Voxceleron2 Engine

A voxel-based rendering engine built with C++ and Vulkan.

Current progress

Infinite world are working, gone is the blasted array-based storage of the world and a Sparse Octree has been introduced :) Beggining LOD development now.

LOD Development is not going to plan.

Project Details

Features

• Procedurally generated voxel terrain
• Advanced lighting with ambient occlusion
• Bloom and post-processing effects
• Real-time shadows
• Translucent materials
• Optimized chunk-based rendering

Dependencies

The following dependencies are required to build the engine:

• Visual Studio 2022 or newer
• Vulkan SDK 1.4.0 or newer - Download from LunarG
• GLM (included in the external directory)
• STB_IMAGE (included in the external directory)
• FastNoiseSIMD (included in the external directory)

Build Instructions

Setting up the environment

1. Install Visual Studio 2022 with C++ development workload
2. Install the Vulkan SDK
3. Ensure that the VULKAN_SDK environment variable is set correctly (typically done by the installer)

Building the project

1. Open the solution file voxceleron2.sln in Visual Studio
2. Select the desired configuration (Debug or Release) and platform (x64 recommended)
3. Build the solution (F7 or Build → Build Solution)
4. The executable will be created in build\x64\[Configuration]\voxceleron2.exe

Building from Command Line

You can also build the project from the command line:

1. Launch the Visual Studio Developer PowerShell:

   & 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\Common7\Tools\Launch-VsDevShell.ps1'

2. Navigate to the project directory and build using MSBuild:

   cd C:\path\to\voxceleron2-engine
   MSBuild.exe voxceleron2.sln /p:Configuration=Release /p:Platform=x64

Running the engine

Run the generated executable from Visual Studio or directly from the build directory. Resources will be automatically copied to the output directory.

Controls

• W, A, S, D: Move forward, left, backward, right
• Mouse: Look around
• Shift: Run faster
• L: Unlock Mouse

Troubleshooting

If you encounter build errors:

1. Make sure the Vulkan SDK is properly installed and the VULKAN_SDK environment variable is set
2. Check Visual Studio has the C++ desktop development workload installed
3. Verify that all required libraries are in their expected locations