Vanta🅱️lock

Table of contents

• Build and run the project
• Usage guide
  • Common problems
  • Keybinds
• Cool aspects of the project
• Acknowledgments

Build and run the project

Nix users

Activate the project's flake to set up the environment and all dependencies. For direnv users, the .envrc is set up to use the flake by default.

Then simply use any scripts from the justfile:

1. just to compile and run the debug binary (slow)
2. just run-fast to compile and run the release binary (fast)

Other users

Compiling the project requires Rust 1.88 or newer.

• A rust-toolchain.toml is provided to ensure this for any users using rustup will automatically run with this version.
• Any other installation method will have to manually ensure the version 1.88 or newer.

Assuming rust is properly setup, cargo can be used like any standard Rust project:

• Run cargo run --release to compile and run in release mode (higher fps, optimized compilation)
• Run cargo run to compile and run in debug mode (lower FPS, debug tracing, simplified compilation)

Usage guide

Common problems

1. Mouse can be unlocked with Escape
2. Shadows have very low render distance of 32 voxels and also have other noticable issues.

Keybinds

Key(s)	Action
Escape	Toggle "pause" (locks/unlocks cursor, no real pause currently)
W	Move forward
S	Move backward
A	Move left
D	Move right
Left Shift	Move faster
Mouse Left	Break voxel
Mouse right	Place voxel
T	Switch terrain generator (only applies to new chunks that generate e.g. from moving)
F1 or 1	Toggle diagnostics UI (FPS, vert count, coordinates)
F2 or 2	Toggle opaque wireframe mode
F3 or 3	Toggle chunk borders

Cool aspects of the project

Computer graphics technical details

1. "Vertex pulling." Each group of 6 vertices that make up a face share a single 32 bit float in a GPU buffer.
2. Global illumination via the "Sun" with directional lighting, and a shadow pass that adds (somewhat scuffed) shadows
3. Approximate ambient occlusion based on nearby voxels to a vertex.
4. Full transparency support via a separate render pass.
5. Custom UI implementation (with taffy for computing flexbox layouts and glyphon for text heavylifting)
6. Custom fog and sky shaders that define the sky and horizon blending with sun/moon.
7. Convenient texture and voxel definition loading enabling swapping voxel textures easily in the assets/shared/block folder.
8. Water vertices "wave" up and down if you look at them closer

General engine technical details

1. Chunk loading uses multi-threaded compute pooling
2. ECS architecture for data-oriented design of the entire system
3. Rendering and simulation run in parallel using a binary semaphore