Voxel Engine Tutorial (How To Make A Voxel-like Game with OpenGL in C++)

How To Make A Voxel Game Engine

Developing a voxel game engine in C++ with OpenGL is no easy task (or any other languages, like Rust for example). It's definitely a humbling experience. I created this WIKI as a journal for writing down what I learn while creating my own voxel game engine.

I hope it helps someone. You can contribute your own voxel game articles to this wiki (goes to email.)

First and most common mistake: There is no "best" language or platform for making a voxel engine. It is mostly intellectual labor. It doesn't matter which language or engine you use, at the end of the day, performance of a voxel engine will be determined by your skill as a programmer, which depends on your level of understanding of how different rendering techniques actually work.

This site was created as a mental map for helping you grasp all of the pieces of the puzzle, and hopefully put them together into an efficient and successful voxel game.

Good luck on your path, and know that you can help by sharing links to any articles on this site on Discord, Reddit or other platforms. Thanks シ

Lay Of The Land Coming Soon To Steam! (Tooley1998's Unreal Voxel Engine Game)

Note, this site is not affiliated with Lay of the Land created by Tooley1998 it's simply one of the best games made in the voxel sandbox game genre. Even though it has its issues, the game is truly set a new standard in so many ways and deserves acclaim.

Lay of the Land (youtube, steam) is a voxel-based game that emphasizes exploration and creativity within a vast, procedurally generated world. Players can shape the environment by altering the terrain, building structures, and interacting with various landscapes, all presented in the distinctive blocky style characteristic of voxel games.

The game combines survival elements with open-world mechanics, encouraging resource gathering, crafting, and building to thrive in its dynamic environments. Its immersive atmosphere and customizable world offer endless possibilities for players to leave their mark on the ever-evolving terrain.

A step-by-step tutorial guide for beginners with C++ and OpenGL source code.

Table of contents:

How to make a voxel-like game? The content on this site is about answering this question. I started this site on May 5, 2024 and will continue to update it with new tutorials about building a complete voxel engine game from scratch.

The information posted here comes from my own experience of developing a voxel engine over the last 4 months which is currently getting close to completion. So please bookmark this site and check back soon.

You can follow my voxel engine channel on YouTube where I post my development updates when there is something substantial to show. Currently I'm working on equally distributing memory load between CPU and GPU, while also creating a dynamic LOD system for rendering voxels in my game. This should clear up some RAM for calculating real time shadows and perhaps even volumetric light. I'm also looking into parallel processing to be applied as an optimization to some of the core algorithms.

With advent of Nvidia RTX (ray tracing-capable) video cards, and popular games like Minecraft and most recently Teardown, game developers all over the world have been considering creating their own voxel engines.

This is a very simple site about making voxel engines, and I hope that it helps beginners and intermediate-level game programmers who are starting out and need a straightforward voxel engine tutorial. While most voxel engine tutorials explain small part that make up the whole, there isn't much information available as far as putting an entire voxel engine together from scratch. The problem with making a voxel engine in Unity or Unreal is that modding will be nearly impossible to implement, at least not in the easy way modders expect.

Creating a voxel engine is an incredibly complex task. There isn't just one way of rendering worlds made up of little blocks. Usually, your voxel engine will depend on a combination of techniques chosen by you. These techniques is what will be discussed on this voxel tutorial site.

Before we begin, watch this demo of my own voxel engine I'm working on that I also plan on turning into an actual game someday.

The soundtrack together with the lyrics was generated by AI, and even though the lyrics do tend toget a bit washed out toward the end, the song itself is somewhat charming and can even get stuck in your head for days!

barren desert scene with earthly colors in a voxel engine (screenshot)

A vast terrain (still not even optimized) showcasing piles of dirt in a wasteland.

voxel engine screenshot with a barren desert scene (screenshot)

Another example of a hill in my voxel engine game. A simple black and white height map was used to sample the height.

How To Make A Voxel Game Engine

Lay Of The Land Coming Soon To Steam! (Tooley1998's Unreal Voxel Engine Game)

A step-by-step tutorial guide for beginners with C++ and OpenGL source code.

How Does Greedy Meshing Work?

LOD: Implementing Level Of Detail Algorithm In a Voxel Game Engine

How To Make A Voxel Game In Unreal Engine

Links To Other Notable Voxel Engine Places