I'm making a game engine based on dynamic signed distance fields (SDFs)

Mike Turitzin explains how his custom game engine uses dynamic signed distance fields to enable high-fidelity, non-destructive modifications to world geometry.

My motivation when starting this project was to build an engine that enables high fidelity modifications to world geometry during gameplay. In most games, the game world is relatively static. In the games where geometry is dynamic - like Minecraft or No Man's Sky - modifications to the world are usually relatively crude and low-fidelity. My engine supports detailed changes to world geometry - adding and removing matter both smoothly or with sharp edges. It also supports non-destructive changes like moving a hole around, or creating a tunnel and walking through it - and then seeing it disappear behind you. I'm excited about these non-destructive changes in particular as they enable a lot of interesting gameplay mechanics. I've started building a game with this engine, which I will be saying more about as I make more progress. I post frequent updates on Twitter: x.com/miketuritzin And also on Bluesky: bsky.app/profile/miketuritzin.bsky.social Resources: Video intro to SDFs and ray-marching by Sebastian Lague: youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5WWtMoeKg Inigo Quilez's articles (many on SDFs): iquilezles.org/articles/ "SDF Tracing Visualization" Shadertoy (paniq): shadertoy.com/view/lslXD8 "Improved Alpha-Tested Magnification for Vector Textures and Special Effects" (Chris Green (Valve), 2007): steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007_AlphaTe… "Ray Tracing of Signed Distance Function Grids" (Söderlund et al (NVIDIA), 2022): jcgt.org/published/0011/03/06/paper-lowres.pdf "Geometry Clipmaps: Terrain Rendering Using Nested Regular Grids" (Losasso & Hoppe, 2004): hhoppe.com/geomclipmap.pdf Jolt Physics: github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics Chapters: 0:00 - Intro reel and motivation 1:03 - Short intro to SDFs 1:56 - Ray-marching perf problems 2:32 - Inspiration: Dreams on PS4 3:09 - Background on my approach 4:15 - Caching SDF distances 5:33 - Interpolating cached values 7:49 - Memory usage woes 8:43 - Caching distances sparsely 9:16 - Brick-map and brick atlas 10:34 - Why not a triangle mesh 11:09 - Supporting vast spaces 11:44 - Geometry clipmaps 12:34 - Dramatic memory reductions 12:58 - Fast incremental updates 14:29 - Physics and collision 15:40 - Terrain (also an SDF!) 16:20 - More examples of cool stuff 18:33 - Making a game, and wrap up Asset credits: Music: Blinking Lights by Alexander Nakarada (creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Music: Transcendence by Alexander Nakarada (creatorchords.com) Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/