T w e n t y S i d e d

The last several posts have been a sort of lead-up to this one. It probably doesn’t look that way, but all the fussing I’ve been doing is about to pay off. Moving from Qt to Visual Studio broke things. Moving to marching cubes broke things. Adding shaders broke things.

Since then I’ve been adding technology and fixing things, and as those pieces come together we’re finally getting something worth looking at. Bit we’re getting ahead of ourselves. First, I need to backtrack and explain a few items that I glossed over in earlier entries.

The big problem is that it is taking crazy, super, insano, bonkers long to generate terrain. It’s about a second per node. Several people, including fellow code-hobbyist Michael Goodfellow – suggested that the octree is really expensive to use. So let’s disable that and see if we get any speed gains.

And by “disable” I mean, “write an entirely different, simpler storage system for my data”. No trees. No dynamic allocation. Just one huge, honkin’ block of memory where you can get anywhere in a single lookup. And let’s see how the new system performs…

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant 12: Fix All The Things”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The texture stretching on these blobs is pretty annoying. There’s no good way to fix this without shaders. So let’s use shaders. As I’ve mentioned before, shaders are special programs that run on your graphics card. It goes something like this:

Now, that’s actually a simplified view. A more accurate flowchart is:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 11: Shaders”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Back when I was talking about making beveled edges, some people asked why I didn’t just lift up the corners of cubes to make slopes instead of mucking around with the soft / solid geometry business. At the time, I wanted to avoid a system where I would attempt to build a cube:

And wind up with this:

I actually had the program doing this when I was working on beveled edges, and it was messy and frustrating. After a while I got used to it, but that wasn’t really the same as having it be intuitive in the first place. To do this right, you’d have to move away from cube-based building and adopt some sort of point-based system. To the end user the difference is purely semantic, but internally a point-based system would have a big impact on how you generate geometry.

That sounds really interesting, but I can’t let myself be distracted from my important goals of… of… What was the point of this project again? Oh, right: Screwing around and working on whatever I find interesting, and damn having a plan. That goal is 100% compatible with tearing the guts out of the engine and starting over with a different system. So let’s do that.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant 10: Marching”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.