T w e n t y S i d e d

Now that we have a world based entirely around the idea of cubes, you know what we need? Slopes. This is something that’s been on my mind for ages. I’ve run around the Minecraft landscape and wondered, “What would this look like if the cubes could slope to form beveled outlines?”

Slopes aren’t really a foreign idea to an octree-based world. Minecraft has steps, which are basically slopes for the purposes of blocking light (they don’t) and collision. I want to take this one further and make slopes a part of the natural landscape. Like a lot of the stuff with this project, I’m not sure how well this will work out.

The trick here will be that the software needs to be able to look at a landscape and figure out which blocks should be turned into ramps, which ones should be turned into corners, which ones should remain cubes, and which way the slopes should face.

First, I need to set some parameters:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 7:Slopes”

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.

So here we are, six entries into this series and we haven’t really done much in the way of making software. I actually find this kind of liberating. In Project Frontier I felt driven to get my core features in there. I like that this project is more an excuse for endless digressions. It’s a lot easier to navigate when you don’t care where you’re going.

Still, I guess we’d better get started with the actual thing and stop whinging on about technology and development platforms. First, let’s look at texture mapping…

(We don’t have a lighting system yet, so I’m just painting the sides of cubes darker than the top. That’s close enough for now.)

I’ve slapped the default stone texture from Minecraft onto this landscape so I can illustrate the thing I want to work on. As in Minecraft, flat stone can look kind of dull if you see too much of it at once, and I’ve deliberately designed this scene to show us way, way too much of it.

This texture is kind of bland. I mean, it’s a scattering of grey values that barely deviate from each other. Of course, this is by design. Notch knew what he was doing when he made his textures. Some well-meaning modders come along and try to make the textures more “interesting”, and you wind up with:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 6:Tiling”

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.

Today we’re finally going to start adding some features to make this thing look a bit more… What? You say you want another digression on noise filtering and interpolation techniques? You sure? Okay then!

(Nerd!)

If you remember from last time, we’re taking tables of random white noise and expanding them to create “interesting” patterns. Stuff like this:

Now, I really don’t want to have the next bunch of images be black & white scramble squares. That’s boring and it’s actually hard to see the effect I’m talking about. So I’ve altered my program to output example images that will use color-blending to make the gradients more clear. So the above image now looks like this:

Just remember we’re not really dealing with color data right now. We’re actually just generating heaps of numbers between zero (dark blue) and one (red) and this color-fade makes it easier to see what we’re doing. Okay? Great.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 5:The Rainbow Collection”

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.