bevy-voxel-data

Bevy 0.19 — Voxel data (RON, palette, KTX2 atlas)

When to use this skill

• Defining a moddable block catalog in a text format authors can edit.
• Building a runtime palette keyed by BlockId (u16/u32) for fast lookup during meshing.
• Packing per-block textures into a single atlas so all chunks can share one material.
• Switching the atlas to KTX2 for GPU-friendly compressed delivery.
• Choosing a runtime chunk storage format (flat array, RLE, palette compression, hybrid).
• Optimising procedural world generation: extremity bound checking, noise upsampling, noise caching, cross-biome noise sharing.
• Surveying the Rust/Bevy voxel-crate ecosystem and its current gaps before reaching for a dependency.

Canonical end-to-end flow

1. Define blocks in RON (assets/blocks.ron). id is the immutable, serialized identity; name is presentation text and may change:

(
    blocks: [
        ( id: "core:air", name: "Air", visibility: Empty ),
        ( id: "core:grass", name: "Grass", visibility: Opaque,
          faces: ( top: "textures/grass_top.png",
                   bottom: "textures/dirt.png",
                   side: "textures/grass_side.png" ) ),
        ( id: "core:stone", name: "Stone", visibility: Opaque,
          faces: ( all: "textures/stone.png" ) ),
    ],
)

2. Core Rust types — BlockCatalog is a Bevy Asset; Palette is a Resource:

pub type BlockId = u16;

#[derive(Debug, Deserialize, Clone, Eq, Hash, PartialEq)]
#[serde(transparent)]
pub struct StableBlockId(pub String);

#[derive(Debug, Deserialize, Asset, TypePath)]
pub struct BlockCatalog { pub blocks: Vec<BlockDef> }

#[derive(Resource, Default)]
pub struct Palette {
    pub by_id: Vec<PaletteEntry>, // dense, process-local BlockId
    pub by_stable_id: HashMap<StableBlockId, BlockId>,
}

#[derive(Clone)]
pub struct PaletteEntry {
    pub stable_id:  StableBlockId,
    pub name:       String,
    pub visibility: Visibility,
    /// Atlas tile per face: [−X, −Y, −Z, +X, +Y, +Z] (block-mesh order).
    pub face_tiles: [u16; 6],
}