In development · a Claude assisted project
Space Voxelworking title
A persistent space MMO in the vein of EVE Online, built out of voxels and lit entirely by path tracing. Every planet, moon, asteroid and hull is made of blocks — and every photon that touches them is traced for real.
Runs on Linux with an NVIDIA RTX card, or Apple silicon from M3 up. There is no fallback renderer.
- Renderer
- Path traced, 100%
- Geometry
- Voxel, everything
- Universe
- Persistent, shared
- Status
- In development
Overview
No baked light. None.
Most games decide what the light does long before you arrive — shadows painted into textures, reflections faked with probes, bounce light approximated and stored. Space Voxel doesn't. Every frame is rendered by tracing light through the scene as it actually is, which is why an engine burn lights the hull beside it, and why the dark side of a world is genuinely, uncooperatively dark.
It is also, deliberately, made of blocks. Voxels give the universe real substance instead of a skybox with props in front of it, and they give the path tracer clean geometry to bounce light off.
Everything is voxels
Planets, moons, asteroid belts and the ships flying between them are all built from the same block grid. Nothing is a painted backdrop.
Light does the work
No lightmaps, no reflection probes, no screen space tricks. The renderer traces paths every frame, so what you see is what the physics says.
Somewhere to go
Ringed giants, cratered moons, stations and asteroid fields — with real distance between them. Space is mostly empty, and the game is honest about that.
Gallery
Captured in engine.
No touch ups, no bullshots. This is the renderer running.
Requirements
You need ray tracing silicon.
Path tracing every frame is expensive, and there is no rasterised fallback to drop down to — the lighting is the entire point of the project. That makes the hardware list short and unusually strict.
Platform 01
Linux
- NVIDIA RTX series GPU. The RT cores are doing the tracing — a card without them will not run the game at all.
- Any modern distribution, with the proprietary NVIDIA driver installed.
- More VRAM buys you more resolution and a cleaner image.
Platform 02
macOS
- Apple silicon, M3 or newer. M3 was the first generation with hardware ray tracing, so M1 and M2 are out.
- MacBook — this is where it has been built and tested.
- M3 Pro, Max and later chips have more headroom, and it shows.
No Windows build, and no software fallback. Integrated graphics, older GeForce cards and Intel Macs cannot run it. This is a limitation of the renderer rather than a decision about who gets to play, and it may change — but not soon.
Status
Not finished. Not secret.
Space Voxel is in active development and there is no public build yet. It lives here at space.fantasy.zone, alongside the other things being built over on fantasy.zone.
Contact
Questions? Ask away.
Whether your hardware will run it, how it's coming along, or anything else — send an email and it'll get read.