Voxel Space (Comanche Terrain Rendering)

[@ricepony33]

I remember being blown away with delta force because there was no pop in and you could zoom forever. Felt like the future!

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

It still works too, I still play the first 3 games pretty often

[@Eugensson]

I remember how laggy it was on my pc

[@josiahjack455]

Would love if you dived into this more. Looks like there is some kind of deterministic noise in Delta Force giving extra detail, coupled with color blending and perhaps height blending. Would be interesting to explore how these might work.

[@touilleMan]

Well I have to say I didn't plan to spend my new year eve watching a voxel engine video, but I peek just a bit I got hooked until the end ! Happy 2023 folks, this is a very nice way to start the year 🤠

[@ghosthuntergr]

Gustavo you are a unique teacher and presenter!

[@guilhermecampos8313]

Hallelujah! Lots of fun doing it!

[@pikuma]

@@guilhermecampos8313 That's the goal. 🙂

[@RyanZola]

Hallelujah! I made it all the way! Thank you for this fun and relaxing weekend programming adventure after a crazy week of professional programming lol. Thanks to your other videos and courses, i was also able to implement the lerp on the tilting motions as well as a gradual acceleration and deceleration. Super fun!

[@pikuma]

Great stuff! :)

[@ViniciusSoaresBatista]

Your passion for teaching is inspiring

[@pikuma]

Grande Vinícius. O tópico ajuda nesse caso. :)

[@nahuakang]

Thanks for a New Year's video to start 2023, Gustavo!

[@burntt999]

oh dear lord.. 3 hours whew. i'll be back! SUPER happy that this is online.. i've been wanting to find a place that would teach me the voxel graphics/engine/ whatever. bless you sir. but i'm gonna need to start this on a fresh day.

[@ChooChooThomas]

Here's to help even a bit with the algorithm. Thank you for making such a detailed explanation. Definitely a great resource!

[@pikuma]

Thank you. 💪

[@HiddenAsbestos]

Hallelujah! (thanks for this tutorial, great!)

[@mikeand9]

Awesome tutorial, it is amazing how you show all of these things easily that for me was magical stuuf in the past! I'm enjoying all your videos. 🧑‍💻

[@jzhu623]

Wolfenstein 3d and Comanche came out in the same year, but you would never guess by just looking at them.

[@ahmetpehlivan6312]

Hapoy new year! This is the best present i got today!

[@abdou.the.heretic]

Managed to get some craters forming on mouse click, but performance takes a Tyson's mean cross, I've noticed the craters keep all details even from far away unlike the terrain which gets pixelated by distance, not sure if I can call it an LOD problem. It's not something that bugs me I'm just happy I found some explanation that my old head who still holds Comanche and Delta Force to high regard, can understand and work with. My programming days are long gone, hell I'm using my son's gmail and account, but seeing your video being this long, explaining the very essence that made me love those games, made me boot up a laptop and start grinding my C gears again!! Thanks you, kind sir! And yeah, Hallelujah!

[@pikuma]

This is absolutely great! My coding days are also behind me, but the good news is that the fun part starts now. 🙂

[@pikuma]

PS: feel free to share your code on a Github repo.

[@suvetar]

Good on Kyle Freeman!! Worth noting that even in those heady days, Medical imaging was using point clouds and voxels, or technical versions that were close as to be twinned siblings, if not closer! It's important, too, to recognise his insight and very practical experience to making it work on your bog-standard PC in stead of a high power medical workstation! Don't forget other classics like Outcast and the Magic Carpet games too!

[@suvetar]

I think that the render sequence of the Genesis device in the Star Trek films also used this aapproach?

[@R.B.]

Hallelujah. Caught files vs. maps when you started. I was surprised you didn't have an error at that point, but then I remembered you were writing in C.

[@thepink_game_dev6610]

What a master piece about old technology!! Gustavo, I think you are undervaluated!! You have made my head blow up!! It's an amazing lesson!! Thank you, thank you, thank you!

[@henribas]

Great lessons, thank you! About your end question: pseudo racing game (Top Gear, Outrun, Chase HQ, etc).

[@dizphunkt]

Crazy good content for new year. Thanks for sharing your knowledge - happy new year!

[@alexandrohdez3982]

amazing 👏👏👏

[@MrNareez]

Another awesome video-book!

[@abdou.the.heretic]

I've been looking for an in depth video on this for ages, time to fire up my computer and get programming memory running again.

