This page consumed all the resources on my Late 2010 MBA pretty quickly. Not that the real minecraft runs well, but it's far more playable than this version.
Whether that's WebGL or the programming is something I don't know.
> This page consumed all the resources on my Late 2010 MBA pretty quickly. Not that the real minecraft runs well, but it's far more playable than this version.
Well. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all: yes, it should keep 4 CPUs busy. I spawn of four background workers so it pretty much hogs everything.
That said, not only the world generation is slow right now, also the VBO generation is because I do some very conservative invalidation which causes some VBOs to be generated multiple times.
I have a lot of stuff that I can do to make this faster and my local version already performs better but I caused some bugs in the coordinate system conversion and my frustum culling. I have to iron this out first before I update the live demo.
This version (rendering wise) on my Mac does actually render faster than Minecraft at equal rendering distances.
This is how we were instructed to think about transforms, in school. I'm not sure how common it is, but I also believe that this is how XNA performs transforms. It has been two or more years since I have worked with XNA though.
If and when you write a blog post about this, I think it would me more interesting if you'd write about how you generate your vertex buffers and organize your draw calls, etc than describing the world generation algorithm.
Everyone, and their dog, have been writing Minecraft-style world rendering demos for a few years now and there are also quite a few blog posts that describe the world generation algorithm. They're always an interesting read, but I would be more interested in how you get that stuff to the GPU and how do you render it.
Also some insights about WebGL limitations would be welcome. Would your task have been easier if you could memory map your vertex buffers or use instanced draw calls? This is the kind of stuff I'd love to hear about as a graphics programmer.
Yeah, the world generation is not that interesting in my version anyways. The interesting stuff is how it uses web workers to move that into the background and how the VBOs are updated (or will be once I have finished that).
Whether that's WebGL or the programming is something I don't know.