XNA / C#: Minecraft style terrain - Progress

I made a bit of progress with my little voxel engine yesterday. The performance is now fairly good. Good enough to render a 33x33 chunk terrain (35+ million blocks) at 200+ fps on my HD4870, and that is CPU limited at the moment. If you stand in the middle of this map you can see 256+ blocks far in all directions which is about the same as Minecraft's Far render distance.

To see what kind of performance I'd get on a "real" map I quickly added a chunk loader and (crappy atm) 2D Perlin noise for the random heightmap and 3D noise for the cave-like features.

The next thing I'll probably do is make a descent async chunk loader/unloader making the map size (semi) infinite. After that it's on to the terrain generation and per quad shadow system.

Yes, I used Minecraft's textures. I'll replace them with other textures as soon as I can get a hold of some. I don't intend to rip any of Notch's hard work ;).

Music by c418: http://c418.org/music
Minecraft: http://www.minecraft.net/

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• xna
• 4.0
• c#
• minecraft
• style
• terrain
• engine
• 3d
• blocks
• cubes
• voxel
• voxels
• hyperz
• perlin
• noise
• chips
• computers

[103150162151163]

Is it possible to have a look on how you render this, and how you put all those cubes into vertex buffers? I found an example, pointing my on how to use a vertex buffer for every single cube in the map, which makes it impossible for me to draw more than 12 chunks before it goes haywire. When you got about 51k DrawCalls at 32 chunks, I go down to 12 fps. ;<

[hyperz2006]

@103150162151163 You shouldn't use a buffer per cube. That would be madness :p. Use 1 vertex buffer + 1 16 bit index buffer PER CHUNK. In other words: merge all cubes into a single mesh per chunk. That will result in 1 draw call/chunk.

[AnimationSector]

was this done with instancing?

[hyperz2006]

@AnimationSector Nope. From my experience HWI would be a lot slower. HWI generally lowers the memory footprint but it's not well suited for this task because it would mean drawing whole blocks whereas this can remove invisible quads.

[Momo5775]

C# > Java

[Tspider4]

I realy like it. Btw haters be quiet!

1) minecraft is amazing, so what's the Problem hacing a cool clone of it?

2) it is just a terrain with notch' tectures (which is quite awsome!)

3) it will never be as amazing as minecraft, because here he is using 2d Perlin noises,and notch uses 3d Perlin noises.

You can't make things like overhangs with the 2d noise.

And I'm not talking about the biomes yet!

But still...realy good job.it looks amazing.

[betalexotiger]

Hey That's pretty cool ! I plan to create a multiplayer game using voxel technology. If you are interesting, here is my last video : /watch?v=NsqlU0DCqPM

[aleexx77]

is there a tutorial for this?

[albell616]

Your video is popular on Macedonia

[MrTheswagger121]

Better the wolfs is the best mod in minecraft

[MrTheswagger121]

Creative mode is very cool just amagen you doing that mode it's the 2 best

[MrTheswagger121]

I got 1.1 and I did creative mode

[DrunkenWaffle]

@Momo5775 Yeah. Plus the fact C++ is slightly more level, although lower level.

[Momo5775]

@DrunkenWaffle I agree. C# -> Windows only, C++ -> Linux, Mac, Windows.

[Momo5775]

@RandomnessProducts You obviously don't know those 2 languages, how they work.