Hello, author here :)

I've been thinking of doing a series of blogs on the journey but .. it's been a journey, which is a lot to write about in full. In short, a few places where I've been able to prefer simplicity:

1. Allocators are all pretty much as simple as you can get. Most memory in the program is bump/arena allocated. There is a buddy-style heap allocator for things that are annoying to arena allocate (strings that can be edited, for example). I make heavy use of temp memory and freelists.

2. Containers are all very straight-forward, and it's definitely a feature. The example I always give here is std::map from C++. On paper, it looks great; it has very good looking properties. In practice, the implementation is a nightmare; it's slow, and has a comically large rebalancing-shaped performance cliff. My containers strive to be simple, with reasonable average and worst-case performance.

3. I wrote my own metaprogramming language instead of using C++ template metaprogramming. Writing an entire programming language sounds like the antithesis of simplicity, but in reality, having a good metaprogramming layer makes your life immeasurably easier in the long run. With strong metaprogramming capabilities, stuff like realtime debug UI and state serialization becomes nearly trivial. Once you start doing versioned data serialization in C++, you quickly realize you need a better compiler (see: protobuf, cap'n proto)

Hello, author here.

It's actually more efficient to do a hybrid approach, especially at high view distances. Rasterizing triangles is extremely fast, and is basically a perfect primary-ray intersection. Ethan Gore recently did some experiments with raytracing and said that for large scene volumes (his engine comfortably renders the entire 32-bit range, or 4B^3) it turns out to be faster to do raster for primary rays and raytrace shadows/GI.

I've always wondered why voxel engines tend to produce output that looks so blocky. I didn't realize it was a performance issue.

Still, games like "C&C: Red Alert" used voxels, but with a normal mapping that resulted in a much less blocky appearance. Are normal maps also a performance bottleneck?

It's way more performant though and looks fine so I see the reasoning why you would do rasterization instead

I'm curious, did you specifically choose Voxel Max over MagicaVoxel for any reason?

> I’ll have to try some of my assets out in this engine.

The asset loading is currently broken in Bonsai after a big rewrite, but it's the next thing on my list to fix! Would love to see your art :)

WTFPL (Do What The F*k You Want To Public License) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL

Author here.. that was kind of the point.

To be fair, most are.

Better than LGPL which prevents you from static linking even if you give attribution.