Terrain rendering in fewer than 20 lines of code
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderI stumbled upon this very good explanation (and demo) of the Comanche Voxel 2.5D engine reimplemented in JS and thought it might interest some HNers. I did not had the pleasure to play Comanche though I have fond memories of playing Apache in 1996. I've been investigating the terrain generation / rendering quite a bit for the past ten days and have started to play with https://threejs.org/, webgl and shaders, the current result (https://twitter.com/maxmre/status/933860624773283842) is quite humbling when I see…
Props for a great readme as well. I wish more open source included at least a screenshot so you can see what it actually is.
It's really nice when something sells itself in being written in less than X lines of code and it's actually nice/simple code rather than weirdly abbreviated/overly dense stuff.
This is very neat. I miss the era when novel and elegant algorithms like this delivered magical experiences. This could just be from getting old, but I feel like games have lost the magic they had when availability of hardware resources was limited. Back in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s we saw games push the medium forward practically every year, and certainly every generation. Developers squeezed all the performance they could from the hardware, using novel techniques and pure…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 4
- Total points
- 2233
- Total comments
- 373
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017-09-26 | Show HN: Voxel Space – terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code | s-macke | 6 | 2 |
| 2017-11-19 | Terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code | davidbarker | 3 | 0 |
| 2017-11-24 | Terrain rendering in fewer than 20 lines of codeFirst breakout · Best thread | blaze33 | 793 | 93 |
| 2020-01-02 | Commanche's Voxel-Space terrain rendering (1992) | netgusto | 2 | 0 |
| 2020-01-03 | Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code | netgusto | 720 | 116 |
| 2021-03-30 | Voxel Space: Comanche's terrain rendering in less than 20 lines of code (2020)Hall induction | danbolt | 366 | 71 |
| 2022-12-01 | Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code | Audiophilip | 1 | 0 |
| 2023-10-28 | VoxelSpace – Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code | peter_d_sherman | 3 | 2 |
| 2025-01-03 | VoxelSpace: Terrain rendering algorithm in less than 20 lines of code (2020)Latest 20+ point return | lnyan | 339 | 89 |