News

Since last update I've:

- Added the Landform generator to terraingen, which a little bit similar to minecraft biomes, but it only defines the terrain and not the climate. This finally allows for some decent looking terrain!! \o/

- Rewritten the Texture Atlas composer which allows any size texture to be used while still packing the most amount of texture into the smallest space. This is needed so that Tallgrass can have a 48x48 texture to still have the same pixel density (because it is drawn diagonally) as other textures.

- I've added basic support for tallgrass

Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/pLthQ

- I also played around with doubling (512 blocks) and quadrupling (1024 blocks) the worldheight, both are working fine, but the default terrain generator takes very much time to build the terrain. I could limit the terrain generator to 256 blocks and leave the remaining space for builders, then it should be fast again. I definitely am interested in breaking minecrafts old limits just for the heck of it ;-)
It also looked super impressive to stand on top of a 200-300 block tall mountain, so still might be worth considering to get it running efficiently. In any case, the worldheight is freely configurable to any value as it already was in ManicDigger. The worldgenerator generates chunks in columns, but everything else is done in cubic chunks of 32x32x32

Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/fHJln

Up next: Rewrite of the ChunkRenderer, Cave generation, Ore generation, Particle system

I had some extra Time between the updates shown in the last articles and this one, so we got several new features:

- A lot of code cleanups, tweaks, rewrites, fixes and also finished some incomplete features (finalized clouds, clouds move with the wind, refactor client commands, game window now remembers the window size, etc..)

- A square moon and a new night sky!

- Major push towards world generation (about 1000 lines of code added), which now generates the first component: Rock Layers!

- Another worldgen component, at least a super basic version: Tree generation. Currently it generates 3 kinds of trees (birch, pine, oak) anywhere according to a forest map, using the tree generator from Vintagecraft. It is still missing a bunch more features.

- To help me make sure that the climate is calculated correctly I added biome/climate colouring of blocks which now works for tallgrass blocks

Pictures on https://imgur.com/a/3ZVpr

Up next: Finally some decent terrain

A shiny sky needs clouds too! Clouds are quite tough to implement due to the fact that graphics cards were not designed to draw half transparent objects, so you have to use various tricks to make it work, like sorting all objects every frame or implementing order independent transparency. Thankfully there's a lot of research on that - I chose to implement "Weighted Blended Order Indenpendent Transparency" invented by Morgan McGuire because its fast, comparatively easy to implement and delievers good enough results. 

1. First working clouds with variable density (no WBOIT)

It uses efficient rendering methods so it can render over a kilometer of clouds quite easily (at least at this stage of the game)

2. Less ugly clouds after implementing correct transparency rendering using WBOIT

As you can see, the density and color of the clouds is just a value that can be changed anytime. This is important as I want to create different cloud patterns depending on the weather.

The cloud system is also using Shaders, so i can easily color them according to the sky colors during sunset (they are also vertically offseted here just for testing, I might make it a permanent feature):

Up next: More cleanup/refactoring and the beginnings of proper terrain generation.