A Minecraft-like voxel environment rendered in orthographic isometric on
macroquad's 3D pipeline (real cubes + GPU depth buffer). Each block has a logical
voxel position (gx, gy, gz), so the world is 3D-ready by construction.
Reset note. This repo previously hosted a DNA-based a-life simulation. That full simulation is archived at git tag
sim-v1(brancharchive/sim-v1) and can be restored at any time. The current line of work rebuilds the environment first — simulation and GUI are intentionally off — and the simulation will be re-integrated on top of the voxel world later.
cargo run # environment viewer
Controls: WASD/arrows pan, mouse wheel zoom, Q/E rotate the iso view 90°,
R regenerate with a new seed, I toggle the fps/ms readout.
Dev bridge: cargo run --features dev adds a localhost JSON-RPC server (drive the
camera, reseed, capture screenshots) — see DEV_BRIDGE.md.
Scale: 1 voxel = 1 m³; the base map is 138×95 m, scaled by MAP_SCALE (in
config.rs, currently ×8 → 1104×760 m). Chunk meshes are frustum-culled, so only
on-screen chunks cost anything per frame (the readout shows chunks drawn/total). The
whole mesh set still lives in RAM (~0.7 GB at ×8); true ×16 needs chunk streaming.
- Phase 0–3 (done): orthographic iso
Camera3D; noise worldgen into a chunked, bit-packed, ghost-paddedVoxelTerrain(7 biomes + heights); rendered as batched per-chunk meshes (exposed top + cliff side faces, strata bands, baked per-face shading) on the GPU depth buffer; voxel trees on forest/plains columns; a translucent water plane at sea level (opaque pass then water pass — sea floor shows through); tall mountains (peaks ~8 blocks over the plains) on a giant frustum-culled map. - Next: data-driven
BiomeDefbiomes (swamps, mountain lakes, rivers).
See the working plan for the full phase breakdown.