Block engiine -> Make your own minecraft. Would you buy?

[Inovora]

Block types are currently 1 byte, reducing from 8 to 4 would have absolutely no impact in features or amount of blocks available. It is just a clean tradeoff between speed and memory.
A block consists of: 1 byte for type, 1 byte for data, 4 bytes for light. This adds up to 6 bytes, which c# rounds up to 8 bytes for performance reasons. Right now, there are 4 light channels (red, green, blue, sun), with 16 levels each. I could fit them in 2 bytes which would leave me with 4 bytes per block. The tradeoff is that squeezing 2 channels per byte implies extra bitwise operations to deal with the channels independently.

This is actually very significant memory wise because we are talking millions of blocks at any given time.

Oh. I thought you was talking about reducing from 8 bits to 4 bits.
I think most of us would prefer just the sun light channel so to have a smaller memory footprint.
You could probably squeeze that to 2 bytes, one for block type and the other one for light and block data.

It is more complicated than that, A block has 6 faces, and each one of them can have different textures; grass has 3 textures. Also, some blocks don't have textures at all like air. So it does not always match 1 block type = 1 texture though I will admit it is close to true. Moreover, there is a huge limitation in unity: texture atlases and mipmaps don't mix well, so I have to pad the atlas to leave space between textures or the textures start spilling on each other in the distance. Your math is very reasonable, but the mipmap issue forces me to waste some space and use lower resolution textures than I would otherwise use.

Just disable mipmaps and use point filter mode. You will get a great effect, specially for unlit shaders, without padding textures.

[goldbug]

Oh. I thought you was talking about reducing from 8 bits to 4 bits.
I think most of us would prefer just the sun light channel so to have a smaller memory footprint.
You could probably squeeze that to 2 bytes, one for block type and the other one for light and block data.

Just so you know, minecraft has 2 channels: sun and block light. Sun changes intensity with the day night cycle (just like mine), block light is always white, and allows you to have torches that shine even at night. You could do just 1 channel, but you would either give up day/night, or you would have to relight and redraw all chunks several times at dawn and dusk.

Just disable mipmaps and use point filter mode. You will get a great effect, specially for unlit shaders, without padding textures.

Look fine up close, but far away blocks look terrible. I get sparklies

[HeadHunter]

Look fine up close, but far away blocks look terrible. I get sparklies

Thanks for the link) I find it very useful)

[goldbug]

I have been cleaning up the engine and documenting it thoroughly. I will put it in the asset store in the next week or so.

Meanwhile, I made a new release. Beside the cleanup, the changes include:

• Terrain now loads twice as fast.
• Worst case FPS is significantly improved.
• I added a FPS display on the top left corner.
• Memory consumption was reduced to 400 MB. Still far from mobile material, but a step in the right direction.

[ArenMook]

Nice... it even freezes my browser... just like Minecraft!

Not sure why, but after playing for a minute it just froze and I had to kill the app container in Firefox / Win7.

[goldbug]

Nice... it even freezes my browser... just like Minecraft!

Not sure why, but after playing for a minute it just froze and I had to kill the app container in Firefox / Win7.

Does that only happen with my game or other unity games as well?
Does it happen if you use IE?
Does it freeze your browser when you exit the game or while you are playing?
What version of the player are you using? I compiled with Unity 3.4.2.

[ArenMook]

Yours would be the first.

Player is probably 3.5.0 as it's updated by Unity.

Froze while playing, and no I haven't tried IE.

[HeadHunter]

I test in in GoogleChrome and i have Unity player 3.4.2.
Terrain loads really fast) And nothing froze, all fine.

[Zhosay]

I had once a freeze but I have it randomly in every web player I guess its the same for the other sometimes it works for days another time it crashes 3 times.

Works pretty nice now looking forward to the engine.

[1Men]

I ready to pay $100. Good work!!!

[ArenMook]

"I ready to pay" <-- Lol same guy keeps replying under different accounts.

[Zhosay]

"I ready to pay" <-- Lol same guy keeps replying under different accounts.

Yeah watch aT Post count it tells all.

[HeadHunter]

"I ready to pay" <-- Lol same guy keeps replying under different accounts.

Strange guy)

[BlockyBuild1400]

Hi, I have an Idea for this, perhaps you can release a "Lite" version which allows you to generate indiviual worlds and change the block sizes of them, perhaps even add the ability to generate underwater caves, caves etc.

I'd love to see a "Lite" version which is cheaper and useful as I need the option to generate multiple individual worlds and not just one infinite world.