[@CasperBorretzen]

Hallelujah! Thank you so much for this aaaamazing tutorial, super interesting and fun!:) Hmm, option 2, exploring different pseudo 3D racers sounds very cool!

[@Error-pb6ee]

Great video!

[@braveitor]

Great content. Explanations are clear and the result is amazing. Thanks for sharing your knowledge.

[@vinnyhorgan7186]

This is so cool! Thank you so much Gustavo!!!!!!

[@ooichu_]

Great New Year's gift, Gustavo! Thank you!

[@blacklistnr1]

Great visualisations! I understood the process even though I skipped the code parts

[@lucetubegplusstillsux2678]

Hallelujah I got it with my own custom terrain rendered in Blender~

[@pottuvoi2]

Back in the days the implementation I remember tracked the height of the ray on each point of the map it checked. So it just checked if height of ray was higher than pixel in heightmap. As an optimization when moving to next pixel, it started testing the height from same location on map. Without this optimization it could be used as full 3D renderer with free camera. (As long as ray generation supported it, but was really slow) Always fun to see voxel/heightmap renderers, a lot of possibilities for fun tricks.

[@dustinclark5620]

Another wonderful video Gustavo!

[@salsicha2]

Voce eh brasileiro! Boa, muito bom ver brasileiros fazendo magica!

[@realcundo]

Nice video! I remember Comanche being used as a proof that PC was better than Amiga. :D It also reminds me of an old dos demo MARS.EXE (search youtube for an example -- the original archive has a readme describing the rendering details). It worked back to front, but it was only rendering pixels when the upper edge of the closer Z plane was lower on the screen than the upper edge of the farther Z plane: it then rendered vertical pixels between the upper edge and the closer upper edge. This way it only rendered surfaces that were facing the camera and reduced the overdraw (painter's algorithm). And since it interpolated between heights and colours, it looked very smooth.

[@pikuma]

mars.exe was classic! 🙂

[@SerBallister]

@@pikumaThere were voxel terrain renderers running on stock AGA Amiga's (@14mhz), albeit in low resolution, although the PC was far better suited for voxel rendering, and they came with much stronger CPUs 40Kb intro from "Stellar" kzbin.info/www/bejne/a4qUY3eomqx3pdE

[@Ehal256]

If you convert the constant depth algorithm to front to back order, you just need to maintain a per-column y buffer to prevent overdraw, and still maintain the benefit of reducing divisions for projection. You just need to calculate 1/z per constant-depth row, then multiply the height values fetched from the height map by the 1/z, which is much faster than a division. On very slow hardware you can even precalculate a table of 1/z values (and coordinate offsets for level of detail!), which I believe arkagis escape does on megadrive/genesis

[@Ehal256]

I finished watching the video and see that the projection lookup table idea was already mentioned. :)

[@pikuma]

Yup. Quality comment. 🙂👍 Just checking something... Visitor from Hacker News, by any chance?

[@Ehal256]

@@pikuma No, just linked by someone else, but I have written similar engines before :)

[@eulondon]

Hallelujah.

[@gwelter]

Just a comment to help you with the KZbin algorithm

[@pikuma]

That's the spirit. 🙂 Thank you so much.

[@achyuththouta6957]

Wow. You have so much knowledge.

[@PlasticCogLiquid]

I love voxels sooooo much.

[@Anonymousewizard]

its so cool how coding works... you can be using a polygon system for so long, then some guy walks in, has a think, and boom, increased performance. incredible problem solving

[@AngryCPPCoder]

Thank you so much for this great video. I always wanted to learn more about voxel engines. Great explanation. For upcoming videos, I would say racer or a new topic.

[@brunorcabral]

Both options would be great

[@Chevifier]

Im gonna try doing this with compute shaders

[@harshguptaxg2774]

Go Ahead!

[@luispieri640]

Hallelujah! Gaucho!

[@canova]

Thank you Gustavo, excellent video. For the next option, I would like to know more about the optimization techniques you've mentioned.

[@pikuma]

Sure thing!

[@elferna]

Hallelujah!!!

[@AnonANONY-jz1wg]

Hallelujah

[@pikuma]

Ahhhhhh, the first! ❤️

[@StiffAftermath]

Have you seen John Lin's voxel engine yet? It is mind-blowing!

[@pikuma]

I was not aware of that project! Amazing. Thanks for the tip.

