Abandonware?
It’s been quite some time since I last published an updated for this project. I never fully stopped looking at or thinking about it though, life just got in the way and interest waned a bit. Version 6 has actually been mostly ready to ‘release’ for quite some time, I just kept putting of writing this article; in fact, I am fairly sure I did actually write this at least once and then loose track of it.
Still, it’s here now. The shiny new version, with gamma correct rendering, a thrilling sky box and less terrible FPS!
What is Frame Rate?
I’m still not satisfied with the FPS I’m getting, but I have found that running the release build helps a huge amount. Considering the rendering is so simple at the moment, I would have thought this would be much higher. There are some things that could help, one of the ideas I have is re-work the way the chunks are rendered. I’m thinking I might look to cache the entire chunk as a single object to render. One of thing that I think holds this back is the lack of texture atlas - so that’s one thing to add onto the ‘todo list’ for the next version.
Crude Sky Box
As is the theme with my development for this project, I did a pretty bare minimum for the sky box. It’s just a basic static cube that invites a certain sense of dread. Down the line, I will certainly want to come back to make this more interesting looking, especially if I get a day/night cycle going and animated textures. For now though, I think it suffices; at the least the unsettling infinite white is gone.
Gamma Rays, Man
I am fairly sure I got this implemented correctly. I’ll probably have to come back at some stage to fix this up, really looking forward to that. There’s not really much to see with though, but should make things look better for all; when things get that far.
Blocks on Blocks
I started working on setting up a block registry for this, but then the great silence fell onto this project. For now, I’ll wrap up where I got with it so that I can push out a new version. In the next version, I want to also work on establishing a texture atlas and that will work nicely with a block registry.
ETA 2025
There’s two key things I want to get done as part of the next version. Well, three if you want to count ‘publish it before the year is out’.
Texture Atlas
I want to be loading all the textures for the blocks into a single large texture. The use of a texture atlas should help simplify and speed up the rendering code; I would not have check on every block if the texture needs to be swap, as it never would (per block). Not every texture would be thrown into a single texture atlas though. For example, the green, red and white block textures I currently have would be thrown into this one atlas whilst the skybox would be stored in it’s own texture object. This means each frame would only require two calls to set textures, one to set the blocks texture atlas, one to set the sky boxes texture.
Block Registry
This will allow me to start to store all the properties for blocks in a more ordered fashion. Obviously one of the main things would be working with the texture atlas to know what texture co-ordinates to use to draw the texture you want. This can then be used when building the ‘render chunks’, these could become single large models, combining all the visible cube surfaces together. I expect this too will also help improve the frame rate.