So yeah, I finished those games just in time for ROM, had a great time at the event, and then in the sudden absence of deadlines I promptly went dark for several months. I’m a wee bit rubbish at the whole “maintaining focus” thing, y’know.
With the basics of the trench runner working, I wanted to take a look at a performance issue that’d been giving me trouble - the initial version of the engine was pretty much limited to only seeing about 10 chunks ahead if I wanted to keep it at 60fps, which was giving me some pretty visible popup on the far end of the trench.
The problem was in the mesh generation for my chunks. I had the basic optimisation in place of not adding faces to the mesh that were in between adjacent filled blocks, but that meant that for a completely solid chunk I was still rendering hundreds of little cubes where one would be enough.
As mentioned in the last installment, I’ve got about a week and a half left to finish up the voxel game before ROM. Clearly then, this is the perfect time to start working on another game!
Oops, went a bit quiet there for a while again. So yeah, in the last installment of this thrilling series, I’d got the basics of the engine in place and I was starting to make some videogame, which is pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months. Right now it’s looking a bit like this:
Been a manic weekend - between getting stranded in a pub all afternoon while out buying a new Beermobile (I know. My life, it is filled with troubles…) and general weekend activities, I managed to squeeze in a couple more evenings of coding time on the voxel project. It’s starting to come together quite nicely now.
As previously mentioned, I’m having a crack at building my own voxel engine, because that’s the sort of thing we do for entertainment around these parts. Here’s how it’s looking after a couple of evenings of development.
It’s no great secret that I like me some ArenaShooter, so when Rob started tweeting incessantly about something called We Are Doomed I figured I should give it a look. It’s rather tasty…