Random Ores

Another update, for the last few days i have been working on adding a dynamic system to allow me to get a block anywhere in the loaded range of the world, this is quite a task because it means i need to convert world coordinates to local chunk coordinates, the way i did this was by dividing the values to get the chunk that contained the block, then i would use the modulo operator to get the remainder of the calculation , allowing me to get the local block coordinate. I also worked this morning on fixing a lot of bug fixes and added a simple ore generation system, which generates chunks of ores , this system is far from complete but at the moment, it generates some pretty decent looking veins of ore.

Here is a preview of ores generating in the world :

and this is a preview of the distribution of ores :

The texture i am using for the ores is just a test texture i made, so i can easily see a difference between the stone and the ore block, it is meant to be some sort of coal ore, but for now it will do.

Thanks for reading and keep checking the blog for more updates!

Random Tick

Another update guys , i managed to implement random ticks, i can now add basic natural features such as growing grass and plants, this is a vital feature which will be needed to create a diverse world full of life. These chunk updates however are quite expensive so i will need to keep the updates to a minimum if i can.

This is only a quick post because its getting quite late. I will post an image below of the grass / dirt which grows, currently the process is backwards, the grass turns into dirt, so i can see how " random " it looks. I will of course change this later on. Looking at the image below, all of the dirt spots are randomly chosen from the built in " Random.Range " function built into unity.

Thanks and as always, keep check of the blog for more updates!

Block Updates

So, today i spent a lot of my time working on a dynamic block updating system. I found it quite challenging to overcome block updates , this is because if i place a block, i need it to send a message to the 6 surrounding blocks, these blocks will then do whatever they need to, this part is kind of the easy part, the hardest part is getting the surrounding chunks to receive block updates too.

I managed to successfully complete this system, it took me several hours to create it and i think that it could do with an optimization, but for now it works fine.

Here is a preview of the block updates :

As you can see from the image below, for testing purposes, i made it so that stone blocks are set to " air " when they receive a block update, so for a test, i made the world place a block in the middle of the chunk, as you can see, it successfully updates in every direction.

So far, this system runs pretty smoothly, it does not really have to do much calculation to achieve this, so i don't think that it will be very intensive to do this.

Thanks for reading and keep checking the blog for more updates!

Basic Rendering

Over the last few days, i began working on the basis of the chunk rendering, the way that i make the chunks render is by looping through each block in the chunk and checking the blocks at the side of the current block. I have each block store their texture , id value and render type. When looping, i check whether the block at the current side has a transparent render type, if it is transparent, it will render the face. This system is quite efficient because the chunks are pretty small and therefore allows them to loop fast. One challenge i came across was for blocks at the edge of a chunk, because they are on the end, i need to search for the adjacent chunk so that i can check its render type.

 I also implemented a system for updating the render system when a block is changed, so if a block on the edge of a chunk is destroyed, it will have to send a message to the adjacent chunk and tell it to re render its faces because otherwise there will be a hole where the chunk " thinks " there is still a block.

Here is a preview of my rendering

On a side note, i am not breaching Copyright of the textures , i am not going to be using the textures in the final version, i am just using them as placeholder textures until i can get some nice looking textures of my own.

 Thanks for reading and keep checking the blog for more progress!

Introduction

Hello there , I am working on a project in my free time called " The Cube Project " , this name may or not be the actual name of the project in the end , but for now i guess this will be the nickname of the project. Basically, i have a simple goal, i want to make a game , similar to the way Minecraft works, with the blocks, but i want to make a more realistic alternative, one which follows how humans developed, how humans created tools from the natural sources of stone and wood, i want to be able to simulate this in a block genre because these seem like a good way to start.

 I am going to be making this game with the Unity 3D Game Engine, mainly because of how user friendly and extremely easy it is to put a project together with full control of what happens. I have used Unity for a few years now, i have not however completed a project fully yet, so this will be the first project i dedicate my time to complete. I will be using the C# programming in unity, mainly because of how much more powerful it is over the Boo / Javascript alternative which unity offers. For the Voxel engine side of the game, i have already experimented and successfully made many examples of Voxel terrain which runs well. Recently, I managed to re-write my code to make it even more optimized, allowing me to use block updates many times a second.

 So for now, i shall be developing the project in my spare time, which at the moment is pretty much all of my time, Its the summer holidays and i don't have much to do :)

Thanks for reading this and i hope you keep up to date with the progress of the game!