(July 2020) Monthly WIP Screenshot Thread

Perhaps @pspeed can better explain than I, but yes. The physics is kept server side, only the block types/values (Integer) + location is sent through to client (probably more magic going on than I perceive) , and from there the client can generate the visuals. Client-side the visuals load only those chunks need and server-side, physics is kept performant by only calculating physics for the chunks that are active plus surrounding chunks (that is, for those where something is dynamic). The faces of the blocks are calculated to let physics know which sides are solid and which are not.

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And there are ways to load pre defined block shapes from file

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I’ve published what I have right now to git. The repository isn’t finished, and some classes may change, but there is a test case for all implementations in the test folder. There’s also a TestSimplifyMesh that shows the simplification algorithm in action for all mesh types. It’s very effective for marching squares as it doesn’t affect the edges.

https://github.com/jayfella/jme-mesh-lib/tree/master/src/test/java

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Squeaking this one in on the last day of the month. As a birthday present to myself, I took some time off day job to play with using combined normal maps for beveling block edges.



In the last pic, you can see the bevel normal maps applied to a regular blue cube. I’ve left the corners unsmoothed for now as this is just a prototype and I need to see if it’s even feasible.

Visually, I think it’s ok. I suspect it will look really bad with parallax maps but maybe not. I’ll try that next time I have a few moments. (Edit: and to be honest, I’ve been a little sour on bumpmaps lately anyway. Without steep parallax, they look bad up close from edge-on angles… and sometimes even with steep parallax. And from far away, normal maps take over the job almost completely. So bumps are not super important to me right now.)

The most important thing will be putting this into an atlas texture with the 16 different edge type combinations and seeing if that still works ok. If I can’t pick a bevel combination with a single byte vertex attribute then it’s maybe not worth the trouble.

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