Really impressive work. He covers it at the end, but being able to create tunnels into terrain, walk through them and then make the terrain disappear. Or make holes in the ground and move them around to suck items in. Or dynamically erase or add to any terrain in real time. A lot of interesting gameplay opportunities here and surprisingly performant!

This is super cool, and I like the no-nonsense presentation.

I'm curious to know where he takes the gameplay. He mentions it being digging-focused, and also mentions the digging/terrain deformation aspects in other games like No Man's Sky are relatively low-fidelity. I wonder what a "high-fidelity digging game" looks like (:

Aside, if I may self-plug: I wrote a small series on SDFs, for those who might be interested[1]. I'm also using them in my game engine (though it's 2D, for me).

[1]

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-1/

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-2/

* https://festina-lente-productions.com/articles/sdfs-3/

The physics engine mentioned towards the end, Jolt Physics [0] is used in the frankly blockbuster games Horizon: Forbidden West and Death Stranding 2 and yet opens its description with

> Why create yet another physics engine? Firstly, it has been a personal learning project.

which is really rather wonderful and inspiring to see.

[0] https://github.com/jrouwe/JoltPhysics

Great video. A new game engine powered by SDFs is the sort of thing I want to find out about. Not the next game in a long running franchise that looks the same as all the others that preceded it. One for the from-scratch game dev nerds like myself!

Go Mike! Been seeing his progress for a while on Bluesky, I knew exactly (and who) what this was when I saw it on HN.

I was rendering-curious when we overlapped together at Figma. Mike was super patient and giving with his time, answering all my dumb questions and aiding with my Maker Week projects. Excited to see him take on something so ambitious next.

Dreams on PS4 had an SDF modeler, but I’m not sure if the runtime was SDF. Now that I think about it, the rendering engine had a Gaussian splat look to it years before that paper.

Using layers with settings about which SDFs interact with which layers for operations seems interesting. Like put trees in a layer and then have an axe that can negatively deform the trees but not the ground layer or something. Or a predator layer that can absorb things in the prey layer. Haven't really thought through.

GameGlobe from Haptico and Square Enix, the engine of which also powered Project Spark from Microsoft, also used an SDF engine. Former colleagues of mine built the tech in Copenhagen and I remember getting a super impressive demo back then. This was the first time I heard of SDFs.

I wonder if ReLU fields could help reduce cache grid resolution while improving reconstruction precision? See https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.10824

really cool! CSG: The Game!

Dang! Very nice!

Such impressive demos and great explanations in the video. Mike, if you're reading this, keep making videos!

Almost every 3D game uses textured polygons almost everywhere (except sometimes for fog or clouds), so this SDF engine is nice to see.

However, he doesn't mention animations, especially skeletal animations. Those tend to work poorly or not at all without polygons. PS4 Dreams, another SDF engine, also had strong limitations with regards to animation. I hope he can figure something out, though perhaps his game project doesn't need animation anyway.