Fr0stbyte's Development Log

Lord Mackeroth wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Robinton's compressed distant chunk rendererthingy is.... progressing....

Spoiler:

Kinda

What the Sukolov?

The what? I didn't take this screenshot btw.

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Lord Mackeroth wrote:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

Robinton's compressed distant chunk rendererthingy is.... progressing....

Spoiler:

Kinda

What the Sukolov?

The what? I didn't take this screenshot btw.

I'm just amazed at its lack of cohesion.

Frost, I have more of a future request than a question: If your the one to create the single-person entity based fighters, would it be possible to allow it to kill players by flying into them? Without taking self-damage, assuming you don't hit the ground as well?

I ask this because, you see, in other games it's become a bit of a sport of mine to kill players by only hitting them with flying vehicles(its called booping, as named by its original inventor, Bigirpall), ideally without hitting anything else and exploding, and I've gotten good at it. Very good. To the point that I can get a k/d ratio above four and do better than the top players with what is essentially a scout-fighter, without firing a single shot.

Seems reasonable, though the implications are troubling from a balance standpoint.

maybe theres a way to get chunk height based on the seed, project a curve on a flat plain to represent it, then apply a texture like the one you see on a map.. just an idea

Krade wrote:

maybe theres a way to get chunk height based on the seed, project a curve on a flat plain to represent it, then apply a texture like the one you see on a map.. just an idea

That sounds like genius, but wouldn't you still then have to generate the world?
Oh, and this topic just passed 11,111 views.

For a perfect sphere, it's not too difficult to generate the surface textures, but getting details and block information from the blocks that are not the top block requires a lot more work, and a lot more geometry. Still, something like that may be necessary regardless.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

For a perfect sphere, it's not too difficult to generate the surface textures, but getting details and block information from the blocks that are not the top block requires a lot more work, and a lot more geometry. Still, something like that may be necessary regardless.

If we made every world a flat world, would that help?

This would be a simple way out, make planets a different world, and have a non seamless transition for your ships, and go to a flat surface planet. It would be so much easier then dealing with all the geometry.

Spoiler:

I said this the first day I came too, along with somebody else. It is in the space topic.

hyperlite wrote:

This would be a simple way out, make planets a different world, and have a non seamless transition for your ships, and go to a flat surface planet. It would be so much easier then dealing with all the geometry.

Spoiler:

I said this the first day I came too, along with somebody else. It is in the space topic.

I think he means the following:
the entering and leaveing of the atmosphere gets managed by the ships computer system, so basically you don´t have to do anything meaning you could just make planets the previously stated cylinder- form with polar storms and do it in a way so people like enter a different world when going into/ out of the planets atmosphere but the surface of the planet can still be seen fuzzyly from space.
any questions?

Ivan2006 wrote:

hyperlite wrote:

This would be a simple way out, make planets a different world, and have a non seamless transition for your ships, and go to a flat surface planet. It would be so much easier then dealing with all the geometry.

Spoiler:

I said this the first day I came too, along with somebody else. It is in the space topic.

I think he means the following:
the entering and leaveing of the atmosphere gets managed by the ships computer system, so basically you don´t have to do anything meaning you could just make planets the previously stated cylinder- form with polar storms and do it in a way so people like enter a different world when going into/ out of the planets atmosphere but the surface of the planet can still be seen fuzzyly from space.
any questions?

Please restate that, I somewhat understood it. It is written well, but my mind is somewhat muddles with othere thoughts. So could you or someone else possibly rewrite this? Thank you. (I am NOT trying to b**** to anyone here)

~ Khmac

I really want to do seamless travel though. That's one of the major points of this mod.
Besides, it's more an issue of preserving details at a long distance than it is morphing the geometry.

(USEFUL (hopefully) NECRO)


wait, could you have a non-seamless thingy that would look seamless?

