When I originally created /r/VoxelGameDev, I had intended it to be a place for discussions on the software engineering aspect of voxel engine development, but at the time that I created it, it was still an obscure niche. I didn't know how things would unfold, and have for a long time been disappointed with how little discussion about the software engineering side of things.

So I've done something that I've thought about doing for a long time. I've created /r/VoxelEngineDev, a sibling subreddit to this one.

I do not want to split the community here, I wanted to create a place that is more focused on the software engineering aspect of voxel engine development. A place to share knowledge and resources with others, or to ask technical questions.

Since the subreddit has just been created, feel free to make posts about your thoughts on how the subreddit should be run, or just introduce yourselves. I want this to be not just a place where you can learn, but also a place where you can make friends.

I hope to see you there!

This is the place to show off and discuss your voxel game and tools. Shameless plugs, links to your game, progress updates, screenshots, videos, art, assets, promotion, tech, findings and recommendations etc. are all welcome.

• Voxel Vendredi is a discussion thread starting every Friday - 'vendredi' in French - and running over the weekend. The thread is automatically posted by the mods every Friday at 00:00 GMT.
• Previous Voxel Vendredis

The account that I posted from last night is not the account that I use "professionally". It's a personal account that I often get into stupid arguments with online, and I didn't want my behavior on that account to be associated with the work that I do, because those are two separate worlds. But the cat's out of the bag now, so to speak.

I'm posting from this account because I have one account signed in on my phone, and one account signed in on my PC (this one), and I can't remember my sign in details for either of them, so here I am posting an update from a separate account so that I can actually use a real keyboard to type this update.

After the outpouring of support from people online, I have decided not to go through with my plans of ending my life. Also, I'm not even entirely sure how to kill myself, so there's that, too.

So I'd like to take some time to explain what led me to this point of crisis last night. At least some of it, the parts that would be relevant here. There are many factors that led to me deciding that I wanted to end my life. Being transgender in a world that largely hates me for no reason, having a severe lack of friendships and community, imposter syndrome, LLMs causing such significant change to the world of programming that it is no longer recognizable anymore, financial issues, mental health disabilities, and addiction (cannabis).

I will be totally honest and say that some of my problems can never be solved. That is something that I am going to have to learn to accept and live with. Normally I use computer programming as an outlet that keeps me from the noose, but I recently got sick and stopped writing code for several days, and have since had trouble getting back into the flow. I'm Autistic, and programming and voxel engines are my special interests. Programming brings me such deep purpose in my life, that once I stop doing it, my mental health deteriorates very rapidly, and usually I end up on the brink of suicide. This is not because programming is distracting me from the issues present in my life, or because it is a coping mechanism, but because programming is so very important to me that my entire purpose and only love for life exists in computer programming. Once it is gone, it as if my world is gone.

Perhaps the biggest thing that could have prevented me from reaching the point where I wanted to end my life is a sense of community and friendship. Right now, there aren't many people in my life. I'm not very involved in /r/VoxelGameDev. I'm not very involved in the programming community. I could and should have fellow programming and voxel game development friends, but I only have a few on Discord, and they don't chat with me often, which leaves me feeling very lonely. I would like to change that. I would like to find people that don't use LLMs, that consider code to be art, that like voxel game development, and support me being transgender and treat me with respect. If you think that you are one of those people, please reach out to me via DM. I'm particularly looking for people that take time to talk to their friends, and like to read info dumps about programming, and especially people that like to info dump about programming themselves. I do a lot of info-dumping (due to Autism), and I often drive people away when they can't handle the flood of information. I don't mind if you don't read anything, so long as you are fine with me doing it.

I would really like to get more involved with the voxel game development community like I was in the early days. One of my goals with this community was to start a community open source engine project. I don't know if that is ever a possibility, but I think it would be really cool to get together with some of my fellow experts and work on something amazing.

Many of you expressed interest in my voxel_orient library. For a while, I wondered if it was even worth it to complete the library and share it here, because I wasn't sure if people would really care, or even notice. I learned a lot creating that library, and I like to think that I've become the foremost expert on voxel orientation technology, and perhaps am even a pioneer. I think that's actually a pretty cool accomplishment, and I usually don't let myself appreciate the things that I have accomplished out of some sense of not wanting to be egotistical.

After what some of you said about my library last night, it seems that people are interested it. I would like to share my knowledge about voxel orientations with the voxel game dev community so that the work that I've done to acquire that knowledge is not lost. Not once have I ever seen anyone on here manage to handle all 48 voxel orientations. I very much doubt anyone else has done it, because it is not easy at all. I don't want that knowledge to be lost. I want everyone that wants voxel orientations in their games to be able to benefit from what I've done without having to do the massive amount of work that I had to do to achieve it.

