Tey 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓗𝓮𝓻™

Last time I left off wanting to replace the basic UV test shader with a proper texture. Thankfully this was pretty easy:

The usual scene, but with the UV test shader replaced with a simple, stoney texture.

That's looking better...but maybe it was too easy. So let's go to the next step: multiple block types!

Before we add that, we need to address something first. A mesh can only have one (albedo) texture, but our chunk meshes need to represent multiple textures. I'm sure there's many solutions to this but the one I (and minecrap) went with is to cram all the textures into a single atlas. We can then have a mesh display the correct texture by using the appropriate UV coordinates.

To generate the atlas, I'm using this algorithm by lisyarus. Before moving forward, I set the Chunk material to use the generated atlas as a texture to test it out:

The scene now has each voxel use the entire atlas as a texture.

Yup, that sure is an atlas!

To get the UVs, I'm giving each texture in the atlas an ID, then creating an ID-to-UV map. I'm storing the atlases (and other related things) in a singleton called AtlasManager.

To start the structure for different voxel types, I also made a VoxelManager singleton. It's currently creating its voxel types in code, but I'd like to make them actual saved Resources at some point.

Finally, I updated the temporary "worldgen" code to randomly pick from the registered blocks. I also added some logic for the player to cycle between which voxels they can place:

The scene, now randomly made up of two types of blocks. Two size-2 cubes made of a different material each are build in front of the archway.

Nice, now the game is starting to vaguely look somewhat kind of like a real game, maybe!

And I think I'm gonna call it on that note. In fact, I'll be pausing this project for now. I've been working on this for a few days now and there's a lot of other projects (SFTA included) that I need to get back to, but I'll be coming back to this eventually!

Starting off, I did the thing I said I was gonna do last post. I added the Level object, which automatically manages the whole Chunk business:

The same scene as the last post, but with a bigger floor. Each white box represents a different chunk.

A problem now is that the chunks don't take their neighbors into account when creating their meshes:

The same screenshot as above, but rendered in overdraw mode (The brighter the pixel, the more times it's being re-drawn in a single frame).

I don't want to focus too much on optimizing right now so I'll leave it as is for now.

The next thing I want to add is being able to place/break blocks, but do do that I need to add collisions first! For now I'm going with the naive solution of just adding a separate collision shape for each block:

The scene with the mesh hidden and the collision shapes displayed instead. Good lord that's a lotta cubes..

This will probably cause issues when I get into worldgen and start having millions of blocks at the same time, but it's good enough for now (mainly because I don't know a better way to do it).

Anyway, to test the collisions I replaced the placeholder camera controller with a proper Player object. Just as a fun extra, the initial implementation of Player was so small I can fit it into a single screenshot:

The initial code for the player. It can walk but not turn the camera yet.

After this I also added jumping and camera controls, everything worked fine.

After that little detour, I finally added the block placing/breaking! I'm just using a simple RayCast3D to obtain the position of the voxel I'm looking at, then calling Level.set_voxel() or Level.get_voxel() depending on the player's input.

Now, I'm presented with an interesting opportunity. While testing this feature, I get to make the very first player-made structures for this game (the archway was made with code), so I gotta make something good..

Well, the first (screenshotted) minecrap build was Mario, so I made this game's first build Mario After Not Surviving:

Sans Undertale's face carved into the ground, as viewed from atop a block tower.

The first project I'm logging here is a simple minecrap clone. I haven't though of a proper name for it yet, so for now I'll just call it "Block Game".

For the engine I chose Godot because that's what I'm familiar with.

This is what I got so far after ~2 days:

Here we have a chunk and with some voxels added through code.

Instead of displaying their own meshes, the voxels hand their models over to the chunk, who culls and properly merges them into a single mesh. Pretty standard stuff.

Right now I'm manually adding a chunk to the scene and directly telling it to set the voxels. Ideally though, I'd want the voxel getting/setting API to be handled by a more general "Level" object that automatically handles adding/mutating/freeing chunks for you, so that the next step.

To start off, I finally finished upgrading some tooling and have already incorporated it into SFTA, so I'm now ready to finally start adding new content to it!

Part of the whole "incorporating" thing involved updating the script that generated the table in SFTA's README file, so I took the opportunity to give said table a bit of a glow-up:

The old and new status tables, respectively.

At long last. AT LONG LAST!!!!!! 99% DONE! Only 10 more images and the update is DONE!

I can't believe it's almost over...It's the home stretch! For real this time!

Oh, right. A sneak peak. Uhhhhhh here have whatever the fuck this is

...This is why I never make promises or whatever Sans said

Got burned out while making this commit so I stopped and did other stuff for... *checks notes* ...half a year??? Wtf???

Well, it's done now, and we're almost at 91%! We're at the home stretch!

Though, that home stretch seems to keep getting bigger... (The "For later - BEFORE JUNGLE UPDATE RELEASES list has at least 30 items and it keeps growing)

And to throw a wrench into things, the game's 1.4.5 update broke a lot of stuff. How much stuff? I don't know! The program I made to keep track of this stuff is still working with 1.4.4 references, and I can't just update them because the way I obtained the translations changed between versions (was originally one big CSV file, but it's now a bunch of JSON files), which means I'll have to refactor a lot of code 🫠

And to throw another wrench, I also have to update my other resource packs, which also broke. So I'll have to get back to that before fully going back to the sans mines...

Ok sorry for yapping so much, but we are close! Only 98 sprites left! Here's another sneak peek for sitting through my whining:

And with this latest commit, we've just reached exactly 13% of the total image progress!

Here's another sneak peek to commemorate:

After several months of procrastinating, I'm back on the SFTA grind in full swing! Just now we've reached 75% of the update's progress. Only 250 images to go!

Can't make any promises, but here's to hoping I can finish the update by Q2 2025!

Here's another sneak peek for your troubles:

SFTA has just rolled over to 12% total completion!

Here's a sneak peek of the next commit:

Next items on my to-do list.

The update is officially HALFWAY DONE!

You know what? There's enough common tile changes that it's all starting to come together, so here's another sneak peek: