Voxeling - New textures
Wanted to show off the BDcraft textures I’ve been using.
Jump in and build something! Demo world is here
Continue readingVoxeling - See-through objects, cutouts in WebGL
Cutouts are a way to render objects that are fully transparent in spots, without actually doing alpha-blending or pre-multiplied alpha stuffs. More on those can be found in this article: GPUs prefer premultiplication.
Here’s a great example of cutouts in Minecraft. Notice that the tree is made up of cubes which have a leaf texture applied to them. The texture is transparent within the space surrounding each leaf. No blending occurs; you can simply see through the transparent bits:
Continue readingVoxeling Optimizations - Growable, object pool
When I started working on this project nearly a year ago, the frame rate rarely stayed consistent as the player moved around the world. The engine was simply allocating and discarding too much memory, resulting in frequent pauses in gameplay as the interpreter ran garbage collection. As I re-wrote more and more of the game engine, I came to understand exactly which types of objects and arrays I needed to allocate, where I could cut down on allocations, and where I might use an “object pool” to stash allocated objects for re-use. The old engine used typedarray-pool, but I’ve decided to create my own object-pool.
Continue readingVoxeling - Demo is up
I’ve finally rounded out some more features that I felt were necessary for a somewhat-compelling demo.
Open Google Chrome then click here to explore and build: http://voxeling.greaterscope.com
Recent updates include:
- Updated character model to more closely match the one from voxel-engine
- Added skins from voxel-engine and other projects
- Refactorings and optimizations
- Simple water animation (of sorts)
- Made jumping less jarring (implemented the Skyrim float)
- Pause physics until user clicks the world for the first time. This prevents user from falling through the world before it has a chance to load.
- Trees have leaves now
Bad Lip Reading - Not the Future
Voxeling - Transparent cutouts
The voxeling engine now supports textures with transparent cutouts. Thus, leaves!
Will write about what I’ve learned along the way later. Check the voxeling project on github to see what it took, or to play around with it on your own.
Continue reading15 Years of the International Space Station
The ISS has been housing astronauts continuously for the past fifteen years (press release here).
That’s cause for a celebration!
Continue readingBrutal Moose reviews Restaurant Empire II
Voxeling - New engine
Five months ago I started messing around with voxel-engine and it has thoroughly re-kindled my love for measuring and optimizing code. You can see a demo of my project in my previous video post. However, I’ve taken the three.js-based engine as far as it can go. I want to increase the draw distance, want world chunks to load and draw faster, to make changes to the physics engine and reign-in the garbage collection pauses (caused by excessive memory allocation). So I took the plunge, and I’m now 1.5 months into a full re-write of the voxel-engine code. The good news is that I finally have something to show (the image above).
Continue readingVoxeling - New features
Wanted to show some of the new features I’ve added to the voxel game: maps and streamlined mouse/keyboard input handling!
Continue reading