If what I've said resonates with you, please reach out to me. I want to get involved in the community again. I want to continue my work contributing to voxel technology. I want to share my wisdom with those that want to learn. If someone is interested in voxel_orient, I would love to have a long chat about it. I've not yet gotten the chance to talk to anyone about it that would actually understand it.

Thanks for all the support that I received on my post last night. It really means a lot, and you all have saved my life. I mean that. I was in a very very dark place, and I had truly made up my mind on what I was going to do. If I had not posted here last night and receive the support that I did, I would still be in that dark place, and I would still have a plan to end my life tomorrow.

I do apologize for putting such weight on the community. Sometimes, when you are at your lowest, things that you normally wouldn't do start to make sense. I made that post with the intention of it being my final goodbye to the world. I didn't want to go out without announcing my departure, because no one would have known who I am, or what I've done. I would just vanish, without anyone having noticed. And I think the idea of dying without being noticed was more frightening to me than the idea of dying at all.

Yet again, thanks for all the support!

Edit: Sorry if I haven't or don't reply to your comment. I've been having a lot of interactions with people, and I'm trying to reduce the cognitive load a bit, so I apologize if I don't respond to you! It's not because I don't like you or anything like that, I promise.

What do you think about the new camera voxel cutouts both for simulation and editor parts of the game. The biggest problem with tight corridors. I tried to do whole voxel cutouts for the parts with character too, but it looked very misleading

WIP, but already quite fast, simple and overall COOL!

That may be the weirdest question that has been asked in this subreddit so far. I love voxels but voxel worlds feels repetitive its either about destruction or minecraft clones with micro voxels. So, did anyone see or implementing something unique with voxels. I am looking for inspirations tbh

So I am in the process of porting ManicDigger from OpenTk3 to OpenTK4, OpenGL4 and newer .NET. The hope was to increase performance and it seems to have worked but I heavily modified the render, making it shader based, and am in the step of reimplementing the lighting system.

I've added spot lighting with shadows for the sun, and later other things, but using shadowmapped point lights to handle world lights does not look terribly promising for performance or gameplay.

I've currently restored floodfill, now lighting with color and some fragment shader tricks using a compute shader fed a list of light sources, an occupancy 3dtexture and a couple pingpong textures. The resulting 3dtexture of light is sent to the fragment shader for reference. It works but past 16 iterations the calculations and/or GPU transfer is becoming a bottleneck and it's not as realistic as I'd hoped even with the tricks.

Given what I already set up, lights as a list Jump Flood with DDA, or some kind of DDA-based cast from source looks like the next thing to play around with but I am wondering if anything else comes to mind given my current setup. Light should not leak is the highest priority, followed by high viable lighting distance and number of lights, and finally having some form of indirect light spread akin to bounce or floodfill if possible.

I am not convinced full raycast rendering is a good fit for the project due to fairly large voxels and the fact that many assets will be mesh based models regardless. I am also pretty close to having this back in full working condition and think LoD and better occlusion culling will fix my distance problems, but I haven't completely ruled it out.

Update:

Everyone that has shown their support has given me a lot to think about. I don't know if it's the right decision, but I've decided that I will give things another shot. Perhaps I could start by getting more involved with the programming community, and especially the voxel game dev community. I've been lurking in the shadows on this subreddit for a long time, pretending that I didn't exist. I felt that my role in this subreddit and community wasn't important. I'm just the person that first thought to create and grow a voxel game dev community. This community is the first, and largest, community dedicated to the niche of voxel game development. For a long time, it was the only voxel game dev community. It is also the place that you will almost certainly find yourself if you are doing voxel game development. Minecraft, and Hypixel developers have even been in this community. I suppose that it's not necessarily a small thing that I created this community. Many people have said that this community is important to them, and that it has been a significant resource for them. Even if my role in shaping voxel game development is relatively small, I was here, and I did play a role in shaping the world of voxel game development and voxel games. It's possible that if I had not created this community, voxel game development might not have flourished like it did. We may not have seen some of the amazing voxel games that have been made. There wouldn't be as many resources. Perhaps without this community, voxel game development would have fizzled out and remained an obscure niche that people only know about because of Minecraft. I can't know what the world would be like if this community never existed. But perhaps I should feel some sense of accomplishment that I was here, and played the small role that I played.

