About The Project
Introduction
You’ve probably heard of Minecraft, the iconic sandbox game where players can build virtually
anything they imagine. Its terrain is made of cubes arranged using a noise algorithm, and the world
is divided into multiple chunks (meshes). For performance, only a limited number of chunks are
rendered at any time. On my laptop, my Minecraft clone ran smoothly at 60 FPS with a render distance
of 12 (25 × 25 chunks). As the player moves, new chunks are generated while distant chunks outside
the render distance are removed. All progress in a save is preserved seamlessly.
Real 3D
Real3D was built by following the
Vulkan Tutorial.
The version the Minecraft clone was built upon was created in the course of 12 weeks. The engine of
course handles everything render related, and comes with some handy components, like a
camera component and a mesh component. There is also an option to load meshes,
textures and shaders. Materials with custom pipelines can also be created by the user and
applied to any mesh. Frustum culling using AABB is also implemented in the engine for a
better performance. Sadly I didn't find the time to fully include ImGui in the project yet, but this
is on the top of my todo list.
Features
Some of notable features are transparency (water, leaves, flowers), animated textures (water),
sprites (flowers), procedurally generated terrain using simplex noise, dynamic meshes
and loading/saving of chunks.
Transparency was definitely the hardest to implement, I chose to
sort the faces of the transparent meshes from furthest to closest to the player,
but that came with its own flaws. I later learned about depth peeling, but I didn't have the
time anymore to implement this. I am very interested in this subject and have done already some research,
and would love to build a project around this. As mentioned, meshes in Real3D are dynamic, there can
be vertices added and removed during rum time, so the player can place and destroy blocks wherever
it wants.
Chunks are stored in a binary ,
I found it quit clever and fun to mess with this. Every chunk has one file, where its stores all the
blocks that have been changed. The position and type of the block are all mashed in a couple of bytes
for maximum efficiency.
Future Work
As mentioned before, improving and learning more about transparency in graphics programming
is definitely a priority for me. I found it quit intriguing that such a simple thing as transparency
that we don't even think about in real life, can be so difficult to add on to our screens.
I also wanted to experiment more with shaders, as this project lacks a bit of those.
Dynamic lighting is also something that I could experiment with.
