This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation.

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/

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-2/

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-3/

I had the same idea but with voxels. The idea works fine, more work on photorealism needed : https://youtu.be/LBzuXj21_bY?t=128

Go Mike! Been seeing his progress for a while on Bluesky, I knew exactly (and who) what this was when I saw it on HN.

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.

Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!

Great video. A new game engine powered by SDFs is the sort of thing I want to find out about. Not the next game in a long running franchise that looks the same as all the others that preceded it. One for the from-scratch game dev nerds like myself!

The physics engine mentioned towards the end, Jolt Physics [0] is used in the frankly blockbuster games Horizon: Forbidden West and Death Stranding 2 and yet opens its description with

> Why create yet another physics engine? Firstly, it has been a personal learning project.

which is really rather wonderful and inspiring to see.

[0] https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics

I wonder if ReLU fields could help reduce cache grid resolution while improving reconstruction precision? See https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10824

Dreams on PS4 had an SDF modeler, but I’m not sure if the runtime was SDF. Now that I think about it, the rendering engine had a Gaussian splat look to it years before that paper.

I use SDFs on my render engine to render text. It allows me to debug values inside shaders. (I can print value of an uniform, texture value etc.)

(It's a combination of line segments for each letter and digit)

The interaction with the terrain reminds me of Astroneer, although I don't know if that game uses SDFs.