2015/10/15

DISCLAIMER: These notes are from the defunct k8 project which precedes SquirrelJME. The notes for SquirrelJME start on 2016/02/26! The k8 project was effectively a Java SE 8 operating system and as such all of the notes are in the context of that scope. That project is no longer my goal as SquirrelJME is the spiritual successor to it.

00:05

Moving the loads of constants into interfaces should make things a bit cleaner.

00:57

Will need an actual debug view so I can see what is going on in the game without resorting to modifying the renderer.

02:42

It seems impossible to make GridBagLayout have a 3x3 layout. GridLayout works but it is highly space inefficient.

02:56

Deprived of sleep and I have been trying to figure this damn layout stuff for an hour and a half.

13:57

I added color stuff and it is insanely slow to update all of the given blocks for a chunk. When it finally goes to appear on the screen it looks like a Jeopardy board flashing in.

14:03

Appears the massive slowness is due to HTML, since I use a line break. I suppose I can just not print the position and instead just show the data there.

19:21

My flood fill algorithm works, but it takes a rather long time to calculate through all the blocks. I suppose a simple visit check on the face iteration side will help lots.

20:20

Debug view needs a grid of sorts to determine positions and such.

22:00

About 5 years ago I wrote a test game called Gamma, supposed to be a space combat thing. I wrote the renderer but I did not do much for it. The renderer is light and it is quite possible I could port it over to Squirrel Digger since it already has working projection matrixes and such. Uses 16 point 16 fixed point so it looks a bit distorted in some places. It works however. Some positions look like jello.

22:51

To increase render speed, I can also use a kind of display list of triangle meshes for each chunk. The triangles would still need to be projected to the screen however, but they would not need figuring out. Assuming 16x16x16 chunk and 6 faces where there are 2 triangles per face. That means there is a maximum of 49152 triangles per chunk. However, some faces are shared between blocks and some are not visible at all. The fill code can determine which faces to draw for the chunk. However for air blocks at the edge of a chunk, I will need a new mapping for solids based on the side of the block. Right now I just give all solids a fill of zero, which is nothing. I will need a unique fill for each corner of the cube and the faces of them. This is so when the other chunk is drawn, a complete wall is made instead for it when it is renderer. So basically there will be a triangle set for edges of a chunk. The triangle mesh can just be calculated when the renderer is called so chunks which are not rendered by the renderer will never get the faces setup and such. Depends though as it can be done by the flood filler so to speak.