From Raymarching to Conemarching - FRACTAL GLIDE Devlog 1

In this devlog, I showcase my cone marching implementation and its inclusion in my game. I also discuss some VFX additions and new gameplay mechanics.

The game has now been released!

Resources:

Music:

[wagbagsag]

The cool thing about fractals is that they have texture at every scale. I think it would be really cool if you could shrink your player and fly into the infinite detail

[Mega-]

This is a very impressive project. I am really interested in Raymarching in a Unity context. But there are not many resources out there. Finding this and all the resources you provide made me very happy :)

[vlad._dev]

Really cool stuff so far. Definitely looking forward to seeing the direction you take this project in.

[dottedboxguy]

man i love yt for recommending me unknown stuff like this, i love it. amazing work !

[noahtell]

Oh cool someone actually thought of this. I had a similar idea some years ago but called it sphere marching. Seems to not be the same. For my idea, you would calculate a sphere as a march step in some direction and rasterize and progress any fragment on within the perceived circle of the sphere.

The tricky part would be selecting the direction/pixel to continue merging as well as memory handling on the GPU.

Considering that the real bottleneck of raymarching is rays passing and running in parallel with the surfaces of the scene. I suspect that opting for spheres that are as far way from parallel surfaces as possible would greatly speed up closer rays as they would ride in parallel to the surface of the sphere. However, now the new bottleneck becomes marching rays along creases. 🤷‍♀

[quinn]

this is awesome! I did a project a little while back with raymarching and mandelbulbs, and you used some really cool features I didn't think about. I'll have to do some tweaking if I revisit that project.

[josiahjack]

Still waiting for that cone marching tutorial. Hope you haven't forgotten how cool that'd be

[ehwored]

Really nice project, and the video is really well made too

[DeemoDev]

Great video! The concept of conemarching seems like a natural evolution of raymarching since it optimizes very obvious issues of checking every pixel.
I'm wondering if you ran into any downsides of conemarching whilst or after implementing it.

[noahtell]

I do feel like building signed distance function (SDF) in a bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) along with fractals and other procedural algorithms, plausibly neural networks for textures could be an actual breakthrough in game development. It could create a dynamically changing world with the prospect of a very simple collision algorithm through the SDF.

The awkward thing is the dilemma between using minus operators or not. It is useful for splitting objects, but probably a nightmare by the ambiguity it adds to shape representations. If one could create an algorithm to switch between minus and union operators for the same shape, that would be gold.

[denielalain]

helo!
good video, but i think you have overlooked something at 3:34, which i would like to point out. i think camera tilting is important. if you add camera tilting rotation for turns of right and left too, and also add tilting to the player character itself while turning at these directions, it will be much more vivid, and fun to play. the arm lifting present already at these turns is perfect, but you can still add tilting sideways while turning right and left

[AllExistence]

At such speeds, the ray distance you use is simply not enough.

[SeanStClair-crjl]

This looks amazing. It's an odd thing to request, but, I wonder if actually limiting the flying in some what would actually make it feel even more impactful when you are flying? Something about "on-the-ground life" really makes flight seem that much more special. Like this totally reminds me of Minecraft elytra flying (though even better), and one thing that makes that so amazing is that it's not a trivial thing to stay in the air.

[rmt]

I hope you do make the conemarching tutorial!

[Polygarden]

Great video! I have unintentionally rendered clouds in a very similar way. First you do a lowres pass rendering the boundaries and from this lowres pass you start your refining rays. You could do this over and over again with multiple passes. Interestingly this works also in vertex shaders. (so you could even define geometry boundaries by ray-marching through vertices, which can act as your lowres buffer)

[Yggdrzyl]

The background music in the first half is VERY loud, on my phone it makes it painful to even keep the sound on.

[crackedemerald]

Neat idea: good for a shorts if it isn't too much work. Scale the player (or world, whichever is easier) so they're always the same distance appart. Make the world smaller, when further away. And bigger, when closer.

[gakman]

subscribed for the cone marching video

[rmschindler]

now imagine that you can shrink or grow your flying character by an order of magnitude

[laycookie-fi]

Love this video, but really hoped that you would talk a little more about how cone marching works, because I didn’t really get it from the 2 pictures you have shown us.