Is my computer dying, or is Minecraft really this broken?

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

That's criminally oversimplifying both the concept of threading and how the new method works, but that's more or less right.

That's what matter isn't it ? We humans tend to simplify things because getting the true concepts behind our world is nearly impossible. We build model that explain stuff in the specific boundaries we gave that model. Another model can even claim the opposite but they do not cancel each other (Like Newton’s and Einstein’s models)

Anyway thanks for increasing my model's boundaries .

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

That's criminally oversimplifying both the concept of threading and how the new method works, but that's more or less right. The thing with threading is that OSes do it every time you spawn a new process, and they're very efficient at it. It works even better when you have a multi-core processor, which is practically all of them nowadays. It takes more work and planning to set up, but the results are almost always worth it in a time-constrained process.

Also, that illustration is hand-drawn. I hadn't finished the triangulation code when I made it, so I eyeballed it. There's a few mistakes, too, like the really skinny triangles near the crosshairs. Wouldn't have formed like that with the Delaunay algorithm.

But is the triangulation code finished now?

Yeah, I think it was done the following week.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delaunay_triangulation

That discusses the main technique. There's tons of variations of it with different complexities, but I went with a pretty basic one. For starters the workspace is always a 2D 33x33 point grid and only a fraction of those are ever vertex points. So in this case, instruction cost trumps asymptotic complexity (not explaining, look it up). There are also some statutes for subdividing rectangles with less analysis (they don't show up a ton in the wild, but are naturally everywhere in minecraft). It also uses data found at earlier steps in the pipeline to work out which triangles are holes and which are faces, which gets around needing some of the more complicated versions of the algorithm.

Really, the hard part was extracting the dense bitmap into a sparse set of vertices and re-sorting the collection for different planes. Lots of funny-looking bit twiddling was involved.

Didn't get terribly far past that once my job started getting demanding. The virtual texture memory map is what I am currently wrestling with. That's where 8x8 patches of surface data (face sprite, block and sky light level, color modifier, ambient occlusion data) is written semirandomly to giant textures in the GPU. The lookup data is stored to two tiers of 4x4 texture patches for that plane. The first maps each 8x8 patch to sectors of the 32x32 face, and the second the 16 pointers to every other layer (since back-to-back solid blocks can't have faces in both layers). The layer map is densely populated, but the pointers can be to the same patch, if there is no overlapping data. In this way, surface data can be much more densely packed than the 8x8 patches would normally imply. The top-level pointer is to a 6-faced cubemap texture, which is the only one with a 1:1 correlation with the physical world, and must be shifted every so often. A single pixel draw requires atm 6 texture lookups, which isn't too bad, though it may go higher if we add extra shaders. Still, we get a lot of points back for reducing the polygon count so sharply.

What I'm working on now is the module that keeps track of where each patch and lookup element is stored in the full texture, and decides when and where to overwrite prior data based on a number of factors, likelyhood of revisitation being the foremost. It's working somewhat, but is still sort of hacked together and fights with Java in places. Mostly I just need some more time to work on it.

So, uh, that.

HOLY SQUID I JUST FOUND EMERALDS

now trade them for a few peices of wheat

...

O_O

That block of emerald ore I found was in a ravine I'd hit while mining. Further exploration of the ravine revealed... an abandoned mineshaft.

My preliminary exploration of the mineshaft is now complete. There are huge sections that I could see but didn't get to. The part that I've explored and partially mined out gave me 4 more emeralds, 4 diamonds, 2 stacks of gold, 4 stacks of iron, 4 stacks of redstone, a half-stack of lapis lazuli, and 6 stacks of coal. I didn't mine all the coal.

coal: it gets to you. either you mod and need it, or you don't and don't.