Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!
I really respect his work on the engine, the math, and the engineering is excellent, but I'm not sure it makes for an interesting game above and beyond what we already have.
Adding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either).
As for "create a hole, then close it behind you", this is about as game-changing as open/closing doors (or tunnels with doors). I'm open to suggestion, but honestly this is amazing tech, I just don't think it will create very fun games.
Kind of feel the same about the demos I see of spherical or non-euclidean geometry games. Its very interesting, and impressive, but seems like it is an engine in search of a game.
Maybe one other thing to consider -- I think its usually best to have a killer game idea that seems fun, then design around it (and select the proper engine), rather than simply "I want to build an engine with some capabilities, then I'll figure out what games to make later."
Have seen this with a lot of software "frameworks" (web, game, graphics, etc.). Nothing wrong with writing an amazing tech demo just for the hell of it, but then when it comes time to do "real world" tasks, the frameworks are often in search of a fitting problem.
The physics engine mentioned towards the end, Jolt Physics [0] is used in the frankly blockbuster games Horizon: Forbidden West and Death Stranding 2 and yet opens its description with
> Why create yet another physics engine? Firstly, it has been a personal learning project.
which is really rather wonderful and inspiring to see.
Its use in those games is no mere coincidence though, the creator of that physics engine, Jorrit Rouwé, has worked at Guerilla Games since the Killzone days.
Great video. A new game engine powered by SDFs is the sort of thing I want to find out about. Not the next game in a long running franchise that looks the same as all the others that preceded it. One for the from-scratch game dev nerds like myself!
Go Mike! Been seeing his progress for a while on Bluesky, I knew exactly (and who) what this was when I saw it on HN.
I was rendering-curious when we overlapped together at Figma. Mike was super patient and giving with his time, answering all my dumb questions and aiding with my Maker Week projects. Excited to see him take on something so ambitious next.
Dreams on PS4 had an SDF modeler, but I’m not sure if the runtime was SDF. Now that I think about it, the rendering engine had a Gaussian splat look to it years before that paper.
Almost every 3D game uses textured polygons almost everywhere (except sometimes for fog or clouds), so this SDF engine is nice to see.
However, he doesn't mention animations, especially skeletal animations. Those tend to work poorly or not at all without polygons. PS4 Dreams, another SDF engine, also had strong limitations with regards to animation. I hope he can figure something out, though perhaps his game project doesn't need animation anyway.
GameGlobe from Haptico and Square Enix, the engine of which also powered Project Spark from Microsoft, also used an SDF engine. Former colleagues of mine built the tech in Copenhagen and I remember getting a super impressive demo back then. This was the first time I heard of SDFs.
Using layers with settings about which SDFs interact with which layers for operations seems interesting. Like put trees in a layer and then have an axe that can negatively deform the trees but not the ground layer or something. Or a predator layer that can absorb things in the prey layer. Haven't really thought through.
This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation.
I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:
Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).
stupid question to anyone reading this: not a gamedev, not even by a long shot but i had to ask
- with the advent of all the AI tools, is it actually possible to vibe code a 3D FPS shooter from scratch like if you wrote a 2000 page prompt, can it actually be done?
I watched this over the weekend and loved the approach. I’ve played with SDF for 3D modeling (even though the current libraries generate meshes for slicing using marching cubes, which is slow as heck and can lead to imprecision on small features), and wish I had more time for playing around with it.
the problem with SDF engines is that you have to reinvent everything, as current pipelines rely on triangles.
That means:
- Software to model using SDF (like Womp)
- Technique to animate skeletons using SDFs
- Tool to procedural texture surfaces using SDFs
At least he solved the physics part, which is also complex.
And also, his way of carving is by instantiating new elements, which works for small carves, but if you plan to have lots of tunels, then the number of instances is going to skyrocket.
Excellent technical presentation!
Though the style itself is a bit too "clay-like", like I wouldn't expect a cube melding with the terrain sand to be a smooth glued connection. Is that some "inherent" SDF thing or just a style of the demo?
38 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 73.4 ms ] threadAdding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either).
As for "create a hole, then close it behind you", this is about as game-changing as open/closing doors (or tunnels with doors). I'm open to suggestion, but honestly this is amazing tech, I just don't think it will create very fun games.
Kind of feel the same about the demos I see of spherical or non-euclidean geometry games. Its very interesting, and impressive, but seems like it is an engine in search of a game.
Have seen this with a lot of software "frameworks" (web, game, graphics, etc.). Nothing wrong with writing an amazing tech demo just for the hell of it, but then when it comes time to do "real world" tasks, the frameworks are often in search of a fitting problem.
> Why create yet another physics engine? Firstly, it has been a personal learning project.
which is really rather wonderful and inspiring to see.
[0] https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics
https://jrouwe.nl/games.php
Stylistically there are similarities...
I was rendering-curious when we overlapped together at Figma. Mike was super patient and giving with his time, answering all my dumb questions and aiding with my Maker Week projects. Excited to see him take on something so ambitious next.
* Slides (good notes): https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGR...
* video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9KNtnCZDMI
However, he doesn't mention animations, especially skeletal animations. Those tend to work poorly or not at all without polygons. PS4 Dreams, another SDF engine, also had strong limitations with regards to animation. I hope he can figure something out, though perhaps his game project doesn't need animation anyway.
I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:
Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).
[1]
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-1/
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-2/
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-3/
- with the advent of all the AI tools, is it actually possible to vibe code a 3D FPS shooter from scratch like if you wrote a 2000 page prompt, can it actually be done?
Kind of like Quake in a Lemmings world.
This is quite more polished to say the least.
And there’s game developers who develop game engines thinking they are developing games.
That means:
- Software to model using SDF (like Womp)
- Technique to animate skeletons using SDFs
- Tool to procedural texture surfaces using SDFs
At least he solved the physics part, which is also complex.
And also, his way of carving is by instantiating new elements, which works for small carves, but if you plan to have lots of tunels, then the number of instances is going to skyrocket.
It allowed you to shape terrain with sand, water and lava. So terrain modification PLUS fluid simulation!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYUU3dv7WC4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Dust
(It's a combination of line segments for each letter and digit)