sneaky voxel engine heightmap render distance trick

I'm making a voxel game with bevy and rust, and decided to implement a sneaky trick to increase the render distance without much performance overhead. A huge subdivided mesh that only need to sample the voxel world about 1 or 2 times per chunk (depending on how much detail I want)
#shorts

[@jed0378]

You could increase the render distance even further if you use GPU sided indirect rendering. I managed to get a volume of 12^3 chunks with a resolution of 64^2 running fine on .y laptop gtx 1050 due to the inherently parallel architecture of GPUs. I made it within my custom wgpu engine though, not really sure if bevy has support for GPU indirect drawing.

[@BlockTSB]

i love tantans accent

[@cluelessadc]

Sorry to backseat but just a thought, couldn’t you occlusion cull valleys and rear side of hills using by checking the player position against the height map? Like simplifying the view frustum to top down problem. In the simplest case, the player would be in a valley where the region is dark bordered by a light gradient so you could cull all regions that are darker than the surrounding lightest points of your boundary.

[@nemene8585]

sick

[@finndemoncat9379]

Nice

[@enchantedsword123]

Cool

[@HanProgramer]

Isn't this going to break if the world changed? Like for example a player build or dig a lot

[@MDG-mykys]

It's like that minecraft mod

[@lDyamonagl]

valheim uses something like this

[@irondolphin1559]

I have question do you use a graphics library like opengl or your own?

[@Tantandev]

I actually did at first (WGPU). But I realized the bevy engine uses wgpu under the hood. So the shader code is still custom, but I can integrate bevy's PBR rendering to also benefit from their lighting calculations

[@Goat_Models]

Hey im a blockbench modeler, i see your game is voxel based and would love to make you some high quality models if you want!

[@BitBloxDevs]

Ok

[@oglothenerd]

Hi Tantan.

[@Tantandev]

hallo

[@The_Codemaster144k]

Wow

[@Hanoolka]

ngl looks very bad

[@Tantandev]

truuue

[@mikah8998]

Hahaha we learn and we optimize. That is how life works.

[@marcboss]

Cool