IE:

you take off, and slowly float towards the height limit, once there, you enter into a kind of empty space instantly, that has a sky box ( I think that's what it's called) showing the planet you're on below you, and a 2d representation of whatever's in orbit. And all the loading or whatever is done while you slowly float up, so it seems like there is no transition. that could be used for balancing stuff too (like different tier cores, or whatever)



of course i'm making the assumption transitioning to this empty place would take so little resources as to make it virtually instant, also that the "background work" for getting into space could be done without anything in the UI changing (other than an altitude sensor or whatever) until the last second.

Would it be possible to have flat worlds at a certain height, and when you rise higher, the chunks that you couldn't see begin to form the other cube faces? Then each face could have, say, 16 chunks, and if you traveled low or on foot, the world would be flat, but from a higher point or in space, the other chunks are the other cube faces. And the face you ascend from is the top face. I think this has been discussed before, though.

It would be easier to bend the geometry in the shader itself, and that will be a function of height. Hopefully, it will be subtle enough that it doesn't look weird. Then again some people play with quake pro DOF, so clearly it's an easy thing to get used to.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

It would be easier to bend the geometry in the shader itself, and that will be a function of height. Hopefully, it will be subtle enough that it doesn't look weird. Then again some people play with quake pro DOF, so clearly it's an easy thing to get used to.

Make sure you do better than Hazeron and make Mac support! (Though Haxus is working on it...)

Don't mean to necropost, but how is Copernicus coming along? I'm still really interested in the possibilities of such a framework.
Somehow missed the gigantic post on just that topic.

Ummm... We asked Fr0stbyte this like, a lot lately, he did write this:

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

Fair enough, Mr. That Guy.

First of all, Copernicus is a lot farther reaching than simply making ships fly. It is a framework which allows Minecraft to treat large world spaces as if they exist within the same physical context. On top of that is a slew of much needed engine mods which will give the game the performance boost needed to handle this new framework.

Among these are modifications to the network protocol, specifically migrating the entire thing to UDP, adding timestamp-based operations and the capacity to trigger events retroactively, as well as more general things to improve the sensibility of what data is being passed and with sort of priority. Got lots of notes on this but I'm waiting until Mojang finishes doing whatever they plan to do with thin clients before starting on that.

The primary thing I'm working on right now is the graphics engine, as I have for the last four or five months (albeit not as frequently as of late). I've written quite a bit about it in the past, but I can find links if you want. The idea here is to boost the draw distance to at the very least 1 km while using no more resources than are currently being taken up. The trick to it is a novel geometry representation which disassociates surface texture data from the geometry, so that both can be optimized without regard to the other. I forget the exact numbers but the reduction in data usage is significant, like 90%. This is a major undertaking and the engine is still only at about 25%. However, we won't need all the features immediately, so I'll be able to switch gears soon.

Additionally, there will be a new file format which prioritizes time-to-render, and for the bulk of the geometry uses a new compression scheme that allows you to generate geometry directly via bitwise operations, 32 blocks at a time. It's not far enough along that I can give concrete performance numbers, but it'll be a completely different ballgame from what we've seen so far. The normal cube layer specification is complete, but I haven't started the unique cases yet.

I've been putting off the flying ship aspect for a while now until I get some of the lower level work done. Abandoned the concurrent worlds model in favor of the old fashon ship entities. Though concurrent worlds would be nice, Minecraft is too fundamentally set in a one-world interface. It would not work out in the long run. Instead, entities will act as placeholders for other world spaces, handling collision, lighting, and other entity interaction. Once I can get back to it, we'll be in good shape but I can't divert my attention to it yet. Ship/world entity proxies are at about 20%, the collision model is at 80%, and there will probably need to be additional interfaces for generalizing interactions. Custom gravity orientations has not been started, nor has planet generation.

On average I work at my actual job 10-12 hours a day, and don't get a ton of sleep. I work on Futurecraft on the weekends whenever I don't have more pressing concerns, but it's only a fraction of the time I had before March, so progress has been rather slow, and will continue to be slow for the foreseeable future. Sorry about that.
It would be nice if I could find other programmers who could pick up the slack, but a lot of this is really high level stuff I only really understand after half a year working on it, and it's unreasonable to expect someone else to pick it up without having done the same.

