godot_voxel VS Terraforming

Don't do this, CSG is unoptimized. Use this.

Take a look at https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel, which would be a great starting point that you could build game mechanics on top of.

https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel https://voxel-tools.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Currently all our major C++ based number crunching is in the GDAL. We haven't had to make in-house GDExtensions or Modules, yet. But we do also use Godot Voxel. Both are good examples of where you'd want more native speed.

I originally ported Qodot to an engine module that required people to compile their own engine (like godot-voxel) but users were turned away at this first roadblock.

I really wanted to use it but sadly it might be hard to export projects done with it cuz it's not a gdextension yet https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel/issues/333 still possible but i think you gotta compile something.

If you aren't adverse to doing a custom editor build you could add https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel

To give some practical examples. At my day job we use GDAL (a C++ geospatial data processing library) and Zylann's Godot Voxel (a C++ engine Module) https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel

The master branch of this one will also build as a GDExtension for Windows. This one is successfully building regularly, but structured different than the rest of the GDExtensions I've seen. I haven't played with this project too much yet, but it's an insanely powerful module/extension: https://github.com/Zylann/godot_voxel

Well Sebastian Lague puts his code on Github https://github.com/SebLague/Terraforming so you have a cheat sheet if you ever get stuck.

On marching cubes, there is the original paper you could read up on if you prefer reading or a wonderful video by Sebastian Lague about the process. Sebastian also has a GitHub page with his completed project, though it is made with Unity, so you'd have to port it over.

I started with sebastian lague's infinite terrain tutorial. It was cool but the results were plain. It didn't cover caves or how to have overhangs, or mountain ridges, or terraces, erosion, etc. That's how I came across marching cubes, it seemed like marching cubes was required for some of these things and I got the impression I would need to know about it (or something about using 3d noise?) to move forward. Someone told me about his marching cubes video, and I watched that. It didn't really get deep into what he did like in the landmass tutorial. I also watched his terraforming video just to see if all of this would made more sense to me after, but it didn't. So I checked the descriptions of his videos and found a few interesting links. One was from 1987and had to do with Marching Cubes use in the medical field and MR scans and stuff. It went over my head. There was this paper from 1994, which is supposedly a basic explanation of marching cubes, but it too went over my head. Finally, there was this link to the first chapter in Nvidia's GPU Gems 3, which tackled procedural generation with marching cubes running on the GPU? It also went over my head. I found this Unity forum post which has somebody attempting to implement the GPU Gems stuff in Unity, and the person seems to had made some pretty significant progress on it, but it looks like life things got in the way, as it does, and so they haven't posted in that thread since 2014. They didn't post a GitHub repo or anything either. Speaking of repos, I also opened up sebastian lagues GitHub repos for his marching cubes video and for his terraforming video to find something interesting and, while the projects were interesting to look at, it would be a lie to say I actually learned anything by opening them up and looking at them, which was extrememly disappointing. I watched his erosion video too, but when I opened the repo and tried to generate a map, it said it was above some 65555 limit and wouldn't generate anything but a flat plane, so I've been ignoring that one entirely for now. I don't really know where to go from here, and I feel like I've been all across the internet and have nothing to show for it.. I'm about to read these two documents since they were linked in sebastian lagues erosion video description, but I can already tell these will, yet again, go over my head.

Terrafroming: https://github.com/SebLague/Terraforming