[@StiffAftermath]

@@pikuma thank you for your awesome work! I love voxel tech! If you see it, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[@billallwell6507]

Just completed the course tonight 2am Melbourne Aust. Amazing piece of work. Vista pro on the Amiga ! I remember I use to leave it running all night to generate a 100 frame animation and hope the trusty old Amiga 500 didn't crash. Please go with some pseudo 3d games, the format you use of theory and history coupled with the implementation is awesome. Not sure whether stunt car racer could be a consideration or Outrun?

[@lorrainefigueroa4624]

Hallelujah! I am really enjoying learning something new this holiday. I vote for 3D racer!

[@lucassamuel6069]

Amazing

[@Aexorzist]

Cool video! The 386 required a 387 to even run floating point code. I don't think one FSINCOS per frame would have been that bad even back then. It's 194-809 cycles on 387. About as much time as processing one vertical line? A LUT is trivial though so not an optimization that would have been missed.

[@kevinbatdorf]

Very well done. Thank you

[@galacta6841]

Are you considering doing more tutorials on 2.5D engines like Mode 7, portal rendering, and such?

[@pikuma]

@@galacta6841 Yes, it's in the queue. 🙂

[@nahuakang]

Also, option 1 for the MS DOS implementation sounds fun :) But both are great ideas!

[@OGkuma_]

Thank you for this content!! Are you planning to do a kind of course on creating a Minecraft clone in C++ and talking about some rendering optimization etc? That would be so nice

[@TheIlluminatedParker]

56:38 Is that yerba mate?? 🧉

[@pikuma]

It sure is... also known as "chimarrão" in the south of Brazil.

[@TheIlluminatedParker]

@@pikuma ahh, I didn't know it was a thing in Brazil. I only know about yerba mate, because I have some friends from Argentina

[@shdon]

Hallelujah indeed

[@3f006]

Really cool

[@aakarshanraj1176]

01:04:21 the formula of delta y is wrong, its missing + operator after pl.y

[@sha5b]

Great tutorial! Happy new year. 3rd comment, just saying

[@pikuma]

Maybe one day that'll be worth millions! 😅

[@bimoverbohm6837]

Halleluja (on the Game Boy Advance btw). Would love to see what optimizations you can come up with and how your demo would run on a 386.

[@pikuma]

On the GBA??? Amazing. 😀 Share a video of it working with us on Twitter @pikuma. 💛

[@pedrocosta1742]

Hallelujah😄

[@pikuma]

Grande!

[@klr607]

I really enjoy the 6502 8-bit programming, but these 3D graphics are awesome 😊

[@Rydn]

1:04:22 There's something I'm not getting about this. If you are in the middle ray calculating delta X, the offset is zfar, so zfar/zfar gives an increment of one on the delta X, but for that ray, shouldn't deltaX be 0 all the way?

[@pikuma]

Hi Rydn, Let's imagine that our camera is in the middle of the map (512,512), and our zfar distance is 400. Therefore, the left and right points x coordinates are plx= -400 and prx=400. So, our delta X is: (-400 + ((400-(-400))/320 * 160)) / 400 which is zero!

[@pikuma]

The addition of plx (which is negative) with the other terms makes the deltax zero when our column is 160.

[@Rydn]

@@pikuma Oh! Thank you. I was wrongly thinking about plx as the zero in my head. I can't wait to finish this. Thank you for your great videos.

[@akshatra2k1]

We want both options please, emulator and 3d racing game. Moreover, can we implement voxel space engine in real 3d from scratch using C?

[@GabrielxC]

Wich VI theme do you use friendo?

[@pikuma]

Hello. I use "ron" (default) or "Benokai".

[@binaryburnout3d]

first comment!!!! happy new year!

[@pikuma]

Happy 2023! 🙂

[@peterlous853]

Thanks for excellent video! I would op for pseudo 3D race for next video.

[@ramyres110]

Aleluia 🙌

[@pikuma]

Feitooooo! ❤️

[@santitabnavascues8673]

Would it be posible to do something similar but with sprites? You know, rendering sprites with depth information or something... would it make sense? 🤔😅

[@CYON4D]

Great explanation. And since I have played all the DOS classics back in the day, this was exceptionally fun. I was wondering if you are considering uploading your "3D Computer Graphics Programming" lesson on Udemy.

[@pikuma]

Hi! It's a fun topic. 🙂 Unfortunately I don't use Udemy for my courses anymore.

[@EmiTheLoomistar]

Pls cover the MS - DOS implementation!!

[@jamesonsouza9417]

Vim pelo canal do Fabio Akita. Sensacional a sua iniciativa de ensinar a base. Gostaria muito que tivesse seu curso em Português. Pagarei com todo prazer.

