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New Voxel Engine Reveal - Crystal Islands Experiment

John Lin
Demos
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2021–2025 score 3
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN cites it as a showcase of one of the best voxel engines, impressive for its detail and smoothness.

John Lin reveals a rewritten voxel engine demonstrated in a Crystal Islands scene, with much finer voxel detail, fast collision, fracture and path-traced global illumination.

“Crystal Island looks amazingly detailed and smooth.” (HN, 2025)

2 strong recommendations · 2 citations · Demos · partly dated

4 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@junon Sep 2021 Strongly recommends
on HN thread The Perfect Voxel Engine
For reference, this is John Lin who posts semi-frequent devlogs[0] of his voxel engine progress - an engine that is, in my opinion, one of the best voxel engines in existence rivaled only by Dennis Gustafsson's "Teardown" voxel engine. [0] [this video]
Devlogs of one of the best voxel engines in existence

Citations, criticism and jokes

@Crestwave May 2024 Cites it
on HN thread The Perfect Voxel Engine (2021)
Hm, do you have a source for that? It's possible that you're mixing it up with his decision to shelf "micro-voxels" in favor of the traditional, chunkier voxel art style. [this video] (see pinned comment)
Creator's decision to shelve micro-voxels

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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