Hi, this is my first time posting here so be gentle. 
This is a little coding obsession I started about two weeks ago or so. It’s a JME3 based game project and the world currently behaves very similar to another “crafting and mining” game you might have heard of 
but things will diverge greatly from there. The entire world is dynamic, every 1 meter block can be destroyed or stacked, lighting can be added/removed, etc… Hopefully the attached screen shots give a little feel for it even though it’s early (really early) in the project.
Next steps are to get it networked and start adding some of the role playing and crafting elements. Then it starts to feel like an actual game. I’m also still constantly tweaking/adding textures and so on and trying to get my materials to play nice on different hardware.
I wonder, what is the process an independent developer uses to get stuff tested on a bunch of hardware configurations? I’ve tested it amongst a handful of my friends and my own computers and performance and runnability varies widely. My OpenGL is rusty and I know there’s still a bunch of tweaking I need to do to my shader code, etc. to get it to be more robust. (For example, I’ve found shader code that works on one nVidia card won’t even link on another nVidia card without tweaking… good times. Maybe there’s a process for validating GLSL that I don’t know about.)
I have a link to a test build I can post but I don’t know if that’s appropriate protocol for this sort of group.
Anyway, thanks for the attention.
:o Amazing! You did this in two weeks? This looks great so far! Can’t wait to see further development!
Is it a randomly-generated island/world? And is that a time-controlled sunset?
Looks great!
Hey, great work! Yeah, GLSL is a bitch in that respect, takes lots of bugfixes for each new shader added to jME3 until its working on most cards ^^
About your project, share anything and everything you want to, if you plan to extend on the project, we can even set up a group for it so people can follow the development.
Looks Nice so far!
Wow… fast response, guys. Thanks for the kind words.
@nomnom Yes, the world is randomly generated though for the test engine it’s a preloaded 1024x1024 meter section. It’s randomly generated from a fractal based set of stacked generators so technically the world can continue on infinitely in all directions.
And yeah, day/night, sunset/sunrise, it’s all there.
Here’s a link for anyone brave enough to take a deeper look at what I’ve done:
http://www.mythruna.com/mediawiki/index.php?title=Engine_Test_Build
normen said:
Hey, great work! Yeah, GLSL is a bitch in that respect, takes lots of bugfixes for each new shader added to jME3 until its working on most cards ^^
Yeah, this I'm discovering. I started with only a few tweaks to the existing lighting material in JME3 and even those did not run on one of my older cards here until I reordered some of my 'varying' variables. GLSL has come a long way since I original played with it but things like that make me feel like I'm still poking values into raw registers somewhere. :)
I should put out a small material test at some point. A buddy of mine tried the full engine on his Mac and some of the textures were just showing up flat shaded, some not at all... and it would be nice to know if that's because I was blowing out bottom of his card or just giving him 'badly formed' shaders.
This looks fantastic! Best Minecraft-esque I’ve seen so far
I’m gonna start updating our screenshots section, would you mind if I used one or two of these pics there?
erlend_sh said:
This looks fantastic! Best Minecraft-esque I've seen so far ;)
I'm gonna start updating our screenshots section, would you mind if I used one or two of these pics there?
Thanks a lot.
Use whatever you like. :) There are a few more here.
And if you are able to run it, you can always snap your own with F2. :)
Ive been able to run the demo on 2 of my pc’s so far without any noticeable rendering issues.
nvidia 8800gt, and nvidia n220. both run win xp.
Averaging 120ish fps on both.
Yes it did look good
Oh and forgot to mention, both times the app was run @ 1024x768 16 bpp and 2x aa windowed.
wow ide play that. looks better then minecraft in my opinion
Tested for a while on an Inspiron 1720 with Windows Ultimate 64bit and GeForce 8600M GT.
All ran smoothly, except an odd little glitch when I made myself a very tall tower by block-jumping (I’ve not played Minecraft before but I’m hoping this expression will catch on) and fell down. For some reason the movement/camera was glitching pretty badly, as I couldn’t move in a straight line and it was very laggy. I started a quick new round of block-jumping and somehow that remedied it.
I haven’t been able to recreate it.
On a related note, accomplishing this in a matter of two weeks merits real cake.
erlend_sh said:
Tested for a while on an Inspiron 1720 with Windows Ultimate 64bit and GeForce 8600M GT.
All ran smoothly, except an odd little glitch when I made myself a very tall tower by block-jumping (I've not played Minecraft before but I'm hoping this expression will catch on) and fell down. For some reason the movement/camera was glitching pretty badly, as I couldn't move in a straight line and it was very laggy. I started a quick new round of block-jumping and somehow that remedied it.
I haven't been able to recreate it.
On a related note, accomplishing this in a matter of two weeks merits real cake.
There is some weirdness in the 'physics' and the collision detection, I think. Some oscillation that happens that doesn't dampen or something. At least that's what I'm hoping was happening. The thing that exacerbates the problem is that I have it so that in free fall there is no friction as it makes the really high falls slightly more realistic though I am going to add _some_ friction at some point. Because sometimes it's pretty ridiculous. And of course, when you are oscillating you're essentially permanently in free fall.
One thing I struggle with is synching this sort of animation physics with the render thread. When I had it running independently, camera movement was very jittery. And purely on the render thread (as it is now) sometimes has issues when a frame delay makes delta t very large. (My wife's computer only runs it at about 17 FPS and in that case you can actually jump up through things.)
...minor things to work out over the long haul. And perhaps better dealt with when networking is up and running.
And on the last point, thanks. :) I'd like to say it was a piece of cake to do but I must admit that obsession weighed out over sleep on more than a few nights. I was riding inspiration like a crazy high.
P.S.: Pretty sure any minecrafter would know what you meant by "block jumping". One of the best ways to spend the night if you are caught out in the open.
Heh, seems like we have to add a warning to jME3: Can cause addiction and sleep loss
Totally. I played with JME2 years ago and struggled. I had dragged my feet getting started on this project for a few weeks before pulling up JME to see what I was in for. JME3 is a real joy to work with and the platform idea is great.
I was coding geometry accumulation algorithms within hours of getting started and was having great fun playing with some of the post-processing effects. It’s a stellar set of tools.
Looking great!
Edit:
Tried the build. Win 7, Ati Radeon 4650.
No problems you aren’t aware of (i think): Some physics glitches and popping water quads.
rickard said:
No problems you aren't aware of (i think): Some physics glitches and popping water quads.
Depends on what you mean by "popping water quads". :) The fringe scenery loads in as you move around and those will pop in... but other than that, it should all look ok. In theory.
Cool! 
Please share your knowledge about day/night simulation.
What data structure do you use for the boxes?
How do you implement the “open world”?
regards
Andreas
http://code.google.com/p/bloxel/
Got a chance to actually try it on my MacBook Pro and it worked great, the mac application is pretty convenient Fantastic work, things like these push jME3 development more than donations ever could