divided into blocks, and selected blocks perform DDA traversal to render micro-voxel geometry instead of relying on flat textures.

Micro-voxels participate in the deferred lighting pipeline just like regular geometry - they receive global illumination, cascaded shadows, and volumetric lighting.

Built with Unity’s Scriptable Render Pipeline. 60 FPS @ 1080p on Mac M3 Pro.

P.S. The micro-voxel generation shader is still very much a prototype, so the leaves and grass are intentionally simple for now. Improving the procedural generation and shapes is the next major step.

I've fully redone the engine for my game AresRPG, I aim for an immersive world! this is a browser based MMORPG on Sui

My 10yo son and I built this open-source voxel game entirely with AI (Claude generated the Code, and models - ChatGPT / Gemini helped with the story - Music by Suno, Soundeffects by Elevenlabs, I managed the Client/Server architecture). Read the full backstory and find the links to the free Beta & GitHub down in the comments! ⬇️

I am making an open source sandbox game in Godot, I am going for SDF terrain instead of cubes or microvoxel, and texturing it with a material system. Each base material has an albedo, normal and ORM map. With the current compression level I can fit around 680~ base Materials to 1 GB of VRAM with mipmaps. And then I can color tint for practically infinite variations.

Image 2 shows a rough idea of the terrain shading and shape, but I am switching back to marching cubes from surface nets for now so the shape might look different, I also didnt tune the visuals at all.

I am working on the building system now before I go back to port the terrain system to rust or C++ for performance.

Any feedback/ideas/questions welcome.

About a month ago I started with just the creature creation system which was inspired by spore and lets you dynamically configure creatures but also sculpt them. I posted some footage showing an earlier version of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/sandbox/comments/1u3m3tp/some_test_footage_for_a_voxel_creature_system_ive/

The prior post shows more detail on how you can customize the creatures but since then I added an upright body type as well.

Once I had the creatures working I wanted to give them a world to inhabit so I added a basic procedurally generated voxel terrain and a main menu with save files for worlds. A lot of optimization needed to be done here and I obviously based quite a bit of the efficient world saving on Minecraft since they have that figured out, but I had to veer off quite a bit since this is designed to be more fluid rather than everything being premade. In the end it's roughly the same efficiency as Minecraft and worlds shouldn't grow too large even after a lot of editing or adding of custom blocks, creatures, or items.

I made a system based on my code for creature editing that instead allows you to create a custom block which you can sculpt and color to make any blocks or shapes you want. All of your saved blocks, creatures, and items are saved locally so you can access them on any world or server.

The item edit station is working and I used it to make the pickaxe and other icons in the game just like I used the block edit station to help make blocks for the world; however, I don't currently have a system for players to spawn in their custom items yet. I'm trying to work out how to best handle it like I have with custom blocks where you have a sensible mechanism to get them. For custom blocks you take clay to the clay station you can form it into blocks that look like any of your custom made blocks and you can then place them down in the world like any other block. This also limits spam of new block types into the world since they do need to be stored on the server even though their size is very small in the condensed binary form.

I'm terrible at art (as you can probably tell), but I'm trying to solidify the foundation so more artistic people can do more with it. The idea is that people who enjoy building in creative mode would be able to fully customize everything where if a block or creature doesn't exist for their build, they can simply create it in game without me needing to manually add everything. (I want to add vehicles later so you can make custom cars, boats, planes, zeppelins, etc... eventually too).

I'm really focused on getting the actual foundation working well but I would love some feedback from people on what they think and what suggestions they have. Especially if it helps me steer away from being a Minecraft clone since I don't want to just build Minecraft and it looks way too similar now after adding the procedural generation. I'm having a lot of fun just working in the engine and getting things to work but I'm still lost on what the core loop of the game should be. The world types are setup where I can create completely different gamemodes and maps with it so I can keep a more traditional adventure Minecraft style mode but prioritize a better option for the main mode(s).

Most procedural cave generators on Fab are built as standalone actors. They generate a cave, but they don’t integrate naturally with Unreal Engine’s PCG workflow.

SubTerra takes a different approach, Instead of building everything around a single actor, the entire generation pipeline is exposed as modular PCG nodes.

You can use the complete cave generator, or combine individual nodes with the rest of your existing PCG graph to build your own procedural workflows, the result is a cave generator that feels like a natural extension of Unreal Engine rather than a separate tool.

