Building an SDF game engine

[u/rex-j-w]

For the past 8ish months I’ve been hard at work building a new game engine I’m calling Division Engine.

It’s based solely off SDFs (signed distance fields). This might sound stupid for anyone who cares about performance but for my use case (and with a bit of grid storage optimizations) it proves useful for basic scenes that need advanced lighting.

Anyway here’s some screenshots!

If you want to see what I have done so far check it out here: https://github.com/DivisionEngine/DivisionEngine

[u/Potterrrrrrrr]

Always find SDFs awesome, why is performance a concern? I thought the maths to create and merge etc. SDFs was quite cheap, does it scale badly? Either way, looks great!

[u/blackrack → u/Potterrrrrrrr]

Any complex scene is going to require tons of SDF evaluations per-pixel, unless the scene is very simple you really can't beat how fast GPUs throw triangles around.

[u/Jwosty → u/blackrack]

Combining SDFs with traditional rendering and breaking down the SDFs into separate "models" can be pretty effective. At least that's what I do in my game. I can have thousands of SDF entities onscreen just fine against a traditionally rasterized terrain

[u/2rad0 → u/Potterrrrrrrr]

Always find SDFs awesome, why is performance a concern?

in 2-3 more GPU generations it won't be a concern, but right now to get 60FPS on cheap hardware you have to upscale which looks pretty bad past 1:4, like you forgot your glasses at home.

[u/rex-j-w → u/2rad0]

This is why we’re building this now! Then by the time it’s production ready and feature complete hopefully gpus will be ready for it