Posted by imagiro 1/8/2026
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...