So my Global Illumination experiment made some more progress. The technology demo is slowly evolving into an actual game. And the hero of this game might very well be a spelunking rocket. Maybe I should call the game Spelunking Rocket? It currently has a single Google hit, so it should be easy to find online.
So what you see in the video is a rocket flying through a voxel world that is defined by a 3-octave simplex noise function. I sample one noise field to determine block/empty space, and sample another noise field to determine the hue. Notice how the rocket exhaust illuminates the scenery, both directly and indirectly via light bouncing off a wall. Also, the exhaust particles collide with the world, and act as light sources for my photon mapper.
In the left corner an instrument that combines attitude-indication (where is the rocket's nose pointing?) with a compass. Flying towards the little circle on the perimeter will make you go in the +X direction, where the first coordinate increases. The attitude indicator helps you to right the rocket, although there is also an autopilot function mapped on the gamepad that does this automatically using PID controllers.
Still to do are game play objectives. I was considering putting fuel drops in the world, and make them more rare as you move further away from launch position. Farthest voyage wins the leader board?
For technical challenges, there is still the issue of moving away from AVX2 which is not widely supported on current hardware. A possibility would be doing GPGPU. Possible APIs are OpenCL, OpenGL4.3 Compute Shaders, CUDA, Apple Metal. CUDA is too proprietary, as is Metal. OpenGL4.3 support is horrible: I don't think a single Macintosh can do this?