VoxelCut
A voxel engine written from scratch in C++26 on a hand-written Vulkan backend, and the game being built on it. This wiki is where the decisions live — what was chosen, why, and what each choice rules out.
How to read this. Each section below is self-contained and has its own navigation once you are inside it. Technical terms are marked with a dotted underline on their first appearance on a page — hover, or tab to them, for a definition and a note on why the term matters here. The full list is on the glossary page.
Sections
- ENGINE Voxel engine The terrain design and the engine work it implies: two representations in one grid, two damage models, Marching Cubes, streaming, and the order it all gets built in. The largest section, and the one furthest along.
- BUILD Building and running Toolchain, presets, every build target and what it is for, the tests, the asset pipeline, and the dev conveniences that only exist in debug builds.
- GAME Game design What the player actually does. Materials and ores, what it takes to break them, and where in the world they are found. Early — the engine is ahead of the game right now.
- TERMS Glossary Every acronym and term used across the wiki, defined and searchable.
Where the project is
| Area | State |
|---|---|
| Renderer | Hand-written Vulkan backend behind a backend-agnostic interface. Textured discrete cubes, per-face texture arrays, ambient occlusion, a stroke-font HUD and a wireframe overlay |
| Voxel data | Chunked world of 32³ chunks; every cell carries a type, material, density byte and a Terrain/Construction class tag |
| Generation | A staged pipeline: fBm surface with domain warping, 3D noise caves, layered strata with two anchoring modes, mineral seams conditioned on host rock, a terminal bedrock clamp and a density mip-chain |
| Physics | Fixed-timestep character controller, swept AABB against the voxel grid, with contact normals |
| Editing | Class-aware raycast, place and remove, and a game mode that wears a voxel down over several strikes |
| Terrain silhouette | Still discrete cubes. Marching Cubes is designed and scheduled, not built |
| World scale | A fixed dev world held densely in memory. Streaming, persistence and generated world artifacts are designed, not built |
| Game | Barely started. The material table and the digging model are in; everything above them is open |