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Geometric Algorithms for Translucency Sorting in Minecraft [pdf]

25 pointsby HeliumHydride12/18/20254 commentsview on HN

Comments

ANighRaisintoday at 10:08 PM

Binary Space partitioning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning) is an elegant algorithm that solves this issue. This has fallen out of popularity due to the invention of the depth buffer and the power of modern GPUs, but it was used in DOOM and Quake.

This technique, due to the unique limitation of the children's drag-and-drop coding platform, Scratch, has made it proliferate in the 3D community. https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/1203675921 is an example of such a project.

show 2 replies
jacobp100today at 9:17 PM

I had a blog post on something similar (but less sophisticated)

https://jacobdoescode.com/2025/05/18/precomputing-transparen...

gatanetoday at 9:33 PM

This looks interesting! Thanks for sharing it, wonder if anyone else has related content.