🇬🇧 | 🇷🇺
Voxel engine built from scratch in Swift + Metal for Apple Silicon
An experiment in seeing how far you can push a single M-series chip with zero external dependencies
Architecture · Performance · Shaders · Chunk System · Changelog
- Single-pass deferred rendering optimized for Apple Silicon GPU
- PBR Cook-Torrance lighting (GGX + Smith + Schlick)
- G-Buffer stored entirely in on-chip tile memory — never hits DRAM
- 16 animated point lights + directional sun + hemispherical ambient
- Bloom post-processing (Kawase blur, 4 mip levels)
- ACES filmic tone mapping
- Atmospheric distance + height fog
- Water with forward transparency
- 16×16×16 voxel chunks, view distance 64 chunks (1,024 blocks)
- Up to 100,000 loaded chunks, 4,500 rendered per frame
- GPU compute terrain generation — Perlin noise, 10–50× faster than CPU
- 6 biomes with smooth blending: Ocean, Plains, Forest, Desert, Mountains, Tundra
- 27 block types with PBR properties (roughness, metallic, emission, transparency)
- Cave carving and tree placement
- Greedy meshing — merges adjacent faces into larger quads
- 16-byte packed vertex format (vs 48 naive)
- Mega-buffer architecture: 128 MB vertex + 64 MB index, single bind per frame
- Indirect Command Buffer: 4,500 draws → 1 GPU command
- 4-level LOD system (step 1/2/4/8 based on distance)
- Frustum culling with caching
- Triple buffering (3 frames in-flight)
- 8,192 GPU-simulated particles (compute shader)
- Bloom (Kawase 5-tap/9-tap, 4 mip cascade)
- Vignette
- Prepared
NeuralEngine/module for CoreML / ANE integration - Planned: ML upscaling, denoising, LOD prediction
- Full details →
git clone https://github.com/plagness/Metalcraft.git
cd Metalcraft
open VoxelEngine.xcodeproj
# Cmd+R to build and runOr regenerate with XcodeGen:
brew install xcodegen
xcodegen generate
open VoxelEngine.xcodeproj| Key | Action |
|---|---|
W A S D |
Move |
Mouse |
Look around |
Space |
Up |
Shift |
Down |
Tab |
Sprint (5×) |
Scroll |
Adjust speed |
Esc |
Toggle cursor lock |
| Minimum | |
|---|---|
| OS | macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) |
| Hardware | Apple Silicon (M1+) |
| GPU | Metal GPU Family Apple 7+ |
| Xcode | 15.0+ |
| Swift | 5.9 |
⚠️ Intel Macs are not supported — requires Apple Silicon unified memory.
Metal · MetalKit · simd · CoreGraphics · CoreText · Cocoa · QuartzCore · Foundation
Zero external dependencies. No SPM. No CocoaPods. No Carthage.
Metalcraft/
├── VoxelEngine/
│ ├── App/ Entry point, window, view controller
│ ├── Core/ Time tracking
│ ├── Input/ Keyboard + mouse FPS controls
│ ├── Math/ Noise, frustum culling
│ ├── Renderer/ Metal renderer, camera, mega-buffer allocator
│ ├── Compute/ GPU terrain generation
│ ├── Voxel/ Chunks, block types, greedy mesher, water
│ ├── Debug/ FPS overlay
│ ├── Shaders/
│ │ ├── Common/ ShaderTypes.h (Swift↔Metal bridging)
│ │ ├── Deferred/ G-Buffer + PBR lighting
│ │ ├── Transparency/ Water forward pass
│ │ ├── Particles/ GPU compute + billboard render
│ │ ├── PostProcess/ Bloom, tone mapping
│ │ ├── Voxel/ GPU terrain compute
│ │ └── Utility/ Fullscreen triangle
│ ├── NeuralEngine/ [Planned] CoreML / ANE
│ └── ECS/ [Planned] Entity-Component-System
├── docs/ Technical documentation
├── Screenshots/ Build screenshots
├── project.yml XcodeGen definition
└── VoxelEngine.xcodeproj Ready to build
- Neural Engine / CoreML (ANE upscaling, denoising)
- Entity-Component-System
- Spatial audio
- Shadow mapping (cascaded)
- Texture atlas
- Ray tracing (Metal RT API)
- World persistence
- Volumetric fog & clouds
- Architecture — render pipeline, deferred rendering, tile memory
- Performance — metrics, benchmarks, bandwidth analysis
- Shaders — Metal shaders, PBR, bloom, particles
- Chunk System — mega-buffer, ICB, greedy meshing, LOD
- Neural Engine — CoreML / ANE integration plans
Copyright 2026 plagness
Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0
See LICENSE for full text.