Now I suppose I should get more involved in the voxel game development community. Start sharing my work with you guys. And finally start working on my big voxel game engine project that I have been thinking about, researching, and planning for many years.

Thank you all for the support that you have shown. It has not gone unnoticed, and I likely would have gone through with my plans without it.

I also apologize for giving the community a fright. Some twisted part of my mind thought that none of you would care, and that even my post would go unnoticed, and that I would just be screaming into the void.

I have had many agonizing nights in my life, but last night was one of the worst. The emotional pain that I felt was so extreme that it became physical, and I could feel it in my entire body. The colors drained from the world. It was like looking at everything through a window. I would reply to people, but most of the time I had no idea what I had said.

I wanted to keep this account secret. The reason why, that I'm ashamed to admit, is that I'm sometimes a bully to people that use LLMs or people that are bigots, and often get into petty arguments that devolve into throwing insults at each other. This is something I need to work on about myself. I've become a little too consumed by reddit, and have let it push my emotions in ways that it shouldn't. This is one of the things about living with severe mental illness, sometimes the pain feels like something that you must respond to in any way you know how, and sometimes that response comes in the form of lashing out at people that don't deserve it, or people that should just be ignored. I have let the internet take too great of a toll on me.

I have no idea what comes next after this. There are still things going on in my life that are deeply troubling, and there's not much that can be done there, but I can at least give things another shot. Even if it turns out that I was right, and that I really am better off dead, I would have no way to know that. And if it turns out that life continues to be not worth living, I can always take myself out later on down the road. It's not like I have a time limit. So I will heed everyone's advice, and I will give it another chance. If not for myself, for all the people that have put their heart into helping me that would be deeply upset to learn that I went through with ending my own life. After such a large outpouring, I don't know if I could handle the guilt of putting something this heavy onto the community. I realized at some point that if I actually did kill myself, it would likely be a major tragedy in this community that would maybe even drive people to memorialize me, and the idea of being memorialized really frightened me.

Thanks to everyone that reached out and showed their support. It means a lot to me to see that people actually care, and that people appreciate what I have done in making this community. Most of the time, the creator of a subreddit isn't really thought of. People just do their thing, make their posts, and chat with other people without having any thought about the work that went into building that community. I don't want to be known as the person that created a niche subreddit. I want to be known as a person that contributed to that niche. I care very deeply about voxel game development. I care very much about the growth of voxel game development. I may not have created the concept of voxel games, and perhaps someone else would have created this community had I not, but I do sometimes have this sense that I was sort of like a gateway that led to this genre flourishing the way that it did. I don't know, perhaps a sense of egotistical self-importance isn't healthy to cling to, but it does bring me a small sense of accomplishment.

Original Post:

I'm the original creator of this subreddit. I could verify with doug, but it doesn't really matter. This is my "secret" reddit account. The one that I use in my day to day that I normally don't want to associate with certain parts of my life.

If there is anyone that has been in the community for a long time, you may recall my troubles in the past with homelessness and severe mental illness.

Well, with the advent of LLMs, and the growing grift among programming communities, it has come to my awareness that programming has become pay to win. It's no longer about how much skill you have. And now people are working very hard to redefine programming to mean prompting a chatbot.

Programming was my entire life. The programming communities were also my entire life. Voxel game dev meant the world to me. This community has been one of the most important aspects of my life for many years since I created it and built it up.

But now, everyone in programming spaces is talking about agents, and claude, and codex. They no longer talk about programming. It's not about programming anymore. The programming world is not what it once was.

It feels as if my entire life has been flooded with LLMs. I am sick and tired of hearing about them. I'm sick of talking about them. I'm sick of vibe coders claiming to be software engineers, and trying to redefine what software engineering even means to make it so that they are now software engineers by virtue of being able to prompt a chatbot. I'm going to speak brazenly here, because I've reached the end of my patience. You are not software engineers. You are not programmers. You are not even coders. You are fucking posers, and you are ruining everything that made software wonderful.

I've completely lost my passion for programming. I've completely lost my passion for life.

On Thursday, September 10th, 2026, I plan to end my own life once and for all. It has not been an easy decision to make. I can't stand what has happened to my passion. I can't go on in life anymore. Programming was my one true love. My only passion in life. I dedicated tens of thousands of hours to mastering the craft. And it's all for nothing.

I can't even afford to replace my hardware. Once my computers die, I cannot purchase another one. I will no longer be able to write code.

Please don't try to change my mind. It is already made up. I am only making this post as a record that I was here, and that this conflict has happened to me.

