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A small sample of the new blocks added in this update.

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A screenshot of all the slabs in the block selection menu.

Alright, I suppose that this is the first post of year. After about a month of work, I have managed to implement all the features that I wanted to get done for the v0.2.0 update to Voxelworld. My main goal with this update was to add in a bunch of blocks and also expand support in the voxel engine for different block geometries that aren’t necessarily perfect cubes.

One of the features that I added was that pretty much any solid block can be turned into a slab or a stair - blocks consist of two bytes of data (the block id and the block geometry data) and since I stored block geometry data seperate to the block id, that means that I don’t really need to put in too much effort for the creation of new stairs or slabs. It also gets you weird items such as grass block slabs and coal ore stairs.

I’ve also updated the world save format to instead save chunks into large “region” files that can allow for bulk loading of chunks (so that way I don’t have to query the filesystem as much or as often in order to load new chunks) which seems to have made chunk loading faster. Additionally, chunks are now smaller at as size of 16 x 16 x 16 (previously they had been 32 x 32 x 32) so that remeshing is faster. The only downside to this is that any world created in v0.1.* is no longer compatible. However, considering that only affects two (alpha) versions I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

I’m not going to go into too much detail about everything that I’ve done over the past month but my plan for v0.3.0 for Voxelworld is to implement some kind of lighting engine so that should be a fun programming challenge.

Check out the source code here.

Download the game on itch.io.

Anyway that’s it, have a nice day!