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x1m4 | 2 years ago | on: Show HN: A falling sand engine using WebGPU

This is an early prototype of a falling sand engine, which uses WebGPU for the simulation and path tracing for the lighting.

Only works in latest desktop chrome and might freeze for a few seconds during startup.

x1m4 | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: VoxelChain – An Experimental Voxel Engine

For the lighting I'm using a mix of ray tracing and stochastic cone tracing. Cone tracing mainly because it's very cache friendly and almost doesn't introduce any noise. I'm not really using a regular cellular automata or rules, it's just similar on the aspect that the simulation is based on neighbors.

I took some inspiration from Noita and Sandspiel, but I found that falling sand simulations aren't flexible enough and I was thinking about how a system could be created to visually program the behaviour of circuits or stuff like falling sand yourself. Also Noita is single buffered, while my simulation is double buffered which actually makes a huge difference in the possible features you can realize. Single buffering is faster but much more chaotic and "random", while with double buffering you get very precise behaviour. Also the simulation was designed from the ground up to be run on the GPU, while Noita and Sandspiel are CPU-based. Here's [0] a video of a previous 2D prototype doing falling sand on the GPU

- [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aWLPEzngkOo

x1m4 | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: VoxelChain – An Experimental Voxel Engine

I've actually spent the majority of development time on optimization rather than actually working on the overall product. The choice to create this project in the browser instead of native certainly made this more challenging! :> And thanks for the report, I'm gonna give this another try to fix, and otherwise gonna forward this to the Firefox devs.

x1m4 | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: VoxelChain – An Experimental Voxel Engine

Instead of WebGL, I'd recommend to give WebGPU a try first, as it's a much better designed API. I'd even say that once you've learned the few core concepts of WebGPU (such as command buffers), it's an easier to learn API than the notable chaos that WebGL/OpenGL introduces.

x1m4 | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: VoxelChain – An Experimental Voxel Engine

Thanks for the report! I've tried to tackle this issue multiple times now, but found that for some reason on MacOS M1, FireFox's WebGL implementation is severely broken on multiple features that the WebGL specification guarantees to be working. I can't test if this is just for the M1 or also other Mac devices, but Chrome definitely works!

x1m4 | 3 years ago | on: Show HN: VoxelChain – An Experimental Voxel Engine

At the current stage, the project is more like an editor and playground for designers and coders. But I'm planning on adding a player and entity system, which would allow creators to build actual tiny games with this.
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