New Voxel Engine Reveal - Crystal Islands Experiment
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN cites it as a showcase of one of the best voxel engines, impressive for its detail and smoothness.
What it is
John Lin reveals a rewritten voxel engine demonstrated in a Crystal Islands scene, with much finer voxel detail, fast collision, fracture and path-traced global illumination.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2021 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec junon · 2021-09 · on “The Perfect Voxel Engine”
For reference, this is John Lin who posts semi-frequent devlogs[0] of his voxel engine progress - an engine that is, in my opinion, one of the best voxel engines in existence rivaled only by Dennis Gustafsson's "Teardown" voxel engine. [0] [this video]
Strong rec parlortricks · 2025-01 · on “VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020)”
John Lins [this video] Crystal Island looks amazingly detailed and smooth. Wish he would continue or share how.
Cites romwell · 2023-10 · on “MagicaVoxel – A free voxel art editor and interactive path tracing renderer”
>Would it be possible at some point to have voxels the size of a pixel? And would it benefit for example path tracing, physics and other things? The answers are yes and maybe . There are people who are working in that direction. See this, for example: [this video]
Cites Crestwave · 2024-05 · on “The Perfect Voxel Engine (2021)”
Hm, do you have a source for that? It's possible that you're mixing it up with his decision to shelf "micro-voxels" in favor of the traditional, chunkier voxel art style. [this video] (see pinned comment)