John "Lin" is a programmer who is prototyping a voxel game. He's a prolific poster on Twitter, frequently posting small demos of the types of gameplay you might eventually see, however, the engine is extremely early in design.
My new pet wolf kept me company while I spent my Halloween destroying some voxel pumpkins and playing with the☀️(♥️). #voxels #gamedev #screenshotsaturday #Halloween
— John "Lin" (@ProgrammerLin) November 1, 2020
PS: Water physics, a long feature showcase and the official game announcement is coming next video! pic.twitter.com/hsyjR3FsGm
Many of his videos show graphs reminisent of Fugl, but instead of static environments, he often is demonstrating the dynamic capabilities of the engine to deform terrain.
In a rare naked scene with hardly any trees, watch as #screenshotsaturday exposes yet another feature preview of the detail enhancement update: force-based volumetric terrain fracturing! Sound on! A more extensive video is to follow shortly. #voxels #gamedev pic.twitter.com/9x9XEoge26
— John "Lin" (@ProgrammerLin) October 10, 2020
One capability his engine demonstrates is an ability to simulate realistic water physics.
This real-time CPU fluid sim runs on one CPU core (with GPU rendering of course). It was a research project to find an efficient method to handle realistic water, without taxing the entire system. I think you guys know what's coming next in our voxel game. #gamedev #voxels pic.twitter.com/yDnORejqGv
— John "Lin" (@ProgrammerLin) August 21, 2020
Voxels provide an opportunity to express open-world environments with inticate 3D environments. There's many voxel games available on steam, however, there isn't yet a voxel game widely known for genre-epitomizing open-world exploration. Perhaps the most well known game of this genre was "Cube World". Cube World began development in 2011, had a long haitus, and was quietly released in 2019. It was largely panned.
John has shown how interior environments might be represented in his engine; he has posted handfuls of videos of different techniques he has explored to create interiors.
After adding glass, making path tracing noiseless and run 20x faster (60fps HD!), and adding experimental building tools, I created a single arch and couldn't pull myself away for the next 3 weeks. I can't wait to see what real artists can do. #voxels #sandbox #gamedev #rtx pic.twitter.com/2NkFG08wK1
— John "Lin" (@ProgrammerLin) March 6, 2020
Okay, I spent a day working on a program that dumps full @OldSchoolRS map regions from ~2006 into OBJ and PLY models, which can then be imported into my cone tracer. Obviously it's not perfect and textures are to-do but woooow is voxelized RuneScape super charming. #voxels pic.twitter.com/3haSqpeHAV
— John "Lin" (@ProgrammerLin) November 19, 2019
Though his work is in its early stages, @ProgrammerLin is a worthy Twitter follow.
