Other techniques

as mentioned previously we decided on using simple 3d textures as a storage medium, However we did try other methods.

• SVO (sparse voxel octree) storage and traversal. while implementing this we found the complexity to be too great for our scope, especially for terrain manipulation, rendering was partly implemented by me but for a couple different test scenarios we found that simple grid traversal was also actually faster, thus we decided to scrap this idea.

• Sparse grid storage/ traversal, similarly to SVO's this idea was scrapped because for our use cases it did not meet our performance criteria. While simpler to integrate with other systems than SVOs it was still considered to be over scope.

Sparse grid rendering:

Note: while this looks great, there is no support for pointlights here plus peformance did not meet our hard 30fps and soft 60fps target for the ps5. Both of these where unfortunately dealbreakers.

Early attempt at svo traversal: