&meeseengine
Thanks to last year's optimizations, the Dreamcast port of my voxel engine now runs smoother than ever, holding nearly a stable 30 FPS while moving through the infinite world. In the last minute before the new year, I leveraged lightmap caching to boost chunk lighting performance by 60%, resulting in a 21% overall improvement in chunk lighting and meshing performance.

&meeseengine
You can now build in my voxel engine for the Dreamcast (and the other platforms). Placing blocks dynamically updates lighting and shading in the surrounding area. With the major roadblocks out of the way, I'll be focusing more on adding new features this year. There's still some major optimization work to do, but the priority is making the engine more feature rich. Stay tuned!

&meeseengine

This past month has been all about integrating the game with my internal dev tools and revamping core engine features. The biggest milestone has been completely overhauling concurrent heap defragmentation to achieve ultra-low latency performance and O(1) scalability across all the platforms. On average and worst-case, pause times are now down to microsecond levels on all platforms.

The new defragmentation algorithm is something I developed from first principles. I've read various research papers, but I couldn't find anything that matched what I needed, so I ended up inventing my own solution. Heap defragmentation can also function as a garbage collector, but I retained the malloc/free semantics as a flexible guideline for the memory manager to either use or ignore. This approach also allows for benchmarking my solution against malloc/free and arenas.

Heap defragmentation is critical for making this type of game on the Gamecube and Dreamcast ports a reality. These consoles are severely limited in memory, where running out of usable memory is a real risk when address space gets tight. The recent improvements ensure that heap defragmentation will not cause stutters, even as the number of allocated objects, such as chunks and entities, grows into the millions.

The first clip shows the PC version running with 100,000 objects (top-left of video) at a render distance of 32, handling defragmentation effortlessly. In the second clip, I pushed it up to half a million objects with a render distance of 64, and it didn't even flinch — the pause times stayed rock solid.

&meeseengine Showcase of my voxel game engine from Handmade Seattle 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZb-9EMg0es

&meeseengine
Mountains with this level of scale and detail were once out of reach on the Dreamcast. But with recent optimizations, they're now a reality:

• The renderer is now 19% faster, achieving near-peak efficiency at 30 cycles per vertex (up to 6.67 million vertices per second)
• Aggressive occlusion culling reduces polygon counts by over 50%
• Lighting and meshing is now 73% faster
• Terrain generation is now 6% faster
• Optimized frustum culling

&meeseengine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMQ2WcO6ic

&meeseengine for the Gamecube, Wii, Dreamcast, and PC.

I've been mostly working on the engine's internals lately. The PC port gave me the debugging tools I needed to improve complex systems like the memory manager.

• Audio is now working on the Dreamcast version
• Renderer runs 20% faster on the Dreamcast
• Heap allocation is 300% faster on average and 200% faster on worst case. While this had minimal impact on performance for the Gamecube and PC versions, it was a significant bottleneck on the Dreamcast.
• Increased real-time heap defragmentation throughput by using a new multi-regional heap structure, which also sets the foundation for DRAM bank-aware memory allocation.
  This video showcases the Dreamcast version of my voxel engine.

&meeseengine
Flying at 3 times the speed of sound (3690 km/h), hitting nearly 60 FPS, with a 64-chunk render distance.

I ported &meeseengine to the PC, and even in its unoptimized state, it runs at 60 FPS with a minimum render distance of 64 chunks on my laptop -- double the maximum render distance of Minecraft: Java Edition. Powerful hardware won't be necessary for the game to run smoothly at long render distances.

The PC port will streamline the debugging process, allowing for faster improvements across all platforms, including the Gamecube, Dreamcast, and Wii.

I ported &meeseengine to the Wii with a render distance of 17 chunks, now surpassing the render distance of Minecraft on the PS4 and Xbox One.

The Gamecube version of &meeseengine now boasts a render distance of 13 chunks, surpassing the render distance of Minecraft on the Switch (docked). Cloud shadows have been enhanced to distort as they move, with a softening effect during sunrise and sunset.

&meeseengine New features are in the works. In the meantime, here are a few cool places I've found.

&meeseengine on the Gamecube
This update introduces a range of new features, including a new entity system and model animations. Block digging now takes time, with items dropping upon destruction. Background music playback has also been added, efficiently decoding compressed audio data with minimal CPU usage. Over 10,000 objects are allocated on the heap without performance degradation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOxM0feMxHw

&meeseengine

Optimized my game engine to fit 25 million blocks within 24 MB of RAM, achieving a new render distance of 12 chunks (192 blocks) on the Gamecube. This now surpasses the render distance of Minecraft on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U, and matches that of the Nintendo Switch when docked. This accomplishment is the result of extensive optimization effort over the past month.

&meeseengine

Testing the new particle system in my Minecraft-inspired engine for the Gamecube and Dreamcast. Taking a break from optimization work to concentrate on gameplay features.

&meeseengine

On the Dreamcast version, the game runs nearly smoothly at draw distance = 10 chunks (same as in Minecraft multiplayer) and move speed = 8, though it’s still far from the Gamecube version shown in https://discord.com/channels/239737791225790464/404399251276169217/1267828654814265447, which ran flawlessly at 30 FPS. There are occasional small stutters when moving around. Terrain noise generation has been optimized to run twice as fast, reducing its share of the total world, lightmap, and mesh generation time from 26% to just 14%. Numerous smaller optimizations have also been made, slowly chipping away chunk generation time.

How it runs at speed = 16: https://discord.com/channels/239737791225790464/1181724575084593153/1268219356504916080

&meeseengine

This stress test on the Gamecube shows that mesh and lightmap generation have been successfully optimized, though world generation still needs improvement. Thanks to real-time heap defragmentation, the game never runs out of memory, even when moving at high speeds.

In case you're wondering, the Dreamcast's performance lags behind significantly, with mesh and lightmap generation running 30x slower. On the Dreamcast, the game maintains a smooth 30 FPS when standing still or walking within a small area, but rapid movement induces noticeable lag. Substantial optimization efforts are required to bring the Dreamcast's performance on par with the Gamecube.

Previous update: https://discord.com/channels/239737791225790464/404399251276169217/1259864487998259240