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I've been working on my attempt of a game (XNA/C#) for a week now and now I'm that far to create a terrain. I'd most likely use a voxel based engine for this (similar to Minecraft), actually I've tried a lot to play around with Cube tutorials, but most of them are just very basic and don't help me a lot. Right now I've though about following structure:

Game -> Handles main tasks.

--> Invokes World class. -->

World -> Is responsible for all the tasks that happen in the world, keeps the block data.

--> Triggers Block's draw() function after giving over the screen offset -->

Block -> Draws the block at the correct screen position, given by World

However, as I need to render thousands of blocks this could be going quite hard, because I've no experience in 3D programming.

Is it still efficient to do this using the 36 (6 sides x 6 points for 2 triangles) indices method because I could imagine that this eats a lot of memory?

Daniel Koenen
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  • Is minecraft actually voxel based? I thought it was just 8-bit throwback graphics, didn't realise voxels were actually used since when you look through the leaves in the trees the backfaces of the leaves aren't rendered...which isn't what voxels do – Charleh Jul 23 '12 at 15:56
  • really? I wasn't aware, sorry, but I also orientated myself on this layout: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcEEe_Z3Sw8 I guess this is voxel based. – Daniel Koenen Jul 23 '12 at 16:02
  • Didn't say it wasn't it might well be - I mean the pigs certainly look voxely, but I thought it was all polygons and chunky textures :P – Charleh Jul 23 '12 at 16:08
  • Yeah that vid looks very voxely, I thought the blocks in minecraft were polygons though - just the whole backfaces thing. Then again maybe the backfaces of the voxels aren't rendered. No idea what optimisations are applied – Charleh Jul 23 '12 at 16:13
  • Does no one here knows reliable tutorials? – Daniel Koenen Jul 23 '12 at 18:03
  • With a quick google I see lots of results – Cyral Jul 23 '12 at 20:27
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    Note: Drawing blocks one at a time is going to really kill performance. – Andrew Russell Jul 24 '12 at 06:29

1 Answers1

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You can use the techcraft terrain engine.

Its open source, meaning you can edit and contribute to the code, and it is very extensive, with almost anything someone would need to start.

In addition to that, a quick google search brings up numerous resources for getting started with this style of a game engine.

Cyral
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