Give new life to Hematite?

[bvssvni]

I would like to see some new ideas of what to do with Hematite. Perhaps we should start moving stuff into a library "voxel"?

[TyOverby]

I'm writing a voxel based game, but I don't think that it would be easy (or possible?) to abstract over the data-representation of voxel games.

Now abstracting over voxel rendering, I think would be possible and it could be very helpful.

[bvssvni]

@TyOverby This makes sense. Do you think a voxel rendering library based on the source of Hematite like this will suit your game? Or do you think of a new approach?

[TyOverby]

I haven't looked very deeply into the Hematite source, but I suspect that many of the requirements will be similar.

• Break the world up into chunks.
• Given visibility checks, generate meshes for a chunk at a time (don't generate faces for blocks that have neighbors.)
• Cache chunk meshes.
• Pull all textures from an atlas of some sort.

Basically being able to not think about the means of rendering would be a huge boon to someone like me.

[bvssvni]

Is Gfx acceptable as dependency?

[TyOverby]

Is Gfx acceptable as dependency?

For me it certainly is.

[bvssvni]

I created a new repo https://github.com/PistonDevelopers/gfx_voxel

@TyOverby If you are interested in taking the lead, then it would be nice.

We could wait a couple days for others to give input among those who have worked on Hematite, and announce the project on /r/gamedev with request for getting more people involved.

[TyOverby]

@bvssvni: I'm certainly interested in leading, though I'm still quite new to GFX and high-performance OpenGL.

I'll see what I can get written up.

[UberLambda]

Abstracting over voxel data storage is somewhat possible, see PolyVox for instance.

[abbottmg]

I actually arrived at this project specifically looking for a voxel rendering engine that I could use to play with a more mod-able minecraft. I'm a rust newb waiting for the stable beta to start learning the language in earnest, but I'd definitely like to get involved with the project as a training mechanism.

[fenhl]

As I have mentioned on IRC, I may try and start a “Minecraft server in Rust” project, which Hematite could use for the local singleplayer server once some progress has been made.

[bvssvni]

@fenhl You are welcome to start this project under PistonDevelopers, it would be a great match with Hematite!

[fenhl]

@bvssvni That would be great, although I'm still a Rust noob, and I would like to discuss some things with anyone interested in the project before actually creating a repo. Is there an IRC channel for this sort of thing?

[bvssvni]

@fenhl #rust-gamedev (there is a link in the sidebar on r/rust_gamedev)

[bvssvni]

Closing.