It is definitely possible but there's a lot of factors - support for your hard disk controller, graphics etc etc - there's some kexts that disable or emulate Intel specific extensions on AMD chips but it doesn't look like a common method, if you make the attempt I recommend aiming for a 'mavericks' install - has the GL4.1 support of later releases but has been out longer so you're more likely to find maverick specific quirks/patches online.
You're quite right - no Vulkan support from AMD on my hardware - GCN cards only (given the actual chip generations that fall either side of the line at least some of their restrictions are artificial rather than technical limitations of the hardware - but can't really blame them for pushing for newer gear - although 2+ years feels like a con on their part)
I'm guessing it's a common approach as it seemed so obvious - I had already worked on culling from one region type into another as my original design allowed regions to be embedded into others (so voxels inside a terrain allowing you to dig into the ground etc) but I thought one day "Well BSP schemes call for totally closed geometry to generate the tree - so I'm going to need some kind of portal if I want to combine them with other regions"
Then I felt like a total idiot because I was a few steps away from portals for nearly everything - an excellent tool - no engine should be without!
I'm still having issues with culling from inside voxel regions, IE a random shaped cave mouth with multiple cavities looking out onto a planet. I'm currently using a stencil style approach combined with culling against the viewing frustum but it could be optimized more.
Games such as space engineers and star-made must have a technique for this but it's hard to find any information - I'm guessing an algorithm that constructs geometry from 'holes' in the voxel chunks that's used for more optimal culling or portal generation.
I'm guessing it's safe to rule out raster based techniques for constructing portals as we'd be dealing with some expensive image processing that will require a g-buffer to be rendered first.
camera frustum with a boost from stenciling is ok for now but I have to render things such as tesselated patches at full resolution as it would be too expensive to process the image for each patch to see if it's totally masked off (patches could be heavily deformed by height maps etc) so I only get to discard fragments :\
EDIT : oh yes sorry! I read up on star citizen how they had external forces applied to objects inside ships and they were raving about what an achievement this was. I mean stop me if I'm wrong but in my setup, I just take the force vector from my ship and apply it to objects 'inside' right? I mean that's around 20 seconds of work - not seeing why they were jumping up and down about it.
Or I could go one step further and take the ship axis into account or even 'sample' forces at several points and blend the applied force vector between these points for any given object - have some artificial artificial gravity on a ring space station for example.
Or a blasted hole in the side of the ship could generate forces to 'suck' objects through the hole portal into outer-space - which would be very cool - surely some game already does that by now.
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