I've always had a strong interest in software rendering. Voxels are, in this day, a "lost art", but were used frequently in older hit commercial games like the Commanche series and Outcast. Developing such a voxel rendering engine struck me as a very fascinating project, and so development began.

The main idea behind the renderer is to 'cast' out rays for each vertical strip of pixels on the screen. Each of these rays takes steps along the terrain, away from the camera, recording terrain height values and performing transforms to get screen coordinates to draw these vertical strips. A naive implementation of this can be fairly slow, so several optimizations and 'tricks' were included to improve rendering speeds without much quality degradation.

Overall, I'm happy with the result, but I think a different rendering algorithm and approach would be needed to get such a renderer at a fast enough speed for it to be practical for me to embark on developing a game with it.

Windows
Download Voxel Heightmap Renderer (.zip) [8.6 MB]

Linux
Download Voxel Heightmap Renderer (.tar.gz) [8.0 MB]