Ragnavoxel documentation

How the engine is put together and how to write a game on it: the application host, voxels at any scale, the ECS, meshing, rendering, worlds, content, physics, audio, the editor and shipping.

Basics

Getting started

What Ragnavoxel is, how a game is laid out on it, the Application host and its hooks, AppConfig, the fixed-step loop, and building the engine and its samples.

The voxel size and the fixed storage hierarchy of chunks, blocks and bricks; how chunks compress; voxel types, materials and the six faces each voxel carries; and the heightfield patterns that give surfaces their relief.

The ECS and jobs

Entities and archetypes, components split into per-field arrays (AoSoA), queries by entity and by chunk, resources, deferred commands, the staged scheduler, and the job system.

Inside the engine

Meshing

The hierarchical greedy mesher's three passes and cross-level coalescing, face classes, built surfaces' microvoxel stairs, foliage edges, the watertight guarantee, and what a chunk mesh holds.

Rendering

The Vulkan 1.4 renderer: tessellated, displaced voxel quads, GPU-driven cluster culling with two-phase Hi-Z, far terrain to the horizon, water, glass and grass, volumetric fog, cloud and light shafts, fire and spell volumes, shadows, physical light and the post chain, plus the 2D sprite renderer.

Building a game

Cameras and rigs

The 3D camera's pose and lens (perspective or orthographic, infinite far planes, lens shift), picking that matches the GPU exactly, the 2D camera, and ready-made rigs for every kind of game.

Worlds

VoxelScene for worlds that fit in memory, ChunkStreamer for unbounded worlds generated around a focus with level-of-detail rings and look-ahead, stamping primitives, editing streamed chunks, the floating origin, and saving to TileDB.

Content as text

Materials, voxel types, microvoxel models and prop models in TOML; parametric parts, ranges sampled per instance, branches, scatters and ASCII voxel art; the asset library; and model grids for bodies, hair and gear.

Physics, audio and input

Jolt physics with colliders streamed from greedy quads, the character controller, rigid bodies, constraints, impacts and raycasts; the audio engine's buses, voices, 3D emitters, procedural synths and world filter; and keyboard, mouse and gamepad input.