After nine years of development, meshoptimizer has reached its first major version, 1.0!
This release focuses on improvements in clusterization and simplification as well as stabilization. Here's a release announcement with more details on past, present and future; please RT!
meshoptimizer.org/v1
Our #SIGGRAPH2025 paper "Augmented Vertex Block Descent" presents an extremely fast and stable physics solver with hard constraints for handling joints and collisions.
The project page has a 2D demo with source code and more details:
graphics.cs.utah.edu/research/pro...
synopsis post:
recently i've been working on a rendering prototype. it's a Wolfenstein style fan raycaster (so CPU, no polygons).
it has:
displacement mapped walls
terrain raycaster floors (entirely different tech, but texturally matched with the walls).
(angle constrained) real time shadows
In case it's not obvious, every chunk is rendered as an inside out ~cube and the fragment shader of the cube shader does the ray trace / DDA through the 3d texture.
If we needed it to be way faster I would create a mip-like pyramid for each model w/ 1 bit per voxel, like Teardown does
Here's a heat map showing how many steps were needed per pixel. Rainbow wraps after 64 steps.
We also have an oct-tree renderer that we're thinking we'll use for very large levels but i'm not actually sure it'll be faster.
Yeah 3D DDA, pretty close to how Teardown does it:
acko.net/blog/teardow...
64^3 is just to cap the max number of steps any thread needs to take. I haven't investigated how important this is. We run at 360p for stylistic reasons, and worlds with 4000 chunks is <20us so our bottlenecks r elsewhere.
Oh i didn’t realize “Build” is a specific engine. I don’t know what they do.
.vox is popular too. I work on an engine with a .kvx and .vox importer. We convert it to a 3D texture and render it using ray tracing / dda. We tried some other approaches like generating slice planes but ray tracing is faster. For big files we chunk to 64x64x64, or use oct tree
New blog post! "Measuring acceleration structures", in which we will compare BVH costs on various GPU architectures and drivers and attempt to understand the details enough on AMD hardware to make sense of the numbers!
Reposts appreciated :)
zeux.io/2025/03/31/m...
I've now published my blog post, "I want a good parallel computer." raphlinus.github.io/gpu/2025/03/... . Thanks much to all the feedback on the draft, I'd like to think I've clarified some things that might have been confusing.
My cozy town building game now has flowers and some simple bushes. I also updated the lighting of the grass to be a bit softer.
Feels much more alive now!
More progress on the lighting for my cozy town building game Lots of small tweaks and I've added back the ocean and materials.
Still more to do with the sky lighting, but first I want to get the sun light back and add contact shadows, then some more interesting textures and foliage!
