Egad! A post!

In which Beerman remembers once again that he has a blog…

Previously on Beerman’s adventures in voxel-land : Intro Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

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.

Beerman's adventures in voxel-land, part 7 : Need for speed

Previous Entries : Intro Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6

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.

Beerman's adventures in voxel-land, part 2 : Blowing Chunks

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.

Previous Entries : Intro Part 1

Beerman's adventures in voxel-land

I ran across something rather pretty the other day on Hacker News :

Ooh, shiny.

Which reminded me of a a couple of things.

  • Voxels look bloody lovely.
  • Particularly for the sort of simple, gameplay-heavy retro stuff that I like making.
  • I should make something with voxels, shouldn’t I?