T w e n t y S i d e d

So let’s talk about data structures. I’ve mentioned way back at the start of the project that there are certain costs to using an octree. An octree will make interfacing with ALL blocks a hundred times faster but make dealing with a specific block several times slower. I’m curious how…

Hang on. My program has been behaving oddly recently. It’s like it will suddenly stop building new blocks and I’ll end up stuck on this island floating in empty space. I’ve got the program set to aim for 60fps, and if one thing starts eating too much CPU then the block-building gets choked off. Let’s see where these CPU cycles are going.

I add a little benchmarking loop. Right now there are just five systems running:

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Project Octant Part 8: The Time-Hole”

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.

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.