News

News for this Update, again mostly internal updates:

- Spent a lot of time stabilizing the Multithreaded systems on the client and server. Which is like balancing on a rope

- Had to do some rewriting on how chunks are generating, which makes lighting easier

- Completed Sunlight calculations, which means the terrain generator finally generates shadows in caves and und overhangs again

Here's how the terrain now looks like with shadows. Some shadows are still glitchy.

Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/ry7Fl

No big update this time, spent the majority of time working on internal systems and struggling with a decent lighting system.

• Played around a bit with fake volumetric fog, will probably be added permanently to the game. 
   
• A bit more progress on the player hotbar, it now shows the health bar, food bar and 4 backpack inventories. Currently only the display is working, the health/food system and backpacks are not implemented yet.
   
• Added climate tinting of liquids, so now we can have murky green waters in a swampland and crystal clear water in cold areas.
   
• Did a lot of behind the scenes improvements (e.g. rewrite of the chunk render queue, consolidation of all vector classes, etc.) and bugfixes

New since last update:

• Added Lake generator (produces small lakes randomly)
   
• Improved Landform generation (landform specific terrain noise octaves)
   
• Preparing new Lighting system: All loaded chunks on the server and on the client are now compressed in-memory. The loaded chunks account for 60-90% of all memory consumption of the game, and the compression ratio for this kind of data is 95-99% which basically means the memory usage is 3-5 times less. The big challenge herin lies to do it efficiently so the game doesn't lag. I chose to run compression in a seperate thread (= runs in parallel), which is however known as a nightmare topic for many programmers to get it bug free.
   
• Preparing new Lighting system: Added data fields for each chunk to be able to store 32 block player light, 32 block sun light as well as about one more byte for storing color values (e.g. blue glowing mushrooms!
  This causes chunks to use more than twice the memory, so in-memory chunk compression was the solution that should hopefully get us there without loosing view distance.
  
  All in all quite the challenging task to juggle around with more than double the data, but that's what this project is here for - to push boundaries.

This time I spent some extra time exploring the world, I start to quite like what it produces by now. Have a look!

Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/0YXrO

Up next: Bugfixing, Cleanup, Tweaking, Continue work on new lighting system