Scale/Detail

[davestevens]

I was thinking about what sort of scale we should be using, at the moment all of the items which are draw aren't very detailed, to be able able to draw with more details obviously we would need to use more voxels per item, obviously this would cause the collision detection to have more work to do.

I may be jumping the gun and it may require us to run some tests before making a decision on this, its an aesthetic as well as an implementation detail i guess. Do we want a simple graphical game or a detailed one? and can we actually run at the speed we want at the level of detail we want?

[17twenty]

Minecraft has a reasonable block size and I read most of the slow down is due to Java combined with targetting OpenGL 1.0, and even that is pretty damn fluid so I wouldn't be too concerned on using more blocks to give us more granular design.

[iamscottmoyers]

Does minecraft run on phones? Still I think since we're just drawing opaque cubes then we probably won't hit any GPU issues as long as we're careful. The problem with naively drawing so many cubes is that we waste a lot of time drawing internal faces that we will never see so we could hit performance problems sooner than we think. I've enabled back face culling which will make things faster but there is still a lot of internal geometry that we could avoid drawing if we were clever.

[riazm]

There is a minecraft mobile addition yeah. Minecraft is one block = 1m^3. But other stuff is modelled using smaller blocks.

[davestevens]

ok, so we'll probably be fine whatever we choose. i've been playing with it today and maybe its because of how its being drawn but it causes my fan to come on, nothing else really does :S
whatever, we can do some tests and see what kind of limits. with regards to issue #7 we might be able to limit the redrawing because of moving by voxel rather than a GLfloat.

[iamscottmoyers]

That fan thing is a bug, I take it you're running the GLUT version? We registered a glutIdle function which will be called whenever there is any spare processor time. Try GLUT with revision 056179a

[davestevens]

thats quieter.