VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020)

This is very neat. I miss the era when novel and elegant algorithms like this delivered magical experiences.<p>This could just be from getting old, but I feel like games have lost the magic they had when availability of hardware resources was limited. Back in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s we saw games push the medium forward practically every year, and certainly every generation. Developers squeezed all the performance they could from the hardware, using novel techniques and pure wizardry. Hardware advancements certainly helped, but it was never in abundance as it is today, so developers couldn&#x27;t get complacent. Necessity is indeed the mother of invention.<p>These days I find fantasy platforms like the PICO-8 much more interesting than the latest rehashed release from any AAA studio. I don&#x27;t understand how games that are essentially asset flips can be so successful year after year.

Related. Others?<p><i>VoxelSpace – Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38051859">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=38051859</a> - Oct 2023 (2 comments)<p><i>Voxel Space: Comanche&#x27;s terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code (2020)</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26631995">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26631995</a> - March 2021 (71 comments)<p><i>Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21944573">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=21944573</a> - Jan 2020 (116 comments)<p><i>Terrain rendering in fewer than 20 lines of code</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15772065">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15772065</a> - Nov 2017 (93 comments)<p><i>Show HN: Voxel Space – terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code</i> - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15339016">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15339016</a> - Sept 2017 (2 comments)

I just say mars.com (no, not a domain. A program. A video: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=_zSjpIyMt0k</a>)<p>Edit: Pouet has it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pouet.net&#x2F;prod.php?which=4662" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pouet.net&#x2F;prod.php?which=4662</a>

Its a neat way to render, but I don&#x27;t think it qualifies as voxel, it can&#x27;t render arbitrary volumes, and the data storage can&#x27;t contain more than a single position for a given x,y. It&#x27;s just a neat implementation of a heightmap renderer no?

I have such fond memories of building a terrain viewer like this (first in Pascal, then in C &amp; Assembly) in the 1990&#x27;s at the same time I was learning the requisite trigonometry in high school.<p>Back then, all kinds of low-level optimizations were necessary to make it work.<p>Figuring out how to do it, and optimize it with no books or internet to reference is one of the most personally rewarding things I&#x27;ve ever done.

Hey, I made a game using this technique here<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eri0o.itch.io&#x2F;i-rented-a-boat" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;eri0o.itch.io&#x2F;i-rented-a-boat</a><p>It&#x27;s made in Adventure Game Studio. It was made in a previous version of the engine that we hadn&#x27;t optimized yet and I was too lazy to update it on itch page (but will one day). I have a write up there explaining how I made it but there are more details in the AGS forums.

[2020] could go in the title (or even [2017], looking at other comments in the thread in the following discussion link).<p>There was also a discussion in 2021 of the same repository:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26631995">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=26631995</a><p>(and that thread links to other discussions too)<p>It&#x27;s not quite the same, but I remember when I was first learning programming, I wrote a program that would generate a terrain heightmap, and do an isometric-style rendering using similar techniques. It was in QBasic, running on my middle school&#x27;s 386-era DOS machines, and used graphics memory as its scratch space. Slow as heck, but I was fascinated with the output. It&#x27;s one of the things that encouraged me to keep going with programming.

I remember reading about this somewhere (could be from an older HN post), but this time I decided to add a comment so that I don’t lose it. Being a flight sim fan, I still remember playing Comanche for the first time and the wow factor. It was something from the future or from the movies, you got the feeling that you were leaving in the computer era :-)

This is so cool.<p>In most contemporary games, you can occasionally see the mountains are hollow (from weird camera angles, clipping issues, etc).<p>However, with this method, your mountains are solid &gt;:)

Highly recommend doing software renderer stuff like this for fun. Raytracers are a popular sort of project but this sort of retro realtime rendering code makes for a great weekend project too. I implemented basically the same algorithm ages ago (actually I ported some SDL code as an exercise to learn canvas2d): <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;namuol.github.io&#x2F;earf-html5&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;namuol.github.io&#x2F;earf-html5&#x2F;</a><p>Obviously the linked implementation is way more performant and far simpler than mine, so if you’re looking for a reference I wouldn’t recommend my old coffeescript code…

I’d love to live in an alternative timeline where GPUs are voxel-based.

Very cool project and nice work! While I&#x27;m not very experienced with graphics rendering, I use a lot of computational geometry for work. I also implemented the Diamond-Square algorithm in matlab to generate randomized landscape terrains for a grad school project. Combining my generator with this rendering algorithm would be pretty fun to create and explore digital landscapes!

I built a web version based on your post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jesterswilde.dev&#x2F;vertrend.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jesterswilde.dev&#x2F;vertrend.html</a>

This reminds me of how Wolfenstein 3D and to some extents how Doom works

It looks really good for such a simple algorithm. I love this!

Every time I see a voxel landscape it reminds me of this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comanche_(video_game_series)" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Comanche_(video_game_series)</a>

Voxels was an interesting technique for about five minutes in the early 90s, but they could never really be rendered at a high enough resolution for them to look good imho.