Tyron

Recently I was thinking about what should happen when you die. I will probably go the usual way and make the player loose all items and some exp (not all levels), but I'm still interested in other ideas. Examples: - Drop all items but inside a grave that doesn't respawn and can be reclaimed - Drop all items except the ones in the hotbar? - Don't drop any items but loose money? - All of the above depending on the game difficulty? Or something else completely?

After having already spent significant time on preparing for the universal block rendering system I was now able to complete it, this means the game can now take in a json model file and turn it into a ingame block, in fact, almost the same json model files that I made for Vintagecraft. Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/uYMer What I still have to do however is to integrate the custom block shape generation when drawing the world and when showing the players inventory. Above screenshots are made using just a quickly hacked together test renderer for a single block. Nonetheless, having this system in place is a significant milestone as it will let me add game content more quickly. View full record

Was busy with real life, so little progress since last Update. Low activity will continue for some more days. Nonetheless I began work on a universal block rendering system that can take in block models in json format (practically the same as minecrafts format) and process the file into a renderable mesh in the game. added a final render pass which can apply any kind of post processing effects to the world via shader. With that I added some slight sepia effect to the scene. As always, some screenshots of the terrain are also included in the slideshow. Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/Pnnd9 View full record

No new completed features this time, I had to fix up a lot of things and prepare the ground on which to base on the next features Continued working on implementing items (= anything that can go into an inventory and is not a block) Began implementing survivval inventory, before there was only a creative inventory A few major internal refactors and bugfixing sessions Fixed some block facing inconsistencies in preparation for a universal block tesselator from json files However since the game has gotten more stable now, I could spend more time exploring the Vintagestory terrain, have a look. Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/gtpmC Here's also a video of me taking a short hike and playing with the particle system, hope the background music is not too obnoxious. View full record

Let's break some blocks... Added slow block breaking and block breaking system (through a universally coded decal system which can also handle other overlays). Added cubic particles and a way to color them according to a block texture View full record

What's new this time? Let's see.... Water got a new texture, is now animated and I also played around with waves. I probably won't keep the waves, it feels kinda discomforting when a large part of your screen is wobbling around. When starting a single player world, the game window shows the current server log entries, so you know what currently takes so long ;-) Added collision detection for particles. Nothing super complicated or super fancy but quite neat to observe Sunlight has now a range of 24 blocks, which looks really neat when you are about to exit a dark cave as you can see the sunlight already several blocks earlier. Continue some more on the lighting system, various fixes, tweaks, cleanups as always View full record

Hey yes, there will surely be a bunch of random elements

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 View full record

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 View full record

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 View full record

- The Chunk Renderer has been rewritten. This is a big thing because the old system did not allow (what i am aware of) to use shaders on chunks and at the same time I used a very efficient system that collects up to 1000 chunks and draws them in one go (graphics cards are much faster when drawing a lot in one go). - The terrain is now permeated with long windy caves! These caves also branch off and produce caverns. In the long term there is a lot I still want to add to the cave system. - The underground now also has Vintagecraft-Style deposits or copper, iron ore, tin ore, bismuth ore and so on. - We've added the basics for an efficient particle system using a technique called instanced rendering. On my Laptop (Dell Inspiron 15Z) it currently can draw over 20.000 Particles without lagging the game. - The grass block sides are now smoothly tinted, which looks pretty nice Pictures: https://imgur.com/a/4DR9S Up next: Some more work on Terrain gen, preparing for new lighting system View full record

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 View full record

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 View full record

Thanks, feel free to also write your ideas in several posts.