Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Skylight shadow and stuff.

Been working on the ambient/sky shadowing. Since the sky shadowing is block based, I had to blur it to avoid artefacts (currently a simple averaging filter). It is quite fuzzy, but better than anticipated. Also by adding another filter tap directly above a block, this provided a nice and simple way to simulate light "bleeding" into columns of blocks that lie in shadow, so the shadows are softened in the downward direction (provided that they neighbor some bright ones). I think I'm approaching a look that I like... still lots of tweaking remains.

For OpenGL 3 capable cards, I added support for EXT_texture_arrays. This helps to solve the texture atlas issue, so now there is full mipmapping and anisotropic filtering in there with zero tiling problems. Just wish it was available on older hw too.

1) Using a favorite 32x32 mid-res texture pack (John Smith Textures v4), this shot shows some light patterns on the floor projected by the ceiling window. This is before the blurring was added, so if you walked up close you'd be annoyed by the vertex interpolation.

2) Same set of textures, and still point filtered in this one.

3) My coplayers modified the train station while I was coding, as this new TCP dump shows, ithas even more corners, ledges and interesting light patterns to test with now. This also shows the skylight bleeding in from the cross shaped "window", and some of the new 128 x 128 texture set. Torches are missing, that's why it's quite dark.


Next up either torch lighting or some player controls. I want to jump around in there, and not have to use the official client to connect me anymore.
Eventually I will port over my sky system from the old game. That'll be quite dramatic.

Friday, November 12, 2010

MC Hammer

Well, in my limited spare time I found a new obsession. Again of questionable use... but I'll be dumping some progress here. Eventually this will become MC Hammer, an alternate Minecraft client.

First steps. Ran Minecraft and dumped the TCP stream via Wireshark. Thanks to #mcc on irc.esper.net and this excellent wiki documenting the protocol, I managed to parse some wireframe geometry out of it!


Some time later. I have texturing working etc, but it's Minecraft-style so not very pretty. I focused on working out the protocol and now render all world geometry. Next up, implementing my ambient occlusion scheme. Here are some first results, showing AO and some basic ambient shadow. The latter is done per block, and you can clearly see the squares. It's going to be blurred and interpolated.


Ambient shadow is filtered and interpolated... starting to look nice now I think. A little bland though. I need a good texture set.