Update: 8/16/19Quick overview of recent progress:- New, simplified system for handling bricks. Everything is being rewritten.
- .json format for storing bricks, which makes importing them much easier. The revised Blender exporter is close to being completely finished, and is capable of exporting entire packs of blocks all at once (or a single, selected brick, if desired instead).
- Brick grid condition checks are much faster, and avoid unnecessary calculations.
- Adjacent Face Occlusion is fully implemented, and is also designed to work as efficiently as possible. There is a significant increase in the amount of bricks that can be rendered on screen at the same time.
- A new shader editor has been purchased, and a basic, custom shader is now being used. I no longer have to rely on glitchy third-party shaders. Although, the custom shader and brick textures still need a lot of work and are not finished.
- Better management of allocated memory and garbage collection, which effects brick performance once planted. There is a noticeable improvement in performance with the changes, and more improvements are planned in the short and long term.
- Was able to render over
912,000 blocks on screen at the same time, using the recent improvements to blocks and builds (in contrast to a mere 10,000 blocks from before). The game still maintained an excellent framerate, and could possibly handle even more.
What's planned for the near future:- A new building system will be started on soon (possibly featuring two new building methods)
- Saving / loading builds (not hard to pull off)
- More performance tweaks for builds
- Finalize block textures (they're still somewhat temporary side textures especially)
- Old features will be brought back later on