A 3-dimensional cellular automata engine written in C++, powered by Vulkan. It allows for viewing and customizing various cellular automata. It's fast and allows for rendering huge grids of cells using ray marching through a dense voxel octree. The automaton's states are updated on a set interval using compute shaders. This project currently works only for Windows.

To compile this code you need to have the LunarG Vulkan SDK installed.

The project is compiled simply using cmake:

cmake --build <build-directory-name>

When modifying shaders, they need to be recompiled. To compile shaders, first go into the shaders directory and run:

./compile.bat

Then, run an exporter tool (which is compiled alongside the main executable) that exports shader Spir-V code into an embeddable C++ source file:

cd <build-directory-name>
shader_export.exe

Keep in mind that currently this project requires your machine to support Vulkan 1.3 (which is subject for change in the future). All other dependencies are included in the deps subdirectory.

Press ` to open/close the GUI, F1 to lock/unlock the mouse. WASD for standard camera movement, Space to move up, LShift to move down, arrows or mouse for camera rotation.

• make the code look a bit nicer as it's pretty rough right now
• make the vulkan renderer a bit more low-end machine friendly
• more automaton presets or customization options
• more ways to customize cell coloring
• try packing two cells into one byte to halve memory usage and see how performance changes
• further optimize the fragment shader
• render automaton bounds so it's easier to see where it actually is
• maybe allow for non-power-of-two grid widths
• maybe support linux