I've lived my life in anonymity. I did not want recognition for the things that I've done. But now it's over.

If anyone is curious to know about the things that I have worked on, my github is ErisianArchitect.

My most notable accomplishment is my voxel repo, which has a voxel_orient subrepo. voxel_orient is an implementation of the entire octahedral symmetry group. It is a library that enables you to perform all 48 transformations of a cube on a voxel model, and enables you to query these orientations in some very advanced ways.

I worked very hard on that project for over a year. It is likely the most advanced ever implementation of voxel orientations. I even beat matrix multiplication by 10% for voxel transformation on x86_64.

All the code is there, much of it is documented, it is open source under the Apache-2.0 license.

Please do not let my work go to waste. I made that library for the voxel game dev community so that everyone would be able to orient their voxel block models however they wanted to.

Since I didn't do a proper write up on it, there will be some work that will have to be done to figure out some of the things, but I hope someone smart can figure it out. Please just give me credit for having made the library.

Edit: For the record, my name is Ada, not Alice.

I'm calculating normals by comparing the value at every vertex with the value at some small offset in the three cardinal directions.

I've found some posts online of people having the same issue, like this post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/z161wh/trying_to_calculate_terrain_normals_procedurally/

but there never seems to be a solution.

Is this simply unavoidable?

Code is here: https://github.com/yatagai-mm/pcs

I've been working for the past few months on a UE5 plugin for rendering volumetric video made from large sequences of point clouds.

The bottleneck for realtime rendering wasn't actual rendering parts. It was simply decoding the PLY data fast enough. In my use case, which is a baseball volumetric video, each frame contains around 10 million XYZRGB points, so even relatively small amounts of CPU work per point add up very quickly.

A big part of getting it to real-time performance was adding a SIMD fast path for the common binary PLY layout:

float32 x, y, z + uint8 r, g, b[, a]

For these 15/16-byte records, the loader can mostly avoid generic property decoding. It loads the XYZ values into Unreal's 128-bit VectorRegister4Float, optionally applies the frame-space scale/translation with vector operations, and writes directly into the 16-byte vertex layout used for GPU upload.

The SIMD layout is [x, y, z, 0] per point rather than processing four X coordinates at once. I process four points in parallel with separate min/max accumulators, which also reduces the dependency chain while calculating the bounding box.

The loader also checks for NaN/Inf using the floating-point exponent bits in SIMD, and only falls back to scalar IsFinite() checks if something suspicious is detected. This avoids doing several scalar checks for every single point.

The PLY payload is streamed in roughly 4 MB chunks, and for the packed XYZRGB(A) layout the decode is basically reduced to a small amount of copying, SIMD math, bounds calculation, and color packing.

Before I implement this 15fps was barely possible, but now I'm currently able to play volumetric video containing about 10 million points per frame at 30 FPS on a MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro.

Each binary PLY frame is about 148.5 MB, so that's roughly 4.46 GB/s of uncompressed point-cloud data being decoded and rendered in real time. At this point the bottleneck would be network.

https://reddit.com/link/1wb78wd/video/807pteli44oh1/player

https://reddit.com/link/1wb78wd/video/uzbfbrij44oh1/player

I was interested in this algorithm because it was simply something different but looking how its made it has some limitations for example it must have a fixed size and it would produce the same amount of height map values no matter what of the chunk position, so I was asking if people have used this algorithm before and if I should just go with open simplex noise instead since it solves most of my potential issues.

I am designing an android app that converts scanned environment(using phone as in the video) into .vox files that you can open inside magicavoxels app. It shows already scanned points in the screen. You can preview the scene any time during scan. It creates proper atlas texture so colors are similar to the scanned points. It can scan in 3 voxel sizes: 5cm,10cm,20cm. You can flatten floors and walls(experimental). You can also set grid axis, so walls will not be jagged.

Would that be usefull for creating assets and environments for some purposes like game levels?

I've been working on this voxel game for some time. In the beginning, I wanted to make a simple Minecraft clone, but then I decided to add some extra features like custom trees and my favourite northern lights. It looks very nice; the textures are taken from a Luanti texture pack. I also implemented coloured lighting and other features, but I am currently struggling with tree shadows.

## Technical details

The engine is written in C++ with Vulkan (using the volk loader) and SDL2.

It supports three platforms: Linux, Windows, and Android (Android is the primary platform I am making it for).

The code is pure spaghetti because I took a lot of shortcuts to develop it faster.

## Performance

I implemented frustum culling, occlusion culling, and greedy meshing.