The plugin also focuses on producing caves that are practical for gameplay, not just visually interesting, every generated layout is fully connected, supports multiple elevation levels through walkable ramps, and produces organic rock formations instead of smooth metaball-style tunnels.

Once the cave is generated, its surface is automatically classified into Floor, Wall, and Ceiling PCG points, making it easy to populate the environment with your own assets using Unreal’s existing PCG tools.

How it Works

It's built entirely on UE5's PCG framework, so it slots into your existing PCG setup instead of being a separate black-box actor. From a single seed it scatters a bunch of rooms and connects them with tunnels using a spanning tree + a few extra loops so the layout's always fully traversable but different every seed.

That whole thing gets written into a signed distance field (basically a 3D voxel volume), I roughen the walls with fractal noise so it reads like actual rock instead of smooth metaball blobs, then run marching cubes over it to get a watertight, collidable mesh. The heavy part runs on worker threads so the editor doesn't hitch.

Using it, you've got two routes:

• Easy mode: drop one actor in your level and a full cave shows up. Then you just tweak sliders in the details panel — room count, room size, tunnel width, levels, noise, stalactites — and it regenerates live in the editor (no play mode). There's a regenerate hotkey for rolling whole new layouts too.
• Full control: wire the PCG nodes yourself in a graph. It outputs Floor/Wall/Ceiling surface points you can pipe straight into Epic's mesh spawner (or any scatter plugin) to decorate the walls.

Documentation and Fab Links in comments

i started in march of 2025 screen shot was taken in june of 2026 30th

System summary 

• Each explosion / shockwave is its own cube type. It uses the 9 shared bits also used as velocity bits to store both the direction it's expanding from and how many expansion steps it has left (effect cubes are static and don't need velocity). Every update it spreads copies of itself into neighboring cubes if they're allowed to be overwritten by the explosion / shockwave effect, or if the force is high enough to completely destroy them. 
• Explosion / shockwave effects injects pressure at its starting position and at the expanding positions The amount of pressure depends on the base strength of the explosion and how many expansion steps remain .
• The pressure system compares the pressure in adjacent pressure cells against each cube type's pressure tolerance to determine whether any additional cubes should be crushed. 
• Explosions also inject temperature, based on the calculated strength causing various cubes to melt into lava, glass etc in the clips.

Still struggling with cubes ending up doing a bit too much bouncing at the top of the pressure / force gradient so to speak, and the force ending up in a bit to “square” of a shape when reaching the edges of the cube-shaped map.

For the past 6 months I've been working hard on my dream game, a hardcore multiplayer voxel survival game called Ender Lands. Players start in the Stone Age, collecting stones and sticks to build their first primitive tools, then gradually progress toward the Iron Age. They'll carefully manage resources, farm and gather food, craft tools, and build shelter to survive the cold winters.

My latest work on SnazzCraft was improving the lighting engine. Previously entire faces had one light value and light as a visual felt very unnatural. What I've done here is create a thirty two bit float for each vertex that stores a light value. When the GPU renders each triangle in a voxel, it will extrapolate the per-pixel light value based off of the three light values in each of the triangles vertices. You can see how smooth this is by looking at the wall I created in the right of the frame. To do this I did some research on how the original MineCraft Console Edition's lighting engine worked.

For this project I am using C++ with OpenGL. I am considering switching this to a Vulkan project due to some limiting factors of OpenGL. The inability to multi thread and the inability to manually manage memory are the most apparent limitations related to OpenGL and this project. I implemented a thread pool in which the program can hand tasks to have executed concurrently. This is primarily used in the generated process, but is severely limited due to the previously mentioned OpenGL limited of the inability to interact with the GPU concurrently across multiple threads.

The blue rectangle seen towards the center right of the frame is an entity. SnazzCraft's entity system can handle a dynamic amount of entities, each with their collision and movement.

Project Github:

https://github.com/Mr-Snazz/SnazzCraft

so i'm working on a voxel game something 3D i added tree leaves block that had been semitransparent or voids in the texture that should be transparent thing is the side of other block that just hidden by the tree leaves block doesn't get rendered, how do i fix it? it's in C language btw and here is a vid that better explains it i did do some fixing where if there is air in between but still no way done, how can i do it?

EDIT: I fixed it, big thanks to everyone who commented