// the find
scallyw4g/bonsai
The procedural generation voxel engine
Bonsai is a single-author C voxel engine with planetary-scale world support and GPU-based procedural terrain generation. It's a serious from-scratch project — custom allocator, custom job system, custom UI framework, basically no external dependencies. Aimed at developers who want to study or extend a real voxel engine, not pull in a library.
GPU-driven terrain generation via GLSL shaders is the right call — it offloads the expensive noise evaluation to the GPU and lets users write arbitrary terrain logic without touching the engine. The built-in multithreaded profiler with call-graph tracing and context-switch tracking is unusually good for a solo project; most engines bolt this on late or skip it entirely. Hot-reloading of both shaders and game code during development is a genuine productivity feature, not a toy. The deferred rendering pipeline with SSAO, bloom, and order-independent transparency is legitimately complete for a voxel engine.
Still in 2.0.0-alpha with a public roadmap issue listing significant unfinished ports — the world generator and editor rewrites aren't stable, so you'd be building on shifting ground. Windows and Linux only, no macOS; that's a real gap if your team is mixed. The 'written completely from scratch' philosophy means you own every bug in every layer — custom allocator, custom UI, custom everything. That's a feature for learning but a liability for shipping. Documentation appears to live in a handful of markdown files; the gap between 'pre-built binaries' and 'understand the architecture' is large with no clear bridge.