@Pappenheimer, no this is all private and i just posted it here, haven't posted it on the Unity forum yet.

EDIT:
Also added textures, and the tiles already know what texture to use depending on position and stuff:



I am working on the collision right now, then i will show you a webbuild ^^.

@ Joozey, awesome shots That ship is awesome, i wanted to do one too.

Building railroads is kinda useless, they are buggy in SMP

I know, I'm waiting for the day now that tracks work .
But at least they guide the way through awesome landscapes! (and it was a nice challenge to make it sub-oceanic. Also great work there on unity .

BTW, would Ulillillia appreciate this game?
It kinda reminds me to his projects.

it's too unrealistic from the physics aspect, he probably would write the developer an angry letter and give him the correct formulas already scaled to minecraft sizes (keeping in mind that minecraft can have 4x the surface of earth in world sizes, and that everything in this world is formed out of blocks which in turn would affect aerodynamics) and include a quick code for improved waterflow that is both realistic and 10x faster than the current algorithm.

Okay here is a webplayer of the current version.



Link to Webplayer

NOTE: It will be laggy at the beginning to generate the level, later on i will do that in a loading screen. So when you try placing cubes at the beginning, it takes a few seconds to display them, cause ive limited my current version so it can only update < 10 chunks at a time.

The physic and collision is crappy too, just added something simple so i can play around with it.

Controls:
- WASD: Movement
- Left click: Place current block type
- Right click: remove block
- R: toggle between blocks (no visual indicator yet)
- F: Create a big sphere of the current block type
- B: Bomb away some blocks (this is fun 8D)

The red transparent cube shows the field you would remove.
The blue transparent cube shows the field where you place a new block.

Have fun and would be nice to know your framerate (especially with that Bloom, DOF and SSAO :P)

Wow that is absolutely awesome! Great work!
Runs very smooth, even with so many thousand blocks visible.
Looks very nice, too! :>

Thanks, glad you like it and that it runs smooth

But i am still wondering how you can create a really huge world like in minecraft, i've heard the space is 3 times bigger than the earth.

I can create a field of a size 512x512x128 without problem (though the framerate will slowly die, its under 30 then, depending on how far i can see).

But if i go bigger, i get OutOfMemory exceptions. So i am wondering how they do it in minecraft, hmm.


EDIT: hmm i was just thinking. Since i can't create a bigger array at runtime (due to memory problems), i think i need to generate the level as textfile and save it. This one can be as big as it wants to be.

And then ingame, i will cut out the surrounding worldchunks from that file, like 128x128x128 blocks or whatever and only use those sub-world arrays for the current one. When i am about to leave a field, i will re-load the map with the new coordinations (i've noticed how minecraft almost stops at certain map points, i bet they re-calculate the current map too).

This could work, i dunno. What do you guys think? Do you have any idea?

The world in minecraft is not simply a big 3D array of all
blocks.
The game uses a procedural generator to create the
surface on the fly.
This way you can create an infinitively big world, without
using up much memory.

Only the part wich was altered by the player in any way
has to be stored. (the delta / the difference)

So step 1: generate the terrain given the procedural formula
for the current region
step 2: alter the world by the stored changes (the actual 3D array that has to be saved)

Only do that for the visible regions.
When leaving the region, update the new regions,
and trash the non visible regions.

------

To increase the framerate:

You can esily create a visibility list:

To determine if a block needs to be rendered, you can use
a simple method:

For each block in the "chunk" section:

Look if the block has a solid block on EACH of
its 6 sides.
if yes, mark the block invisible.
It cant be seen from anywhere.

Glass/Water/empty blocks are not treated as solid blocks.
(You can even test this in minecraft when setting
the grass texture transparent)

awesome! and with realtime shadows...


captain kiyaku already does that. even i already did it in my experiment. it wouldn't make sense to generate faces that never can be seen.


yes, using a big array is no good idea. better store the voxels directly with the mesh chunks and write some dynamic chunk manager. then you also can more easily create new chunks if the player moves towards the current boundaries of the world.


but with a world as big as the surface of the earth i wonder about floating point precision issues. probably the player somehow would have to be moved to the coordinate origin again after a while to avoid problems. without him noticing.

Yes i've already only render faces that are actually visible (have no surrounding block).

Hm but my problem is to understand how you access the voxels if you don't store them into something. The objects itself have no colliders so i couldn't just trace for them.

Or maybe i should give new created 16x16x16 chunks a big cube collider and only if i do something to it (if i actually scan it and want to build or destroy), i will take its position into the array so i only store actually changed objects?

Hm i dont know.