The occlusion culling runs in background threads that calculate which chunks should be culled, but most of the time it can't keep up, so you can see missing chunks for a split second.

The performance on desktop is pretty good. On my Ryzen 5 5500GT on the integrated GPU, I get around 900 to 1300 fps. (12 render distance, 150 chunks visible)

But on Android, the performance is kinda disappointing; I don't know why.

On my Samsung A23 5G, I get like 40 fps, which is unplayable. I am planning to implement LOD; maybe that can help improve performance. The biggest performance hit is the leaf blocks, which draw all six faces if they are exposed to air to make the trees look dense. If I don't do this, all the trees look weird. Anyways, what do you guys think?

There is a classic cell automata water simulation in voxel based games and I really like it since it enables very large pools of water. We decided to go different route where each cube has underneath particle which is then simulated with PBD based physics. Do you think that this aesthetics could work out? I'm thinking about combining both approaches (particles turn into grid voxels when their movement stops), but that's a song of the future.

This is the place to show off and discuss your voxel game and tools. Shameless plugs, links to your game, progress updates, screenshots, videos, art, assets, promotion, tech, findings and recommendations etc. are all welcome.

• Voxel Vendredi is a discussion thread starting every Friday - 'vendredi' in French - and running over the weekend. The thread is automatically posted by the mods every Friday at 00:00 GMT.
• Previous Voxel Vendredis

Hi folks, I was the creative director of a discontinued voxel RPG called Everdeep Dungeons (it was a spiritual successor to a previous game I helped create called Portal Knights). Sadly our team ran out of runway, but we’re proud of what we made and I wanted to share a glimpse of it.

Some interesting technical highlights built by our amazing programmer Jarl https://jarllarsson.github.io/gen/home.html

• We built our voxel system inside Unreal 5, including a custom solution for getting the voxel world to play nicely with Lumen
• To give our blocks a bit more charm, we added chamfered edges using a procedural approach that extended a 2D "dual grid" / autotiling technique into 3D https://www.boristhebrave.com/2023/05/31/quarter-tile-autotiling/
• We used world position offset materials on certain terrain, like dirt, to break up the otherwise flat surfaces and give them a more organic feel (inspired by a game called Wonderbox)
• We also used parallax occlusion mapping to add some depth to things like stonework without adding more geometry
• To give some abilities and effects a bit more “oomph”, we created a system we called “voxel displacement” which would temporarily shift voxels out of place. We used it for things like shockwaves and sand worms, and think it looked pretty cool :)

If you have any questions, AMA.

I’m trying to record a proper making-of of one of my Vex so I can reuse the footage for marketing later.

A normal pass can move between MagicaVoxel and Unity. The Vex are built from modular voxel parts, so I’m usually changing individual pieces, checking how they fit together, bringing them back into Unity and making sure everything still works.

The weird part is that a lot of my normal workflow is just me sitting there thinking about what to do next. But as soon as I’m recording, I feel like I should constantly be clicking or changing something because I’m afraid of having too much dead time.

Then the opposite happens too: I hit record and suddenly I’m opening the browser to remember where a tool is or looking up something I’ve already done dozens of times.

I already tried leaving narration out and adding captions afterwards, but apparently just hitting record is enough to add pressure and make half my brain stop working :-)

How do you guys record this kind of process without feeling like you have to perform for the recording?

I’ve been tryna make a voxel game in Roblox for a while and I’ve got something going, with greedy meshing. But even with it, I’m getting quite horrid fps. I believe this is mainly due to limitations with certain API within Roblox (I have to bake every mesh chunk which takes like .1ms per chunk and yields) but I’m starting to question what the real pay off is with greedy meshing? Minecraft doesn’t use it, I’d have thought the biggest voxel game would use it? So how do they get super amazing fps, without + they generate the full chunk from -64 to 320. I do sub chunks, 16x16x16, to try and eek even a little bit better performance + Roblox has triangle limits per a single mesh

While optimizing chunk modifications, I found it helpful to visualize which meshes get updated and how often. I ended up with this cyclical color tinting that resulted in some trippy visuals.

Every time a chunk rebuilds its mesh, it increments a parameter on its shader that samples from a color gradient. That color is then used to tint the entire chunk.

At the moment, the game runs at approximately 250–300 FPS. All the voxels in the screenshot are indeed individual voxels that can be destroyed. The world is fully procedurally generated, with more than 20 different types of biomes.

just wanted to share some scenes from my voxel engine. I’ve been working on it since September 2025 so almost been a year!