Infinite explorable underwater world created using Rust and WGPU using marching cubes and 3D perlin noise populated with 3D boids.

Controls

  • Change pitch: WASD or arrow keys
  • Roll: Q/E or pgUp/pgDown
  • Speed up: space
  • Slow down: control
  • Reset submarine: R or enter

Features

GitHub: https://github.com/LelsersLasers/UnderwaterWorld

The main build target was WASM and WebGL, meaning I did not have access to any parallelism/threading or compute shaders. This made performance a key concern, especially with the generation of the world/chunks and the fish.

  • Performance optimizations
    • Chunks/World
      • Each chunk is built one at a time and is split over multiple frames to keep the frame rate high
      • To hide the chunk generation, the chunks to build are sorted:
        1. If they are in the view frustum
        2. If they are in the direction that the sub is facing
        3. Distance to sub but with a little extra prio to chunks with a lower Z value (because they are more likely to be not blank)
      • After collecting the perlin noise values for a chunk, if the chunk will be blank, it skips trying to create the mesh and it will skipped for rendering
      • Built chunk models are stored and sent to the GPU in a more compact way using index buffers
      • Despite the fact that chunks take up 16x16x16 voxels, they are built out of 12x12x12 voxels
      • When trying to render the chunks, it will only sent chunks that in the view frustum to the GPU
      • vertex order is designed for backface culling
    • Boids
      • Index buffer + backface culling for models
      • Spatial partitioning used to find boids that are close to each other instead of iterating through all boids
      • If boids get too far from a point, they are teleported to the opposite side
        • The center point is a space in the direction the sub is facing, as there is no point in having the boids be far away from the sub or behind the sub
  • Other features
    • Marching cubes with linear interpolation based on the isosurface values
    • 3D multi-octave perlin noise to generate infinite terrain
    • Boids
      • Wall avoidance using raycasting
    • Shader effects:
      • Fog: further away objects fade into the sea
      • Darker/deeper: the deeper you go, the darker the fog/water color gets
      • The fish have a swimming animation that moves some of their vertices left and right using a sine wave
      • The sub has a light that illuminates the direction it is facing

Assets

Resources

Download

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Click download now to get access to the following files:

Underwater World - Windows Build.exe 10 MB
Underwater World - Linux and Mac Build 18 MB
Underwater World - Web Build.zip 2 MB
Underwater World - Full Source Code.zip 8 MB

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