I have worked one week on trying to figure out how to make a world like Minecraft or Cube World (without trees and sought sings).
But I couldn’t figure out how to do it. May be someone know a good tutoral, website or a open source project which I can look at and learn from it. If you can help me in an other way I would be really happy to.
I would really appreciate any help.
Thanks a lot Tobias
First of all, get your focus into following keywords - Voxels (like pixels, but in volume - exact cubes from Minecraft you are talking about), octree and k-d tree (containers for large amounts of points which accelerates speed of access for custom locations). Also, because Minecraft were very successful project, it spawned a lot of similar projects, many of them in open source - you might want read this page with example open source GitHub pages.
As far as I understand, Minecraft doesn’t really creates some revealing ideas, it works with chunks of blocks (if I remember correctly 8x8x256 blocks). You can guess that if we have 256 types of blocks, we can really fit this big chunk in relatively small space. If we use some compressing methods, we can fit whole map on small space.
More challenging is figuring out how to draw some Minecraft level with polygons - if you want to start from pure C++ OpenGL, or, like originally Notch, from Java (I don’t know which java-graphic environment he did use). The most obvious, lazy method would be to just call all cubes with custom textures in some distance. From this we could try to optimize methods, for example trying to not draw cubes which are actually not visible. And so on, and so on.
Some examples are on tutorial here.
And, of course, I wouldn’t be myself if I wouldn’t include one of my favourite videos from UE4: here.
Tanks a lot I think this will help me : )