Voxel 3D engine

• A simple hobby project: A Minecraft-inspired voxel game engine and prototype built with C++ and OpenGL.
• Goals: explore fundamental voxel rendering techniques, chunk management, and basic game mechanics.
• Fun fact: my 8 year old daughter helped make some of the block textures!

Features

• Custom Textures: Unique block textures hand-crafted in GIMP for a distinct look and feel.
• Chunk-Based World: Efficient world streaming with chunk management, greedy meshing, and back-face/frustum culling for high performance.
• Block Variety: Core voxel types (dirt, grass, stone, water, etc.) with proper texture atlasing and UV mapping.
• Modern Rendering Pipeline: Shader-driven OpenGL rendering with support for lighting, transparency, and depth-sorted passes.
• Debug Interface: Built-in Dear ImGui panel for live debugging, tweaking parameters, and profiling engine performance.

Next Steps

• Biomes & Environment: Expand procedural generation with biome-specific features — trees, flowers, vegetation, clouds, and terrain variation.
• First-Person Camera: Add a controllable camera for free exploration of the voxel world.
• Physics & Collision: Implement simple AABB collision detection and movement constraints for the player.
• Lighting & Shadows: Introduce directional light and shadow mapping for more depth and realism.
• Saving & Loading: Add persistent world serialization for chunks and player state.
• Optimization Pass: Continue improving mesh generation, multi-threading, and memory usage for larger worlds.

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Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

Prerequisites

You will need a C++ compiler (like g++), make, and the necessary OpenGL and GLFW development libraries installed on your system.

For Debian/Ubuntu-based systems, you might need (I use arch btw):

sudo apt update
sudo apt install build-essential libglfw3-dev libgl-dev libx11-dev libxrandr-dev libxi-dev libglm-dev

Building

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/whleucka/voxel.git
   cd voxel

2. Compile the project:

   make

   This will compile all source files and create the executable in the bin/ directory.

Running

After successful compilation, you can run the game using:

./bin/app

Drawing blocks couldn't be that hard... Right?

Controls

• F1: Show debug info/stats.
• F2: Toggle wireframe.
• F3: Toggle V-sync.
• W, A, S, D: Move camera forward, left, backward, right.
• Space: Jump.
• Mouse: Look around.
• ESC: Exit program.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! If you have suggestions for improvements, bug fixes, or new features, please feel free to open an issue or submit a pull request.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details.

Acknowledgments

• LearnOpenGL.com: Learning OpenGL resource.
• gimp: GNU Image Manipulation Program.
• GLFW: For window and input management.
• GLAD: For loading OpenGL function pointers.
• Dear ImGui: For the immediate-mode GUI used for debugging.
• stb_image: For easy image loading.