Also if you consider this can the world's not be infinite and give you the option to generate worlds of different sizes?
Perhaps smal, medium, large and gigantic or something similar?

Oh, and also many different options for the devs of the game would be nice, so it would be easy for them to modify how your terrain works.

Thanks for reading.

[goldbug]

Hi, I have an Idea for this, perhaps you can release a "Lite" version which allows you to generate indiviual worlds and change the block sizes of them, perhaps even add the ability to generate underwater caves, caves etc.

I'd love to see a "Lite" version which is cheaper and useful as I need the option to generate multiple individual worlds and not just one infinite world.

Also if you consider this can the world's not be infinite and give you the option to generate worlds of different sizes?
Perhaps smal, medium, large and gigantic or something similar?

Oh, and also many different options for the devs of the game would be nice, so it would be easy for them to modify how your terrain works.

Thanks for reading.

The "Lite" version will contain this for sure: You will be able to pass a ChunkGenerator object to the world. A default will be provided, but you can implement your own. The ChunkGenerator will be responsible for creating chunks when the world asks.
What you would do, is use the noise functions (I will provide noise functions with derivative), and combine them in any way you want to create the chunks.

For the most simple implementation of ChunkGenerator you will override a function that receives a coordinate (x,y,z) and return a Block. But I will leave it open for you to load whole chunks from files or database for example, so you don't have to do one block at a time.

Caves, overhangs, floating islands, resource veins, trees, water, can all be done procedurally with this API (I do so now).
There will be an API for registering your on kinds of blocks as well.

If you want multiple worlds, you would just instantiate several worlds and provide different ChunkGenerators

I am not sure what you mean by block size. Making some blocks bigger than others? Making all the blocks bigger or smaller?.

I am still deciding what exactly to do over world sizes. Clearly most people want fixed height worlds, perhaps I will provide several implementations of World. I could provide an up to 2048x128x2048 (1.6 mi^2, 1023 acres) world in lite, and an infinite one in Pro.

[portgalaxy]

Nice Job with this. Not sure quite how it could be implemented into my game but having this system I'm sure would open up a lot of possibilities for either full games or mini-games based on what people are working on. I'd probably find this most useful to create some type of mini-game - though they'd need to build things as well not just break blocks - and I'm not sure if you have that in the demo or not. Regardless, great job I am bookmarking this. I'd likely pay around $100 for this - though I can

[goldbug]

Nice Job with this. Not sure quite how it could be implemented into my game but having this system I'm sure would open up a lot of possibilities for either full games or mini-games based on what people are working on. I'd probably find this most useful to create some type of mini-game - though they'd need to build things as well not just break blocks - and I'm not sure if you have that in the demo or not. Regardless, great job I am bookmarking this. I'd likely pay around $100 for this - though I can

Yes I do. Press "alt" to put a rock. I simply have not bothered placing other blocks yet, though there is nothing preventing it.

[portgalaxy]

Great, did you have a time-frame in mind for when you might sell this on the unity store?

[goldbug]

Great, did you have a time-frame in mind for when you might sell this on the unity store?

I will try to put it up in 1 or 2 weeks.

[BlockyBuild1400]

The "Lite" version will contain this for sure: You will be able to pass a ChunkGenerator object to the world. A default will be provided, but you can implement your own. The ChunkGenerator will be responsible for creating chunks when the world asks.
What you would do, is use the noise functions (I will provide noise functions with derivative), and combine them in any way you want to create the chunks.

For the most simple implementation of ChunkGenerator you will override a function that receives a coordinate (x,y,z) and return a Block. But I will leave it open for you to load whole chunks from files or database for example, so you don't have to do one block at a time.

Caves, overhangs, floating islands, resource veins, trees, water, can all be done procedurally with this API (I do so now).
There will be an API for registering your on kinds of blocks as well.

If you want multiple worlds, you would just instantiate several worlds and provide different ChunkGenerators

I am not sure what you mean by block size. Making some blocks bigger than others? Making all the blocks bigger or smaller?.

I am still deciding what exactly to do over world sizes. Clearly most people want fixed height worlds, perhaps I will provide several implementations of World. I could provide an up to 2048x128x2048 (1.6 mi^2, 1023 acres) world in lite, and an infinite one in Pro.

Wow cool and thanks for replying, what I mean by block size is changing all the blocks to different sizes, atm I would like blocks smaller than minecraft so they can be densly packed and add more detail to the terrain.