Oh. Oh wow how did I miss that? I'm very sorry, somehow I didn't see that post. Deepest apologies.

not sure if this would help with the engine system but there is a space sim called (ironically) Orbiter and it has the whole sphere planets and it has a system for simalar to what you are trying to do and i believe that it has flat maps but i'm not sure so this may or may not help you but i'm glad to controbrute to this to you.

primary site
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
dan's oribiter page
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/
oribit hangar mods (for ships and extras)
http://www.orbithangar.com/
and my favourite XR5 Vanguard
http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3888
author of the XR5 page
http://www.alteaaerospace.com/

mitchster wrote:

not sure if this would help with the engine system but there is a space sim called (ironically) Orbiter and it has the whole sphere planets and it has a system for simalar to what you are trying to do and i believe that it has flat maps but i'm not sure so this may or may not help you but i'm glad to controbrute to this to you.

primary site
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
dan's oribiter page
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/
oribit hangar mods (for ships and extras)
http://www.orbithangar.com/
and my favourite XR5 Vanguard
http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3888
author of the XR5 page
http://www.alteaaerospace.com/

It probably won't be terribly helpful with what we are trying to do. This level of realism and complexity is far and above what we are trying to achieve. Still, it does look interesting. There might be some ideas in there which we can use.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

mitchster wrote:

not sure if this would help with the engine system but there is a space sim called (ironically) Orbiter and it has the whole sphere planets and it has a system for simalar to what you are trying to do and i believe that it has flat maps but i'm not sure so this may or may not help you but i'm glad to controbrute to this to you.

primary site
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
dan's oribiter page
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/
oribit hangar mods (for ships and extras)
http://www.orbithangar.com/
and my favourite XR5 Vanguard
http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3888
author of the XR5 page
http://www.alteaaerospace.com/

It probably won't be terribly helpful with what we are trying to do. This level of realism and complexity is far and above what we are trying to achieve. Still, it does look interesting. There might be some ideas in there which we can use.

glad to help

mitchster wrote:

not sure if this would help with the engine system but there is a space sim called (ironically) Orbiter and it has the whole sphere planets and it has a system for simalar to what you are trying to do and i believe that it has flat maps but i'm not sure so this may or may not help you but i'm glad to controbrute to this to you.

primary site
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
dan's oribiter page
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/
oribit hangar mods (for ships and extras)
http://www.orbithangar.com/
and my favourite XR5 Vanguard
http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3888
author of the XR5 page
http://www.alteaaerospace.com/

Orbiter is simpler. From what I know, it just renders a huge bunch of celestial spheres and then simulates gravity on you. And anyways, it's texture is spherical, I think, and there is no need for blocks to be smooshed at the north pole. Speaking of orbiter, I should really try to get to the moon again.

Fr0stbyte, I need a not-so brief progress report so I can post it on the wiki. Essentially, dazzle with big words and science!

mitchster wrote:

not sure if this would help with the engine system but there is a space sim called (ironically) Orbiter and it has the whole sphere planets and it has a system for simalar to what you are trying to do and i believe that it has flat maps but i'm not sure so this may or may not help you but i'm glad to controbrute to this to you.

primary site
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/
dan's oribiter page
http://orbiter.dansteph.com/
oribit hangar mods (for ships and extras)
http://www.orbithangar.com/
and my favourite XR5 Vanguard
http://www.orbithangar.com/searchid.php?ID=3888
author of the XR5 page
http://www.alteaaerospace.com/

WOOHOO Orbiter! I LOVE THIS SIMULATOR! its mostly the level of detail some moders go into like Dan's DG IV or the XR2 and XR5. Unfortunately it has not updated since 2010 (except for the beta's).

(And yes fr0st my laptop can play orbiter just fine)