Minecraf 2
Here's what I worked on this month
Here's what I worked on this month
Instagib
This month, I sorta finished "Alex's Instagib", a take on the classic Instagib mode present in a lot of arena shooters.
Since the last devlog, I added:
- Global player stats - although I've just realized that these aren't working properly, so I'll have to work on those a bit
- A HUD rework
- A custom map
- Some other stuff that I can't remember off the top of my head
If you have s&box, you can play it here.
Future Plans
Some stuff I'd still like to do involve game states (like starting and finishing rounds). Everything else is done.
Minecraf 2
Minecraf 2 is a bit of a joke project I've been working on to explore procedural meshes & terrain generation in s&box. It was inspired by Leaf's and Rugg's work on their own terrain generation projects that use cube marching algorithms.
Rather than use cube marching, though, I decided to use voxels - though it'd be trivial to include a cube marching or other isosurface algorithm to generate terrain from.
Terrain Generation
Chunks generate a bit slowly (at least for my personal liking), but here's what chunk gen looks like:
Mesh Generation
Mesh generation is done "properly", in that only visible blocks have vertices. This extends through chunks.
Seams are corrected through oversampling - this means that there's no cross-chunk communication in the generator, which has simplified things a bit.
Texturing
Texturing is done through a texture atlas. Each texture is 1/16th x 1/16th, so calculating each block's relevant UV coordinate is super easy.
The only issues, at the moment, are:
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There is no point texture filtering. This means that I've had to scale up the regular 256x256 texture atlas to 8192x8192, which is a pretty harsh increase and uses a load more VRAM than I'm comfortable with.
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Since there's no proper point texture filtering, I get seams:
These seams obviously worsen through mipmaps as the texture resolution decreases. So far away objects look a lot less like they're supposed to - with distant water looking pink, for example.
Performance
I like to think that performance is currently okay. With no LODs and a relatively large render distance, I can push ~100fps, but memory usage is quite high. I can probably fix this through the use of a custom vertex buffer implementation that only uses what I need.
More Screenshots
Big Mountain
Some earlier stuff
LOD Testing
Less intense terrain
Really early terrain gen
Future Plans
Obviously I don't want to re-invent the wheel and make Minecraft all over again. It already exists (in multiple forms). What I do want to make is some sort of factory builder, like a voxel-based Satisfactory.
I want to make the voxels a lot smaller - something like 1/4th of a metre - so that people can fit more detail in and so that it looks a little nicer than Minecraft does. Obviously I'm no John Lin, but I think it's doable.
I'd also like some funkier terrain generation. Something semi-realistic, but with natural beauty spots - like waterfalls, overhangs, proper biomes... you get the picture.
Battle Royale
I've been dicking around with a Warzone-style gamemode with some of the same movement ideas, but a bit faster. None of this is really polished or final, but I thought I may as well post it here anyways
Gunplay
Gunplay is there, but it doesn't feel right. I think it's down to the sound/animations.
Movement
Movement feels pretty good, but needs a proper art pass (legs / third-person animations) and some better audio.
Future Plans
I want to make this into a hybrid between Danger Zone and Warzone - a small map with some fast movement which should hopefully lead to a decent amount of action.