The reason it is so low res is actually more interesting than simple aesthetic choice. Think about the sensor(or eye) needed to view a 3d scene, it is 2d right. So this is a 3d sensor(voxels) for a simulated 4d camera. and then we are looking at the 3d sensor. (with our 2d sensor(eyes)), it's sensor inception.

So it is as low res as it is because it is a bunch of voxels simulating a 4d camera.

The dev put out an interesting video on the topic.

I really appreciate your feedback!

I tried pretty hard to increase the rendering efficiency on consumer GPUs. The biggest issue is that the main view is actually a 96x96x96 grid of "pixels" (or voxels). This makes scaling brutal: going up to 128x128x128 we'd double the total amount of pixels, to around as much as 1920x1080 resolution. Doubling the grid res to 256 would get us 16M voxels, which is about the same as two 4K displays. On top of that simple 4D object meshes scale much worse in terms of tetras than 3D objects do.

A quick solution could be to give the user a few resolution options, so they can bravely test the limits of their hardware.

So I've just modified the engine to allow you to specify a custom resolution in the URL:

https://dugas.ch/hyperhell/levels/the_bargain.html?vox_resol...

(Higher resolutions might break rendering entirely if the accel structure doesn't fit in allowed memory anymore. I was able to push it to 160x160x160 on my machines)

I'll also try to think of other ways to make the rendering more efficient, maybe a BVH instead of my simpler grid-based acceleration structure? My background is not in computer graphics, so others here might have better ideas.

The low resolution didn't bother me too much, but the controls made this completely unplayable for me.

Fully agree. The low-res makes this unnecessarily hard to navigate. Which is a downside if your core gameplay is to teach players to navigate in a challenging environment.

Agreed this is not even 4d Wolfenstein but still a really neat concept