Marble Marcher - A Fractal Physics Game
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN recommends it as a striking example of rendering with distance-estimated fractals and non-standard graphics approaches.
What it is
A demo of Marble Marcher, a game using a fractal physics engine and fully procedural ray-marched rendering. The player rolls a marble through shifting fractal levels.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2020 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends gitgud · 2020-05 · on “Show HN: Fractal garden – realtime 3D fractal explorer in the browser”
This is incredible! If you like this you might also like [1] Marble Marcher , amazing how much detail can be rendered using fractals [1] [this video] (Video)
Recommends CyborgCabbage · 2022-10 · on “Ask HN: What piece of code/codebase blew your mind when you saw it?”
He has a YouTube channel as well: [LINK] Also you may like Marble Marcher made by Code Parade, it's a game that uses a similar approach to rendering: [this video]
Cites FrostKiwi · 2024-11 · on “AAA – Analytical Anti-Aliasing”
True, this is something I struggled with writing and ended up with just a small note commenting that this is not widely applicable. Will clarify more in coming posts. It's all incredibly context specific. The reason for this order, is that you can very much can use all these approaches (SSAA, FXAA, MSAA etc.) for rendering simpler shapes and HUDs. So going through them, where these approaches break down and when it does make sense to go the extra mile with SDFs. Still, non-standard rendering approaches are very much a thing [1] and I could see setups like [2] be used in scientific particle visualizations. [1] [this video] [2] [LINK]