Powerful Bonsai: A Voxel Engine, From Scratch

Bonsai is a voxel engine in a pot. It's been tended to with love and care over the years. It started out as a learning excercise, and has taught me the value of simplicity.

Bonsai supports massive worlds. The current version supports a maximum world size of ~1 billion blocks, cubed. At one block per meter, that's the distance from earth to the moon, 2600 times, in every direction. The view distance is the entire world, all the time. Yes, you read that right. In Bonsai, you can see in a straight line from Jupiter to the sun.

Bonsai terrain generation is fully procedural, and user configurable. Terrain is generated on the GPU using regular glsl shaders. Anything you can do in a shader, you can do in a Bonsai terrain generator.

The current version is 2.0.0-prealpha-rc0, which can be found by joining the Discord. This version is a large rewrite of several core systems, including the world generation, editor and parts of the renderer.

In its current state, the engine is effectively a terrain generator and editor. For details on remaing work, see Roadmap to v2.0.0.

Bonsai, and nearly all it's dependencies, are written completely from scratch. One external dependency is the C runtime library for program startup. There is a back-burner task to remove the CRT entirely, athough it's unclear when/if anyone will ever get around to it.

The only external requirements to build Bonsai are clang++ (>= version 18.1) and a few appropriate system headers.

Grab pre-built binaries & assets from the Latest Releases for your platform of your choice (as long as your platform of choice is Windows or Linux) ;)

[ ] SSR : https://lettier.github.io/3d-game-shaders-for-beginners/screen-space-reflection.html

[ ] Screen-space lines : https://mattdesl.svbtle.com/drawing-lines-is-hard

Source: HackerNews