Zepha: Voxel Game Engine

I've been digging through my old Twitter posts recently, trying to get everything of "value" off of the platform, and I found a bunch of posts with glitched / broken images of my game in it, and I thought, hell, why not? Here's a little gallery of the neatest bugs that I bothered to take pictures of.

This funky grass happened when I was working on leaf swaying particles. I accidentally applied it to the grass blocks instead of the tall grass, and I had the intensity multiplied by a factor of 10.

This was... meant to be a wireframe model, to show you what you're pointing at. I don't even know what happened to it here!

Shaders breaking can sometimes lead to really satisfying results... I believe I accidentally routed texture coordinates directly to the fragment shader output somehow, resulting is this very dreamlike effect.

Back when I was still storing partial chunks -- chunks containing only structure data that spanned a chunk boundary while generating -- in the regular chunk array, it was possible for the game to mistakenly believe these chunks were complete and render them. These chunks were default-filled with id 0, the invalid block, which only meant to appear when a block from a mod that has been removed is loaded. They were a slightly scary sight, looming over the horizon.

A while back, when I was working on the GUI system of the game, I added an API to programatically crop and resize textures, which caused a lot of problems and memory corruptions. I'm not a very careful programmer :)

Despite how annoying debugging can be, it can be fun seeing the chaos that bugs can throw at you. I just wish I got more stuff like this and less Segmentation Fault (Core Dumped).

Do check out our Discord server if you want to see more nonsense, or if you'd like to involve yourself with the project. I'd love to say hi!

Hey all! Sorry for the silence for the last few weeks. I'm visiting family right now so I have less time than I'd like to work on this project.

I'm working on a longer form Devlog + accompanying article on Light propagation in Zepha, my Voxel Game Engine, and I thought I'd post a tiny preview here!

This visualization demonstrates the difference between Minecraft's sub-par light propagation algorithm, my own algorithm designed for Zepha, and the theoretical "ideal" spherical propagation algorithm. Hopefully you can see that the Zepha algorithm produces a much more accurate result when compared to the ideal.

The Devlogs I'm working on will go into detail about how this algorithm works (so that you can integrate it into your own projects!), how to make it performant, and how it interacts with colored lighting. I'm hoping I'll have it out in a couple of weeks.

This video is already stacking up to be weeks of work, so I'm really hoping that a lot of people are able to get value from it. If you're interested, please join our Discord or follow this blog to keep up with things! I'll be posting on all of my socials when the video is out.

In Zepha, you're not limited to 1x1 blocks. Modders can easily design multiblock structures, custom models, and other cool things to really liven up the game world. This is a model for a basic Crafting Table I created a while back, with the idea of making the eponymous station a bit more prominent in your builds.

Nowadays, I'm not even planning on having a crafting table! Crazy, I know, but I'd like to make a departure from the traditional grid crafting system of Minecraft in my game. Hand crafting will be done by selecting two items in your inventory while holding a special key, which will convert them into their product, if they have a recipe using the two of them, and more complex crafting will all be done with specialized machinery, no 3x3 grids in sight. I'm hoping that this system will provide more uniqueness to the crafting system, as I feel that 10 years of Minecraft has made the crafting grid just a little bit stale.

Do you like the Minecraft 3x3 crafting system, or are you also feeling burnt out from it?