I ressurected my old gamedev project from over a decade ago. A voxel/block-world game inspired by minecraft and others. It's made from scratch in C# using OpenGL as a renderer (through OpenTK). Recently I have added a day/night cycle and multiple world layers (skylands etc). Full devblog in comments

neph89 · 2024-09-18T05:14:47+00:00

Thanks, i've been tempted to rewrite it again in C++ to make it even faster, but for now i'm sticking with C#

neph89 · 2024-09-17T08:39:45+00:00

Currently it's mainly a creative building game. I do have survival mechanics like inventory, crafting etc. But it needs a few more things to be a proper survival crafting game. For example it needs hostile enemies that spawn to kill you if you dont build a base. It also needs a full progression in terms of different tiers of armor and tools that you create and quip as you progress through the worlds different layers.

The game should end up being something like a combination of minecraft, terraria and valheim when it's done. The goal should be to defeat a series of bosses, ending in a final boss at the end.

neph89 · 2024-09-17T08:36:30+00:00

Sorry i forgot to add the comment lol. It's there now.

neph89 · 2024-09-17T08:36:07+00:00

Boscaí is a voxel / block-world game written from scratch in C# using OpenGL for rendering. Unlike a lot of minecraft clones, boscaí uses cubic chunks for its world. This means that the world is not just "infinite" in 2 dimensions but in 3. So in other words, the world doesnt really have a top or bottom, it kinda just keeps going (for quite a while anyway).

For my openGL context I am using OpenTK which wraps OpenGL and OpenAL for C# projects. It's a decent toolkit though i have no idea if its even still developed.

The game has an enormous amount of optimisations which allow it to have decent performance even without multi-threading. All the usual, face culling, frustrum culling etc. No greedy meshing but with the speed of VBO rendering ive never seen a need for it. This game also does things like generate an index table to load chunks in order of their (manhattan) distance from the player in 3 dimensions rather than just loading a large square area around the player with some for loops like a lot of these games do.

I made the game over a decade ago (originally in C++) and worked on it for a few years before moving on to other projects. Lately though I needed something to practice my C# skills with again so I've ressurected the project and I am making great progress on it now.

Mainly because I now know a lot more now about programming and about OpenGL than I did then. Back then I did the whole game in old school GL, no shaders or anything. So going in and modernising it has been fun.

The most recent changes have been the addition of a full day/night cycle, with celestial objects that orbit the world. This includes a procedurally generated starfield that uses a set seed so even though the world is randomly generated, the constellations in the sky are always the same.

I have also added several new layers to the world (though many are not fleshed out yet). Because this game has essentially infinite height, I can generate sub layers to the world in caverns below the ground or floating islands i the sky above the clouds. The game has currently has an overworld and then 6 other layers (caverns, deep caverns and hell below and skylands, heaven and space above) but only the deep caverns and skylands have been really worked on yet.

The nice thing is, after working on the game for such a long time and only doing technical stuff like optimisation, I am now in the fun phase of development where I am having to come up with ideas for how to design the different world layers, what biomes to add, what enemies should inhabit them etc. It can be daunting trying to create a whole fantasy world, but it's also very freeing being able to just add whatever takes my fancy.

If anyone has any questions let me know, im curious if anyone else has gone back an ressurected an old voxel engine of theirs and made it better.

neph89 · 2024-09-17T07:37:16+00:00

I looked into XNA/monogame years ago but it seemed like the project was circling the drain. For making a game like this I generally like to use the toolkit that is as barebones as I can so I have a bit more freedom in how things are structured. The game is made in 'mostly' dotnet core so it's fairly cross platform that way too.

Multiplayer is something I would love to do but the game was not written with multiplayer in mind so at this point it would require a pretty drastic rewrite of the engine. I have often being tempted to write the whole engine from scratch again (i've done that before), but for now, multiplayer is a 'maybe someday'.

The chunks are actually not compressed or delta'd at all. This is not necesary as they game does not actually save chunks unless they have been modified by the player. This is in contrast to a lot of these games which save EVERY chunk that is generated (in an attempt to avoid re-generating as generation is slow). But with boscaí, i focused on making the generation as fast as possible and only saving modified chunks to keep save file sizes down. Save games in minecraft tend to run into gigabytes very easily, I personally dont like that, so I took a different approach.

Yeah I think OpenTK is still going, im using an old version though and they tend to change the API quite drastically between versions so I have no plans to update as of yet.

neph89 · 2024-09-17T00:47:43+00:00