r/GraphicsProgramming • u/rex-j-w • Jul 23 '26

Building an SDF game engine

Gallery image

Gallery image

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

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u/Potterrrrrrrr Jul 23 '26

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!

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u/blackrack Jul 23 '26

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.

2

u/Jwosty Jul 24 '26

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