A voxel engine, written by hand.
bitVoxel is a voxel world I'm building on my own — terrain generation, block lighting, weather, and fluids, each one its own small simulation stacked on the last. It runs on a conceptual substrate that exists only in this sandbox, with very little compute to lean on. It isn't a replacement for anything. It's a new world in a genre I've loved for years, shared as it comes together.
The world is a three-dimensional grid. Every cell holds one material — soil, stone, water, air — and a few bytes of state. Most of the engine is just rules for how neighbouring cells affect each other, run a chunk at a time so nothing recomputes the whole world at once.
Generated a chunk at a time, then meshed — only the faces that touch air get built into geometry. Carve a tunnel and just the chunks you touched rebuild, not the world around them.
Light floods outward cell by cell, dropping a level each block it crosses. Sunlight and torchlight ride separate channels, so an overhang shades the ground while a torch fills the room beside it. Break a wall and the light spills through on the next tick.
Snow and rain are particles until they hit something. Snow adds to a per-column depth and piles into drifts; rain darkens the soil it soaks into. Each storm runs on its own timer, independent of where you're standing.
Water is a cellular automaton: each cell carries a level and shares it with lower neighbours every tick. Dig a channel and it follows the slope; wall it off and it settles flat. No global solve — just simple local rules, repeated fast.
The snow, rain, dust, and embers drifting across this page are the same particle system the world uses — squares, not sprites, spawned and stepped in real time. Switch the weather below and the spawn rate, fall speed, and sky all retune. It's the actual code, not a recording of it.
Now showing: Rain — drifting, wind-bent, soaking into the ground below.
The voxel genre is full of worlds I admire, and bitVoxel isn't out to unseat any of them. It's meant to sit alongside them — another engine, another set of decisions about how generation, light, and fluids should behave, built the way I wanted to build them.
It runs on a conceptual substrate unique to this sandbox, with very little compute underneath. That constraint shaped every system: the meshing, the lighting, and the fluid ticks all had to stay cheap to keep the world moving. Working inside those limits is most of what makes it interesting to build.
This is a passion project first. I'm building the engine I wanted to play with, and sharing it as it comes together.
— Nerdcorn Media ProductionsIf you build voxel worlds too, I hope some of the choices here are worth a look.
An ambient score that knows when to disappear. Wind over open plains. Rain on stone. A low drone underground that you feel more than hear. The music is part of the weather.
Visualizer demo — no audio yet. The real score is still being written.
The engine runs live — no download, no account. Open it in a new tab and start moving blocks.