We had some questions in chat about how performant this is. Is this something that would chunk the frame rate as it is right now?
TL;DRPerformance is a constant concern because 3D volumetrics and their lighting are costly, which is why lights are mostly static and the gas cloud isn't animated, since VDB is a static format.
Implementation has been something we have to keep an eye on, because rendering 3D volumetrics in games, not many people do it. And the reason why people don't do it is because it honks your graphics card. So this is something which we're just always looking at. And this is partly with the rendering and how many voxels we see on screen, as well as the lighting. The lighting cost is a huge thing. That's why a lot of our lights are quite static in here. At the moment, we have this little animated light that we can see, but calculating that all the time or calculating a full light with shadows is very hard. We have to make sure that we're doing the performance analysis on it all the time. When we're building it, we're building it in very logical ways instead of things which are going to be just really bad for the user, for your playing experience.
That's why the gas cloud is actually static and not an animated gas cloud. Because every time you load a gas cloud, it's got to start calculating the lights, it's got to process the VDB file itself, and it can take some time to do. So why it's not animated is because the VDB file format is actually a static format. Otherwise, you need to render X amount of files to play over each individual frame.