All Aboard the Tangent Express

So, when I began working on adding 'simple physics' to last week's project, it got me thinking about rigid body dynamics (a.k.a. game physics) and how to apply geometric algebra to it. Not surprisingly, I ended up on a tangent. You'd think I'd know better by now.

Perlin Hills

This week has been unusually productive. I've been working on terrain generation. Already the results are much better than previous attempts of mine. Thanks to researching the topic, I've finally come to decently understand Perlin noise. For generating and storing pieces of a massive world, I plan to adopt some of the methods used by Minecraft. Specifically, I'll be using a file format similar to the Anvil file format, which Minecraft currently uses.

I've spent some time reconsidering the previous block shape scheme I planned on implementing. For the time being, I've largely given up on finding the 'perfect scheme'. Every system I've considered has drawbacks of some kind, and all would have been a huge headache to implement. So, for now, I'm using a simplified scheme. The shape of a block is simply defined by which of the eight corners are present (256 total block shapes). In the future, I will likely consider more complex schemes, but until I find a better one, I'm just going to move forward with what I have now.

As an optimization, no hidden faces are included when the meshes are generated. This is done simply by checking if two adjacent blocks have matching corners on the touching sides.

Here are the next few things I'm going to be working on:

• Adding textures to give the world some color.
• Saving and loading sections of the world dynamically so you can move around.
• Some simple physics so that you can walk around.

What I Want in a Survival Game

A few weeks ago I found myself wishing for a first person survival game. So when I heard about Rust, I decided to give it a try. So far it's not exactly what I was hoping for, but it is definitely fun. It's also early in development, so it's likely to get better with time. In any case, playing it got me thinking about what I want in a 'survival game'. I'm using that term loosely; my ideal survival game would have a lot of elements that aren't strictly about survival. Two of my favorite games that I would group into this category are Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress (again, using the term loosely). Throughout this post I'm going to compare and contrast what I like and dislike from Rust, Minecraft, and Dwarf Fortress. I might also mention few other games that I have less experience with.

To D or Not to D

This week I decided to try out the programming language, D. For those unaware, D is basically an updated version of C++. It fixes some of the problems that C++ has and introduces a bunch of modern concepts. The biggest drawback of D seems mostly to be that everyone's already using C++. In any case, I decided to get my feet wet so I'll talk about my first impressions here.