after endless futzing about and tweaking i think i have something that may just be workable for this faux bevel effect i want

(note that there's a "bevel" between adjacent blocks cause i haven't made the effect dependent on the block's neighbors yet)

I dunno I'm just not feeling the actual lighting model. Its not like minecraft exactly has realistic lighting anyway: blocks are lit from two opposite sides!

But the problem with baked lighting is if you have non symmetrical blocks you have to make 4 versions of each face to get all the lighting. Not that that's super onerous

Also if I made something like a lectern that would be a lot of work to do manually for each orientation

On the other hand when I made isometric games I'd have to make two of everything to get the lighting right and I didn't mind that so much so maybe I'm overthinking it

ok i figured out a reasonable way to fudge the normals so i won't have to manually bake lighting. basically what i do is set the normals of the edges so that they point towards where the adjacent faces are pointing (90 degree bend) and then i lerp from the face's lighting factor to the neighbor's lighting factor

that gives me the result on the left. i tried just having regular, actual normals, but it creates artifacts like on the right (its accurate that it shades it like that but it looks bad)

i was worried the corners would look too sharp without modification but honestly the smooth gradient does a great job without blunting the corners

took all day but i've optimized the vertex format for blocks *and* implemented auto-bevelled terrain. shown without textures to make the bevelling clearer

here's a gif of the textured terrain toggling the faux bevel effect on and off to really show how it softens the terrain. i'm really pleased with this

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doing a side by side with my style guide i think i'm getting there. i'll probably wanna do some fancier color grading on the lighting though, and i want outlines, but the soft rounded feel of the terrain is definitely there now even though its still all cubes

i've brought back the grass, which is actually an obj model

see i made an engine before and appropriated it for this project. it could load obj models (with normal maps) so at first the blocks in my world were actually loaded from obj models

that's why i had to redo a buncha stuff to add the bevelling, since i had to generate the faces myself

I should probably start linking up chunks before I do much else so I don't wind up having to deal with a ton of "this block's neighbor is in another chunk" situations later

had a silly idea for block outlines using the bevel system. i take the dot product of the vector from the camera to the world position with the normal to determine if the bevel normal is pointing away from the camera, then add an outline based on that. there's some outlines where they don't belong but i can get easily rid of those

... i don't hate it?

had a silly idea for block outlines using the bevel system. i take the dot product of the vector from the camera to the world position with the normal to determine if the bevel normal is pointing away from the camera, then add an outline based on that. there's some outlines where they don't belong but i can get easily rid of those

... i don't hate it?

yeah i'm happy with these terrain outlines for now

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another few shots of the new outline tech

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lol the outlining has more than doubled the code in my fragment shader

texturing, lighting, and bevelling: 12 lines of code

just doing outlines: 19 lines of code

Not to pat myself on the back too hard but it's really nice how good this is turning out, like, aesthetically. It's not exactly trivial to make graphics look good when you only have a single 16x16 texture >_>

On the other hand I guess it would be fair to say these graphics are looking a little...... muddy

Eh? Eh? Eh?

another few shots of the new outline tech

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i'm commander shepherd and this is my favorite spot on the citadel

(seriously i cannot get enough of looking at this particular subsection of a screenshot i took of the outlines in my voxel engine)