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Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)

439 points david927 | 2 comments | 29 Jun 25 20:21 UTC | HN request time: 0.397s | source

What are you working on? Any new ideas which you're thinking about?
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jesse__ ◴[29 Jun 25 22:01 UTC] No.44416890[source]▶
I've been working on a 3D voxel-based game engine for like 10 years in my spare time. The most recent big job has been to port the world gen and editor to the GPU, which has had some pretty cute knock-on effects. The most interesting is you can hot-reload the world gen shaders and out pop your changes on the screen, like a voxel version of shadertoy. https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

I also wrote a metaprogramming language which generates a lot of the editor UI for the engine. It's a bespoke C parser that supports a small subset of C++, which is exposed to the user through a 'scripting-like' language you embed directly in your source files. I wrote it as a replacement for C++ templates and in my completely unbiased opinion it is WAY better.

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

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1. goatking ◴[30 Jun 25 15:14 UTC] No.44424357[source]▶
This is pretty cool! I am also interested in game engine programming, but I am in the very beginning of the journey.

Do you have any recommendation on voxel engine learning materials (e.g. books, courses, etc)

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2. jesse__ ◴[30 Jun 25 17:44 UTC] No.44426003[source]▶
Voxel engines are interesting because they're very much an area of active research. People are often coming up with novel techniques, and adapting traditional techniques in interesting ways. There isn't any good, singular resource for learning about voxel engine development thay I know of.

I'd recommend Handmade Hero for a more traditional resource on how to build a game engine. That's how I learned to program for real, and it worked great for me.