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)

@eniko Now I want a fighting game where your moves destroy the terrain around you, so if you are not careful you literally dig yourself into a hole

captured a little fly through video for y'all. i can seriously just fly around this one chunk for 10-15 mins at a time enjoying the aesthetics

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debating what i wanna do with grass in my engine. atm i have a block shader, and a model shader. i feel like i could efficiently implement shell textured grass by making a shell texturing shader, but i also don't want to balloon the number of different shaders i need to render all my terrain

i could just use the model shader, but it becomes a pain in the ass to implement shell textured terrain then

i could try and combine it with the block shader but they both do really different things

hmm if i want to add bits to the shell texturing so it doesn't look bad viewed side-on i kinda have to go the model route

though i figured out i can get away with only 6 variations to get all the edge transitions that could be doable if a bit annoying

i'm overthinking the grass thing so i've made the textures required to make the shells for a 16-tile transition and i'll just generate the model for each of those 16 and implement them in the engine and move on so i don't wind up blocked by choice paralysis

if i want i can always just change it later

hell yeah, grassy voxels

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