Developer, John Lin creates a new Voxel Engine after experimenting with increasing draw distances using regular Voxels. He has managed to increase the Voxel density increasing the visual acuity in the process, making for a nice looking environment as you can see in Crystal Islands demo video.

John writes: “This scene is composed entirely of voxels. What started as an innocent attempt at increasing the view distance evolved into a 4 month quest to achieve not only that, but rewrite a brand new voxel engine from the ground up that would feature:

• An 8x (512 cubic) detail increase with animation support, high compression rates, and per-voxel material attributes
• Fast collision detection that physics and player walking will utilize
• Full fracture and mutation of objects
• Improved path traced global illumination that features 5 bounces from the sun, atmosphere and all emissive objects
• A powerful asset pipeline that can utilize Quixel Megascans, PlantFactory/PlantCatalog’s detailed vegetation, and other highly detailed polygon models after being converted and processed into voxels (all 3 seen in this video)
• Ray-traced world generation that could easily place trees, grass, flowers, and other assets (eg. crystals) in designated areas: eg. in sunlight, on cave walls, in big open areas, and so on
• A 10x speedup in rendering over the previous engine

Most of these features are showcased in the video. Of course, there are some kinks to work out, like you can see object intersections occurring or being placed in odd places, and the path traced denoiser is lacking a spatial filter, but I got too excited with how this looks that I couldn’t wait any longer to share. The effective world size here is 256K^3 and the island is generated once upon startup (like Terraria for instance), which takes about a minute. Things won’t look this chaotic in whatever the final version is, as it’s more a feature test than anything else.

To those who prefer the charm of the old engine, there is a low-detail mode that will be toggleable. More likely than not, this level of detail will be reserved for RTX graphics cards, and the low-detail mode will be the fall back for older ones. I don’t have exact spec predictions yet, because there are so many tweaks to be made like level-of-detail threshold, lighting refresh rates, and the world size itself, so general performance requirements remain to be outlined”.