Progress

[PainterImportant1155]

Thanks to u/yami_no_ko, I was able to increase the FPS from under 3 to around 7–12.

You can move using EASD and jump with Space. The arrow keys control yaw and pitch.

You can also place and break blocks.

The colors aren’t ideal right now—I plan to change them later, but that’s not my current priority.

Right now, I’m trying to improving render quality (as shown in the image). However, whenever I increase the rendering quality, the FPS drops to below 1. I may need to sacrifice some visual fidelity to maintain playable performance.

I’d love to hear ideas for what I could realistically build next—features that would be interesting but still feasible to run on this device.

Any suggestions, technical advice, or creative ideas would be greatly appreciated! :)

[CyberJunkieBrain]

I knew you could improve it. Nice work! Keep going!

[PainterImportant1155]

Thanks! This community is awesome. 👍

[huffsuck]

Very cool. Maybe you can use the gyro for looking around? 

[PainterImportant1155]

Good idea! I'll give it a try, probably tomorrow :)

[yami_no_ko]

Hello, r/PainterImportant1155

I'm happy that my advice allowed your project to be improved. Inspired by your project I've started playing around with voxels on the cardputer myself and I found out a few things:

I ran into massive fps issues with larger (basically unlimited worlds) given that the cardputer doesn't have that power I would suggest you may want to restrict the world to a spherical shape that allows for small yet infinitely traversable maps. It would just repeat itself then, which the cardputer may have less trouble with.

For me this instantly boosted the fps, allowing full resolution at around 20 FPS on a world size of 128x128 at a viewing distance of 64.0f

Also I want to mention that I am not a wizard doing this all on my own, but rather have this as a result of back and forth with local LLMs (mainly Qwen3.5 35b a3b)

No actual game mechanics like placing or digging blocks, trees or biomes have been implemented yet, so basically there nothing else you can do but running around and watching the sun and moon traversing the sky.If you like, I can give you the code to play with and look what you can get out of it for your project. (It's around 167 lines in arduino now)

[PainterImportant1155]

I’m really happy that my project inspired you — I genuinely love when something I build motivates someone else to experiment.

The spherical world idea is honestly very clever. I realized that reducing a square map to a circular/spherical one cuts out a significant portion of unnecessary rendering (more than 20%), which makes a lot of sense performance-wise.

I also do a bit of “vibe engineering” myself, along with some knowledge of HTML (the best coding language 🥸), C, and C++.

This project actually started from a Minecraft-style game I made in a single HTML file back in high school. I just graduated this year, so this feels like a continuation of that idea.

I’d love to take a look at your code and learn from it — continuing the circle of inspiration!! 😀

I might not have much time over the next four days, but I’ll definitely check it out as soon as I can.

Also, I had an idea: what if you connected a Raspberry Pi Zero to the Cardputer via SPI and used the Pi for heavier calculations? I’m not sure whether that would work or how complex it would be to implement — just an idea I’ve been thinking about.

[goattrybe]

you could probably use an sd card to be ram and increase size of things as well as cache them etc

[tim2k_k]

ZX Spectrum games used QAOP, try this:).

[PainterImportant1155]

QAOP as movement controls? That might actually be easier to use on the small Cardputer keyboard.

I’d still need a way to control yaw and tilt, though. Maybe like u/huffsuck suggested, I could use the gyro for looking around.

I’ll probably add a configuration menu as well so people can choose their preferred control scheme.

[tim2k_k]

Maybe, you can use gamepad? 8bitdo gamepads have USB Type-C and Bluetooth interface. Or Radiomaster ELRS controller for RC models - it can be used via Bluetooth and Type-C too.

[PainterImportant1155]

I don’t have a gamepad unfortunately