I guess there are an army of consultants, lawers, new friends, maggots and girls waiting
to take a bite from his endevors.

what do you mean? i don't mean gambling with realties. just buying some flats and renting them out or something like that. maybe there are better ways (i am no expert on this since i don't have that amount of money anyway ) but with almost 1 million € (turnover of about 2.6 million so far and lets say taxes are about 70% in sweden - i don't know - it's supposed to be a high tax country) you certainly don't have to work anymore if you don't want to.

Why shouldn't it be possible with gamestudio?
How much blocks are visible at once? What's your guess?
Calculating visibility of such equal sided blocks should be easy.
The blocks don't need to be an entity at all, a simple array with position vector and texture number is sufficient.
Bunchs of blocks in the distance could be visualized by a single model with its vertices placed by vec_for_vertex.
The blocks around the player are represented by a set of - let's say - 50 blocks that are placed like you would place gras in a common level.

Is this not realistic?

the question is how many entities gamestudio can handle. i made a test a few years ago and it didn't seem to be a very high number. after several thousand it slowed down too much and it didn't seem to have anything to do with visibility but simply traversing all the entitites each frame. probably performance has improved in the meantime.

so i would try to do it with a huge three dimensional array with the block info and use a fixed number of entities that move with the camera and display the array data by switching textures. depending on the amount of entities the view distance would be limited.

someone could do an experiment. it shouldn't take very long to do a basic prototype.

edit:
hm... but 100x100x100 blocks is 1 million entities already. i think you can forget it. this needs some custom drawing routines like a voxel engine.

This simple engine can make some awsome looks

How many blocks are visible in this view?
I don't think that you need to show 100x100x100 at once, ever...

Just f.i. you could draw such a tree which consists if several blocks draw as one entity because it doesn't vary before the player destroys a block of it, then you can collide the vertices of the destroyed block into one the origin of the model thus making it invisible...

Well, most times the outside works is much bigger visually.



I guess you can see about 200x200 blocks.
(the blocks below the surface are not rendered)

about 40.000 blocks, with 480.000 triangles making them up.

For that you need a special rendering procedure.

If i recall correctly, I once read in the blog that he uses a simple voxel engine to access block positions in the view and then renders only the visible blocks.

I'm pretty sure, with some tinkering, you could achieve the same in A7/8. Even the Minecraft engine drops FPS when there are a lot of blocks to render.

Just out of curiosity I gave it a try, 100x100 blocks - Dual 2.0Ghz Notebook @1680x1050: 27fps.


(click to enlarge)

that is entirely within reason, can you try some simple 64x64 texture on them, see how much FPS that drops, alternatively, COULD a shader be faster instead of using skins? I don't know enough about shaders to make that call, but it might be worth knowing from a shader expert.

edit: also in minecraft, textures aren't filtered and shading is disabled and instead calculated externally from light sources, day of time, etc, and then lightens or brightens the blocks accordingly, so that could also save some render power. Try disabling texture filtering and default shading, see how much that would help the fps