VOVogtinator·Oct 31, 2023
> Initially I planned for the game to be flat shaded and added textures as an experiment, then realised the performance wasn't as horrible as I expected,
Heh, same!
> so it's mostly just a leftover from that. I did end up writing a scanline renderer for the flat shaded triangles, I think for those the bottleneck was transforming the vertices though.
IME vertex transformation is not expensive at all, compared to actually drawing on screen, at least if there is HW support for multiplication. Optimizations like merging identical block faces next to each other also reduce the total number of vertices, but this makes the texture distortions more apparent.
> Maybe I can deal with z-sorting entities by splitting them on voxel boundaries, and I guess dividing them again at any boundaries within non-full blocks (is this similar to https://en.wikip
Read the rest
edia.org/wiki/Binary_space_partitioning?)
Kind of, yeah. With the structure of blocks in a chunk there is basically already a layer of partitioning that can be used, though it might not help sorting that much. Is there enough RAM for a Z buffer? If so, it might just be fast enough...
> For the affine texture splitting, as far as I can tell your game is more focused on creative mode/building whereas I might also want to add a survival mode so for that you're more likely to be up close to the blocks (e.g. in thin underground tunnels) and then the artifacts get much worse so I guess it matters more for me.
I never really bothered with that also because in tunnels/caves there is a bigger issue: There is no hidden surface elimination, which results in overdraw and due to the rather low effective fillrate in FPS drops. I couldn't come up with a good way to implement that properly without hurting performance itself.
> The code is at https://github.com/Heath123/minecraft-casio if you want to look at it (textures are in a branch) but it is quite messy
I had a look, it's really not. The asm is also readable. Is it currently memory or CPU bound?