[@ArtexStudios]

Please optimize the voxel engine to old skool computers first and continue with other techniques later... Thanks. ;)

[@erikmarchini3274]

Hi ! So from what I understood, you can determine the colour and the height of a pixel for the cost of 2 bytes. My question is, is there a way to determine the inclination of a pixel ?

[@CGWerft]

Either you save them in a normal map, which IS Just another Image saving the normal or you could calculate the slope by comparing that Pixel with the Pixels around it. I think there should be a formula in the blog of Inigo Quilez.

[@jeffvenancius]

57:49 - if the slopes are exactly oposites,, is it possible to make a loop where you use half the width while painting both fet and right pixels each time(?)

[@jeffvenancius]

Left*

[@jeffvenancius]

something like l_delta_x = plx + i r_delta_x = prx - i

[@jeffvenancius]

Interesting how it compares with mode 7

[@StijnDeWitt]

1:01:30 You say you need to calculate delta x and y once for each ray, so 320 times. Yet you place the code inside the inner loop, where it will be calculated 320 * zfar times... It should go in the outer loop I think.

[@StijnDeWitt]

Looks like in the actual code, you don't make that mistake

[@PaulSpades]

Hah... I actually never seen this vertical ray algorithm, the horizontal painters algo is slow and useless. This one integrates perfectly with existing ray cast rendering. Also, the 90deg fov sure simplifies some annoying trigonometry and results in faster operations. I've learned some stuff, thanks!

[@josiahjack455]

Halelujah, but how did you get the scanline effect....ooohh you cheated and used a CRT!! No wonder it looks so good.

[@pikuma]

The DOS-like framework has its own CRT shader. 🙂

[@jamiecropley]

Voxel course incoming?

[@pikuma]

Only if I get to really use DOS & VGA 0x13h.

[@pieterverhoeven1642]

Did they ever combine these voxel landscapes with something like portal/cell rendering for interiors? Would have been an interesting alternative history where GTA was software rendered like that :P

[@WesleyMarques79]

Sudo 3D racers please!!

[@eobet]

Fantastic video, but you should have connected it to Minecraft as well to get the attention of the kids! 😉 (Btw, can’t remember what computer I had when I got Comanche but it never ran anywhere close to that smooth!) 🤣

[@pikuma]

Oh, right! I forgot about Minecraft! 😅 I had a Cyrix 486 dx2 and it ran... ok.

[@circuit10]

I don't think it would work for Minecraft because it can't do overhangs or detailed walls

[@jeffvenancius]

Aleluia!

[@enricotrudu6760]

1:20:10 No.

[@AnnatarTheMaia]

You didn't have to quit out of vim every time: if your terminal discipline is configured correctly, you could have just sent SIGSUSP (^z), did whatever on the command line, and then typed "fg" to go back into vim.

[@pikuma]

Hi Annatar! I am used to have different windows for the editor and for my bash sessions (either via terminal window or termux). I believe I exited vi only in the first one or two times I was editing the file. After that, I was swapping between editor and command line without the need to quit vi. :)

[@viniciusrodrigues1428]

hey gustavo, conheci teu canal pelo fabio akita e eu realmente fiquei interessado nos teus cursos, porém é muito caro o valor em dolár, você não pensa em adaptar esses valores em reais? um abraço e que video sensacional, estou gostando demais de ver os teus videos

[@vitoralmeidasilva]

Aleluia! :)

[@vitoralmeidasilva]

Btw, here is the Makefile that I used to compile the program using a Linux machine: build: gcc *.c `sdl2-config --libs --cflags` -lGL -lGLEW -lm -lpthread -o voxel clean: rm voxel run: ./voxel

[@pikuma]

Feito! 🙂👍

[@jmssun]

Mars.exe

[@space302]

You sure enjoy repeating things multiple times. Meaning, you say things multiple times, so you repeat things. So to be clear, you say the same thing multiple times. So basically, you repeat.

[@pikuma]

I'll work on that. Thanks. 😉

[@bcodetube]

My channel has a tutorial on Pseudo 3D Racing using Pygame!

[@juanignacioleyenberger55]

MATE!❤

[@TheNeoxpert]

halleluja. Java with LWJGL

[@pikuma]

❤️❤️❤️

[@avlcek]

Hallelujah!

[@pikuma]

Yay us!

[@billallwell6507]

Hallelujah

[@ManutoUzumaki]

Hallelujah