This repo is the home of the Gvox library

.gvox is a meta-format that allows for several voxel data structures to co-exist within a single file.

Gvox, the General voxel format translation library, is what ties it all together, supplying parsing, conversion and serialization mechanisms to the consumer.

Goals

• Gvox should be accessible to everyone making a voxel engine, including but not limited to

  • People who are targeting the Web, using Rust or other WASM compatible languages
  • People using any language that has simple C bindability, such as ZIG, C++, Java and many more

  This is why the library uses a C99 interface, and I plan on creating bindings for as many projects that want it (Open an issue on GitHub, and we can work together!)

• Gvox should be extremely extensible, so anyone can create their own formats that are then automatically convertible to any of the existing formats supported by GVOX!

• Gvox should NOT have an internal intermediary data representation (such as a managed flat array of voxels), so that there is no wasted memory consumption during translation

• Gvox should be multi-threadable

• Gvox should allow for at least 2D, 3D, and 4D grids

Building

For now, you must have the following things installed to build the repository

• A C++ compiler
• CMake (3.21 or higher)
• Ninja build
• vcpkg (plus the VCPKG_ROOT environment variable)

Once you have these things installed, you should be able to build just by running these commands in the root directory of the repository

Windows

cmake --preset=cl-x86_64-windows-msvc
cmake --build --preset=cl-x86_64-windows-msvc-debug

Linux

cmake --preset=gcc-x86_64-linux-gnu
cmake --build --preset=gcc-x86_64-linux-gnu-debug

WASM

Building for WASM is a little more involved. There are two methods, the Wasi SDK or Emscripten.

Wasi SDK

Install the Wasi SDK from here. For Windows, that means downloading the MinGW build of it, and adding the environment variable WASI_SDK_PATH to be the extracted folder containing bin/ lib/ and share/.

TODO: when the library has any dependencies, it must be the case that a Wasi community triplet is added to vcpkg

Once that's done and your environment is successfully refreshed in your terminal - you can run CMake normally:

cmake --preset=wasi-wasm32-unknown-unknown
cmake --build --preset=wasi-wasm32-unknown-unknown-debug

Emscripten

Install emscripten by following the instructions on their website. (On Windows, you may need to add the EMSDK environment variable manually, because I don't know a better way).

Again, once your environment is successfully refreshed, you can just run CMake normally:

cmake --preset=emscripten-wasm32-unknown-unknown
cmake --build --preset=emscripten-wasm32-unknown-unknown-debug

The plan in the future is to have language bindings accessible to as many languages I can.