Been experimenting a bit more with Fractal Worlds; I’ve added a light gamification / exploration layer where you have to hunt down objectives hidden inside the fractal. Right now it’s an endless loop, but I’m thinking about turning it into a progression system where you unlock new fractal worlds one by one.
Also started adding some atmospheric audio, and I’ll keep layering in more ambient loops and one-shots. Parallel to that, I’m playing with audio-reactive fractal parameters.
I like those controls better because every mouse movement moves the camera precisely how I want as much as I want, whereas the fly controls keep turning continuously until the mouse is centered again, making it difficult to stop the camera without perfectly centering the mouse.
Here’s a my favorite room I’ve found so far. I’m not sure where exactly it is (displaying coordinates on screen could help people map them out), but basically go downward spiraling at an angle, and you might hit it. In the huge room, there’s a massive cube, and if you go into the cube there is a space full of cubic objects to explore:
With the other camera controls, I’d be able to keep the view more steady and not moving so much for the videos.
In this huge room, the emissive light planes light up the surfaces up wonderfully once in a while too:
A gamification idea is you could put some sort of special objects in these rooms, like relics or monoliths of some sort, that people can find and collect. For example the relic/monolith/object could be sentient AI figure (not humanoid), perhaps as the source of the emitting light planes in that particular world.
I’ve been working on Fractal Worlds v2, and it’s basically a rewrite of the current project.
The biggest change is that v2 now uses several compute passes instead of the old setup. I also reworked the raymarching with enhanced sphere tracing (https://kev.town/raymarching/media/enhanced_sphere_tracing.pdf), which gave me better stability and a bunch of other improvements.
On top of that added lower-resolution raymarching and I’m currently experimenting with reconstruction and temporal reprojection inspired by Timothy Lottes’ GPU Unchained talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzpLWzGvFK4)
This is really impressive. Real time fractal raymarching in the browser is not easy, especially when you start letting users fly through the space interactively.
The movement feels very smooth and the parameter randomization is a nice touch because it makes exploration feel more like discovering new structures instead of just looking at a static fractal. WebGPU seems like a great fit for this kind of workload.
Also interesting to see how far browser rendering has come. Things like this used to require heavy native applications or offline rendering, and now they can run interactively in a tab.
Great work on the rewrite. It’s always cool seeing experimental graphics projects like this pushed into real time exploration.
