nCraft (3D minecraft-like game for the nspire)

[DJ Omnimaga]

Looks nice Chockosta. I wonder if with minimal textures (such as Minecraft but with a twice smaller resolution) it would run fast enough? Seeing Doom running fast I'm thinking of yes, but this might be very hard to optimize that hard.

[shmibs]

he probably could, although drawing textures on a bunch of small boxes is more difficult than on a few, larger walls, i think. if not, though, then they can always just be different colours.
oh, and this DOES look fantastic =D

[DJ Omnimaga]

An idea I have is to draw every 3 or 4 vertical line too, if that can help processing. Don't do it horizontally, though, as this seems more noticeable.

Also even though I'm talking about textures right now, don't try implementing them now, focus on your 3D engine as it is now.

[Chockosta]

I thought about textures, but I'm afraid it won't be possible.
I'll try, anyway.

Oh, and here is a nice screenie that show I can draw lots of cubes without speed loss

[Hayleia]

By the way, if not any cube is transparent, why not, instead of drawing cubes, just draw the faces the player see ?
Maybe this method would make you rewrite all from the beginning (so don't do it if you don't need to) but maybe the game would become faster, I don't know.

[Chockosta]

I already do it.
The Nspire is fast, but 3D drawing without hardware acceleration takes a lot of resources.
Since there is a lot of cubes to draw, it wouldn't be playable without optimization.

I use several ways to speed up the drawing :
- Only draw cubes if there is an "air" block near them
- Don't draw them if they're not on the screen
- Draw only 3 faces per cube (there are always less than 4 faces that can be seen)

Then I just sort the cubes that will be drawn with their distance from the player (optimized heap sort), no need to use a depth buffer.
So I can manage to have a decent framerate.

[DJ Omnimaga]

I thought about textures, but I'm afraid it won't be possible.
I'll try, anyway.

Oh, and here is a nice screenie that show I can draw lots of cubes without speed loss

Actually that kind of floor could possibily be used as textures in some maps, right? But yeah for other walls I don't think textures are really that necessary anyway. Just have different color or gray tones for each, so they're easily distinguishable. Also another idea if there's a large map would be to not draw stuff that is too far from player view, like Nintendo 64 games, for example.

Does the engine supports 2D sprites like items in Doom?

[Chockosta]

Actually that kind of floor could possibily be used as textures in some maps, right? But yeah for other walls I don't think textures are really that necessary anyway. Just have different color or gray tones for each, so they're easily distinguishable.

Well, I think I will first try to create something playable with a color for each cube.
Then, I will consider rewriting it to use textures.

Also another idea if there's a large map would be to not draw stuff that is too far from player view, like Nintendo 64 games, for example.

Obviously, I have to do this. I think I will display a chunk of 20*20*20 cubes. (That may seem not so much, but it's 8,000 cubes...)

Does the engine supports 2D sprites like items in Doom?

Not for now, but I plan to add this.

I am thinking about the world size... I never tried to store huge pieces of data in the RAM, I hope it will be possible...
Because a 100*100*40 world would take 400,000 bytes to store 

[Hayleia]

I am thinking about the world size... I never tried to store huge pieces of data in the RAM, I hope it will be possible...
Because a 100*100*40 world would take 400,000 bytes to store 

You could use tangrs' method to decompress compressed data at the same time the game is running so you don't need to have all the world at the same place (however, I don't know how to compress a 3D world).

[Chockosta]

Since I finished my lua projects (Gravity guy and nSpaint), I can focus on nCraft...
I got a simple world generator (I will improve it later) It looks like this :


And do you think that I should make iron/coal/gold/diamond more rare? For now it looks like this :

(I did not display the stone)
Iron is grey, gold is lighter, diamond is the lightest shade of grey and the black floor is bedrock.

[Stefan Bauwens]

nCraft= 3D Minecraft? 8O
I do think the diamond and gold should be fewer though.
Looks great!

[DJ Omnimaga]

This looks awesome Chockosta! how big will be maps? Glad you're still working on this.

[cyanophycean314]

Very nice!  Good luck!

[apcalc]

Nice pics and great work!

[annoyingcalc]

Since I finished my lua projects (Gravity guy and nSpaint), I can focus on nCraft...
I got a simple world generator (I will improve it later) It looks like this :


And do you think that I should make iron/coal/gold/diamond more rare? For now it looks like this :

(I did not display the stone)
Iron is grey, gold is lighter, diamond is the lightest shade of grey and the black floor is bedrock.

I dont see pictures?