Voxel Space Demo - Bits and Bytes (Ep. 4)

By Colin Hoad | Apr 23, 2024
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In this episode of Bits and Bytes, I take a look at Chris Bradburne's incredible Voxel Landspace demo, which does an impressive job of rendering a 3dimensional landscape using smacke's original Voxel Space algorithm. Except Chris has done so on a BBC Micro with no extra hardware, and all written in 6502 assembly code!


Voxels are a very clever way of rendering a 3D space by utilising 2D colour and texture maps to generate a three dimensional space drawn with vertical lines. It's a fiendishly clever algorithm that, remarkably, doesn't require a whole lot of code to produce (at least, not in higher level languages). Chris neverthless does an expert job of converting this to 6502 assembly code to produce a truly remarkable feat on a humble Beeb.


If you're interested in pursuing Chris' work further, check out the links below.


Links:

Chris Bradburne's Beeb Voxel Space demo: https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?t=28988

The original Voxel Space source algorithm from smacke: https://github.com/s</i>macke/VoxelSpace