Here it is. The completed final project for my computer graphics course.

Updates

• Textures stolen from JohnSmith Texture Pack for Minecraft (please don’t sue me)
• Trees!
• Awesomer caves
• Better lighting
• Faster (~350 FPS if chunks aren’t loading)

Download here, if you want to play around with it. However, I can’t guarantee it will work with your machine cause the only ones I’ve tested it on is my desktop and my laptop. And both are pretty beefy machines. So, good luck.

AH! FINALS.

I had to demo my progress to my professor this week so I worked on it a lot. Some changes I made are:

“Infinite” terrain. The world is now made of chunks of voxels. I add and remove chunks from a chunk buffer so that only chunks around the player are actually loaded and drawn. The generating is done asynchronously so it doesn’t kill the framerate.

Caves, overhangs, and tunnels. I took some pointers from notch’s post about terrain generation and so now terrain is now generated through a density map. I fill the 3D density map by sampling 3d Perlin noise, augmented by turbulence, at specific intervals. Then I just use trilinear interpolation to fill in the missing details. The resulting density map is then cut to form tunnels using another rigid multi fractal noise generator.

Basic materials (grass, dirt, sand, stone, water). These are determined using the density map described above and depth information. Densities less than 0 are air blocks. Other types of blocks are determined by a combination of depth and density. I’m still not happy with this because, as you can see from the video, areas under certain overhangs leave a silhouette of stone.

Much better performance (200 fps vs 19 fps). This is mainly thanks to face culling and only drawing faces that are touching air blocks. Right now I’m using display lists. I tried using VBOs but I’m still kind of confused on how to actually use it correctly. There is a bunch of conflicting information about deprecated functions and stuff. But I’m pretty happy with display lists so far.

For the future: textures, better and less weird terrain, skybox, better lighting, trees?, and flowing water?

I finally broke a typing speed of 100 words per minute using Dvorak!

So I just started working on this procedurally generated voxel/boxel terrain thing for my computer graphics final project. The above screen shot is what it looks like after a couple hours of work. That’s a 200×200 grid. And yes, sadly, that is 19 frames per second.

Right now, I’m just generating the terrain using 2D Perlin noise stored in a heightmap. Using a heightmap isn’t really ideal since I can’t really use it to store caves or overhangs. Eventually I’m going to update that to an octtree and use some combination of 3D Perlin noise stuff for generating the map.

For drawing, I just draw every single block which pretty much explains the 19 FPS. I have some ideas for optimizing it, such as only drawing blocks that are inside the view frustum and only drawing faces that are touching empty blocks, but I haven’t gotten around to doing that. My OpenGL skills aren’t there yet.

I’ll post some more when I have more to show.

Here is an unfinished mockup of a game I started making. The concept was pretty much tetris but you don’t control the tetrominoes directly. You control a little construction robot worker that can catch, carry, and throw them. There would be a evil dude in the crane that would be dropping pieces to mess you up.

I started working on the game a few week ago. Currently, the player can run around, jump, pick up pieces, and throw pieces. It’s not really in a playable state and I don’t think I’m going to continue working on it. After implementing those basic player mechanics, I realized it wasn’t that much fun. So I’m scraping it.

For me, the actual purpose of the project was to learn how to implement and use a entity-component system. It’s a system where game entities are made up of different components (health, position, spatial) rather than being subclasses of a parent entity. I got that part of the game working so I guess it was worth working on.

Maybe I’ll pick this up again at a later time. Probably not.

City of Life and Death, a film about the Nanjing Massacre.

This movie is disturbing.  I don’t even know how any one could do such horrific things to another human being. What makes this even more disturbing is that the events depicted in the movie do not even compare to what actually happened during the massacre.

Seriously. Watch this movie. Then go look up Nanjing Massacre on Wikipedia.

The first movie was Chronicle. This one was unexpectedly good. I was going into this thinking that it would be another crappy teens with super power movie (see Jumper) but man was I surprised.

Then I went over to watch The Woman in Black. It was a solid ghost story but had your typical horror movie scare tactics. I liked it though. The only thing that slightly bothered me was Daniel Radcliffe’s role as a father. I couldn’t help thinking, “THIS GUY IS HARRY POTTER DAMN IT.”

The Grey was the third one and definitely my favorite out of the ones I watched today. Just a great story about survival and the toll it takes on human beings. It reminded me a lot of Alive, a similar movie that I liked. It was even referenced by one of the characters in The Grey.

Watched Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol last. I missed the first couple minutes cause I  was waiting for the after credits scene for The Grey. I don’t usually like action movies like these, but it was entertaining. Good action scenes, awesome gadgets, and a bit of humor here and there.

I think I could’ve did one more but there was nothing good to watch and I was tired of eating gummy bears and Milk Duds.

Note to future Chris: Do this again.

1. Rum Diary
2. Tucker and Dale vs Evil
3. Four Lions
4. The Descendants
5. In Time
6. Fallen
7. The Confession
8. Restrepo
9. SLC Punk!
10. The Hunter

This is a list of games I finished this weekend:

1. Deus Ex: Human Revolution
2. Mirror’s Edge

This is my favorite video ever.