Working on a voxel engine in unity, finally got ambience right. Everything is custom built.
been building this for a while, pretty much everything from scratch, and most of it is customizable. it's meant to be an actual voxel engine inside unity, not a game kit.
the part I'm happiest with lately is the atmosphere.
what do you think? and what would you want from a voxel engine if you were making a game with one?
EDIT: some technical details since people asked:
- everything heavy runs on burst + the job system. chunks are 32^3 and palette compressed, and they go generate -> light -> mesh off the main thread, so the main thread mostly just uploads meshes
- the far view, around 5k blocks in the image, is LOD rings. first the real chunks you can interact with, then a band with the same voxel size but simplified (no caves or small plants, merged into big meshes), then rings where 1 voxel = 2x2x2 and then 4x4x4 real voxels. They sample the exact same generator at a coarser step, so far terrain always matches what loads in later (even if it has overhangs)
- your edits get stamped into the LODs too, so if you blow a crater in a mountain it's still there when you look back from far away
- the edge of the loaded world fades into the actual sky so fog always matches the sky at any time of the day, and the fade follows how much is actually built, so on a fresh load it grows out ring by ring and you never see the end of the world (inspired by Hytale)
- terrain is a few big noise fields (continents, erosion, peaks/valleys) through curves + domain warp for the base shape, then a 3d density pass on top for overhangs and cliffs. biomes come from temperature/humidity after that, and each biome can reshape its own ground, that's how you get canyons, terraced savanna, karst towers, volcanoes etc
- caves are stacked floors of tunnel networks with flat floors so you can actually walk them, plus big caverns with pillars, ravines and flooded lower levels
- lighting is flood fill sky + colored block light stored per vertex, and the sun/time of day happens in the shader, so day/night never rebuilds chunks. there's also an optional hybrid mode that adds URP realtime shadows and point lights so you have those beautiful shadows as well as true dark areas inside caves
- clouds are raymarched volumetrics at half res, they cast shadows and the water reflects them (water has SSR, refraction, caustics and an actual flow sim)
- every edit goes through commands, so undo/redo and batching come for free, and raycasts, collision and pathfinding all run on the same world data
Still lots to improve tho, happy to answer more questions :)