Finally, if it were me doing this work, I would want to stick with voxelized worlds for procedural content, or rasterized for statically authored. Very small chance I pick SDF for static author too depending on game. Don’t be like me and only write engine code and never sims! Forever prototyping…

I assume you’re thinking to author soft bodies with sdfs, with arbitrary limbs or eyes. That’s very powerful and also enormously difficult. You can in fact approximate a bounding volume for these things depending on shader, you won’t need any other acceleration structures most likely.

On that note, models using SDFs in this hypothetical would be like, a shader for a tree, with a seed in push constants if you can fit it, and every model becomes a coding challenge. Not impossible. Explicit data keeps the door open to prefabs, so voxels are still holy grail for generation imo

I’m hesitant for many reasons. I’d suggest authoring just one SDF model you’re satisfied with on shadertoy first, and then scaling that up to solve the perf issues rather than working backwards from the open world perspective. Authoring is my biggest concern, but could work depending on subject.

The acceleration structures fall apart if you want to start bouncing light around the scene in real time, at which point you’d be better off with an uber shader. You can’t frustum cull things you have to intersect against. You can offline calculate diffuse and SH coefficients if your scene is static

A lot to unpack but bounding volumes for implicit volumes aren’t trivial to approximate. You could have a shader per object, and deferred rendering minimizes work with bounding volumes for lights similarly. Subchunking and light bounds allow for lighting across chunks of uniform size. I could go on…

Yeah, also see github.com/rust-windowi....

CPU renderers are slow but could work with enough optimization, threading, etc.

If you can make WGPU work for you, you could speed up your automata in compute.

I’d only use WASM/WGPU for web. There are many ways to reconcile using different languages.

Source: graphics is my passion 🌈

What’s drawing you to WASM? You could use the pixels crate which has an underlying WebGPU backend, but’s it’s unlikely to be easy if you don’t know Rust. I suspect it would give you exactly the CPU feel and ergonomics you want, and they have a web example. github.com/parasyte/pix...

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her name is celka and she loves her dad. she gets into trouble to get his attention because he’s so busy.

I’ve been quietly following the development of these for years. Having used them, they’re really very good and you should absolutely charge for them. Sadly, my handwritten graphics pipeline graduated simple diffuse, but let me know if you’d like some scripts for bulk renaming, etc, all free.