I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:
Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).
[1]
* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-1/
1. Create a custom game engine.
I was rendering-curious when we overlapped together at Figma. Mike was super patient and giving with his time, answering all my dumb questions and aiding with my Maker Week projects. Excited to see him take on something so ambitious next.
Adding additional smoothness to existing voxel engines I'm not sure would have much effect, unless you have something specific like moving a ball on a smooth surface (but the SDF I'm seeing here wouldn't support that either).
As for "create a hole, then close it behind you", this is about as game-changing as open/closing doors (or tunnels with doors). I'm open to suggestion, but honestly this is amazing tech, I just don't think it will create very fun games.
Kind of feel the same about the demos I see of spherical or non-euclidean geometry games. Its very interesting, and impressive, but seems like it is an engine in search of a game.
Have seen this with a lot of software "frameworks" (web, game, graphics, etc.). Nothing wrong with writing an amazing tech demo just for the hell of it, but then when it comes time to do "real world" tasks, the frameworks are often in search of a fitting problem.
Stylistically there are similarities...
> Why create yet another physics engine? Firstly, it has been a personal learning project.
which is really rather wonderful and inspiring to see.
That means:
- Software to model using SDF (like Womp)
- Technique to animate skeletons using SDFs
- Tool to procedural texture surfaces using SDFs
At least he solved the physics part, which is also complex.
And also, his way of carving is by instantiating new elements, which works for small carves, but if you plan to have lots of tunels, then the number of instances is going to skyrocket.
Game / VFX artists heavily use mesh-based tools such as Maya or Blender.
However, he doesn't mention animations, especially skeletal animations. Those tend to work poorly or not at all without polygons. PS4 Dreams, another SDF engine, also had strong limitations with regards to animation. I hope he can figure something out, though perhaps his game project doesn't need animation anyway.
He's using the SDFs to fill a space sort of like Unreal's Nanite virtual geometry. Nanite also doesn't support general animation. They only recently added support for foliage. So you'd use SDF / Nanite for your "infinite detail" / kit-bashing individual pebbles all the way to the horizon, and then draw polygon characters and props on top of that.
In fact I was surprised to see that Nanite flipped from triangle supremacy to using voxels in their new foliage tech. So maybe the two technologies will converge. The guy who did the initial research for Nanite (his talk also cites Dreams ofc) said that voxels weren't practical. But I guess they hit the limits of what they can do with pixel-sized triangles.
Though it says "experimental". Unclear what that means in practice.
This also mentions "skinning": https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/... I believe thats just another term for skeletal meshes / "bones".
Or could the engine treat animated objects as traditional meshed objects (both rendering and interactions)? The author says all physics is done with meshes, so such objects could still interact with the game world seemingly easily. I imagine this would be limited to characters and such. I think they would look terrible using interpolation on a fixed grid anyways as a rotation would move the geometry around slightly, making these objects appear "blurry" in motion.
* Slides (good notes): https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2015/AlexEvans_SIGGR...
Kind of like Quake in a Lemmings world.
This is quite more polished to say the least.
It allowed you to shape terrain with sand, water and lava. So terrain modification PLUS fluid simulation!
While this true for traditional SDF rendering (e.g. raymarching), the method of "interpolating cached distances" used here means that you will always get blending between objects.
It’s just easy to do the melding thing with SDFs so a lot of people do it
(It's a combination of line segments for each letter and digit)
[0] https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/2007/SIGGRAPH2007...
The thing is, you have a SDF and now what? What about textures and materials, animation, optimization, integration within the engine,... None of it seem impossible, but I won't call it easy.
And there’s game developers who develop game engines thinking they are developing games.
- with the advent of all the AI tools, is it actually possible to vibe code a 3D FPS shooter from scratch like if you wrote a 2000 page prompt, can it actually be done?
You could try planning ahead and restricting assets to an asset library, that could fix some of that problem. But having used coding agents for complex software work, and games being one of the most complex software tasks in the industry, I just don't see it happening quite that easily.
I also think the outcome would be shit, pure and simple. The development of a game is usually the stylistic input of dozens to thousands of humans over the course of years. They are not trivial pursuits. There's a lot of variance in there, but generally speaking I expect this to be one of the final frontiers for AI development. There's not heaps of training data since game code is usually proprietary, which doesn't help.
I'm sure an LLM could output something or other that resembles a vague concept of a game but you're not going to prompt your way into something that's actually fun for a human to play.
But I have half vibed an FPS in Pygame so its 100% viable (Mine is First and Person, and has motion, but its more of a flight simulator. I am sure the rest of the features would be piss easy)
With that said, yeah Claude Code CAN build one, but for action games a big part of them comes down to “game feel”, something that can’t be captured in a screenshot. You really need to have taste and the ability to describe what isn’t working and why.