For the past three weeks, i’ve been working on hard improving the render distance in my Micro Voxel Engine, particularly due to the feedback of having N64 viewing distance 😅

I’m pretty happy with the end result of increasing render distance from 300m to ~10-15km, while running at 45-50 FPS on an Apple M1 Pro.

Note: this engine uses meshing rather than RT/DDA.

— Macro chunks —

All chunk generation functions now include a sieve function to automatically be able to generate at 1/N resolution without any changes. This also applied to generated features and stamps, enabling chunks to be generated at any resolution without downsampling.

Macro chunks also independently record and resolve local edits. They are saved (and cached) independently so that terrain edits are maintained without needing to maintain the full res copy in memory.

The lower band LODs are very quick to generate. At this point I could add even more bands, and a 1/64 res chunk takes the same time to generate as a high res chunk, but covering huge distances.

— LOD transitions and adaptive fog —

I primarily use transient transitions where the detail levels fade between each other once, rather than a continuous gradual transition, as this is around 30% cheaper on the GPU and looks “nearly” as smooth in most scenarios.

Adaptive fog scales the effective draw distance dynamically based on loaded bands. Bands generate from high to low so during fast motion, if needed, we temporarily reduce draw distance until chunks have loaded.

— Macro chunk cards and props —

This was the hardest part, keeping identical prop coverage for trees and items without needing to instantiate millions of entities:
-Macro chunks retain a list of props whose IDs are deterministic based on position and type. If the real entity is destroyed, we can map this to the macro chunk set and remove. Likewise for newly spawned props.
- grass and foliage do not map 1:1 with the actual loaded props, but follows the same generation pattern, so technically there will be disparities, but a good trade off to avoid millions of tracked grass items.

https://preview.redd.it/rztbdcuq16kh1.png?width=1461&format=png&auto=webp&s=541ae62e746c45be6b0aa7df9b53f876c094f4f6

Births are now part of the simulation.

People

Marriage is a two phase process. A proposal, then a recheck up to a year later, because a year is long enough for either party's situation to change. Children come out of an actual gene mixer, traits blended or recessive depending on the trait.

Now for the census. 7,600 children across a 300 year world. And the second generation is 230 people. The reason (after a lot of investigating) 84% of settlements are founded by exactly one couple. Their children are all full siblings, and the kin filter refuses every match the site can offer. A settlement founded by one couple cannot have a third generation at any run length, at any proposal rate.

Civilizations

Every world now founds its civilizations at year 1. A template, a name in their own tongue, a seat, a territory claim, a king. And then they all die because succession is not built yet.

Dwarves, elves and goblins exist as real entities in game.

Dwarf

Goblin

Elf

Named Things

Artifacts are now in i.e., named objects with claims and whereabouts. One 300 year world produced 235,274 named objects. Objects can now be moved as NPCs carry them. The world keeps a belief map of where everything was last seen, and it's right about 99.7% of everything on day one with a median staleness of 71 years, so a book telling you where the hoard is describes a map that is usually old.

Naming got deeper as well. Adjectives slot into names behind an ordering rule, so the generator produces things like Ironoath the Shadowy Iron Gem Anvil of Mountains.

Where it is at?

Still not playable. The simulation is bigger now and more refined.

Solo project, still. Happy to answer anything.

Answers to some Previous Questions from the Previous Post

u/Geaxle

>Awesome project! By wrong books you mean they are incomplete as no error id ever injected, just information is missing ? Or did I miss something? It would be awesome if earsay was not exact, that people might miss remember names, dates or place slightly to increase this effect as happens in the real world.

It means that information goes stale so something might have been true say a 100 years ago but that information is out of date till someone updates it.

u/ggrieves

>STRIKE THE EARTH!

Diggy Diggy Hole

Link to Previous Post

Progress on my nearly fully procedural world for the game I've been working on for most of this year. This is one of the test islands, used to let me tweak the generation in a controlled way. This one is all about the mountain at the centre... and more importantly, what's contained within.

It's come a long way since I posted a few months ago; visually I think it's a lot more interesting. It's much, much more optimised (though there's quite a bit of unwanted pop-in and other visual issues I'm working to address) hence how I can now do a fly-through rather than a walk-through.

All of the meshes, textures, materials, and most of the sounds (excluding the water at the very start) are procedurally generated. The installer is currently a 7mb exe file!

The tech stack is Rust on the back-end, and WebView2 (Chromium, Windows only at the moment) via Tauri, running three.js as the renderer. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking about any of the stuff in here; it's all the usual (and perhaps slightly naive) implementations we've seen here a thousand times before. Most of it is just liberal applications of layered noise. I'm quite proud of the net effect though, and I think that's maybe its main appeal - it's a really nice world to wander around, and that to me has really been the most important factor. So much so that the game (yes, there is one) has taken a back seat while I splurged on crafting the world.

I'll be releasing a demo sometime soonish, likely on Steam. I'll drop an update in this sub when that happens if anyone would like to take a stroll :)