ok i figured out a reasonable way to fudge the normals so i won't have to manually bake lighting. basically what i do is set the normals of the edges so that they point towards where the adjacent faces are pointing (90 degree bend) and then i lerp from the face's lighting factor to the neighbor's lighting factor

that gives me the result on the left. i tried just having regular, actual normals, but it creates artifacts like on the right (its accurate that it shades it like that but it looks bad)

here's a gif of the textured terrain toggling the faux bevel effect on and off to really show how it softens the terrain. i'm really pleased with this

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i've brought back the grass, which is actually an obj model

see i made an engine before and appropriated it for this project. it could load obj models (with normal maps) so at first the blocks in my world were actually loaded from obj models

that's why i had to redo a buncha stuff to add the bevelling, since i had to generate the faces myself

had a silly idea for block outlines using the bevel system. i take the dot product of the vector from the camera to the world position with the normal to determine if the bevel normal is pointing away from the camera, then add an outline based on that. there's some outlines where they don't belong but i can get easily rid of those

... i don't hate it? 🤔

yeah i'm happy with these terrain outlines for now

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another few shots of the new outline tech

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lol the outlining has more than doubled the code in my fragment shader

texturing, lighting, and bevelling: 12 lines of code

just doing outlines: 19 lines of code

On the other hand I guess it would be fair to say these graphics are looking a little...... muddy

Eh? Eh? Eh? :D

i'm commander shepherd and this is my favorite spot on the citadel

(seriously i cannot get enough of looking at this particular subsection of a screenshot i took of the outlines in my voxel engine)

captured a little fly through video for y'all. i can seriously just fly around this one chunk for 10-15 mins at a time enjoying the aesthetics :D

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debating what i wanna do with grass in my engine. atm i have a block shader, and a model shader. i feel like i could efficiently implement shell textured grass by making a shell texturing shader, but i also don't want to balloon the number of different shaders i need to render all my terrain 🤔

i could just use the model shader, but it becomes a pain in the ass to implement shell textured terrain then

i could try and combine it with the block shader but they both do really different things

hmm if i want to add bits to the shell texturing so it doesn't look bad viewed side-on i kinda have to go the model route

though i figured out i can get away with only 6 variations to get all the edge transitions 🤔 that could be doable if a bit annoying

i'm overthinking the grass thing so i've made the textures required to make the shells for a 16-tile transition and i'll just generate the model for each of those 16 and implement them in the engine and move on so i don't wind up blocked by choice paralysis

if i want i can always just change it later

hell yeah, grassy voxels

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here it is compared to my style guide image. how did i do, chat?

i probably wanna pull the grass away from the edge a bit more because it obscures the outlines, but i'm pretty happy with this overall

here's another close up i really enjoyed of the terrain in my block game

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i've got columns of chunks working, but they're not really connected at the moment so i gotta fix that next

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chunks connect properly now! with bonus shot of the sprawling cave systems beneath the surface

i made a staged chunk generation system where chunks can request their neighbors be generated but only up to a certain stage, which keeps the generation from going infinitely in all directions, because the requested stage must always be lower than the chunk's current stage of generation

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who's got two thumbs and infinitely spawning terrain? this girl 👈👈

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@eniko Another headache appears when you allow voxels to be mutated (i.e: breaking/adding blocks). Now a mutation can invalidate meshing work that's currently in-flight, leading to a 'missed' block change that's not reflect in the mesh. We solved this by incrementing a per-chunk counter every time a mutation occurs. If the result of the generator's work doesn't match the most recent counter, we spawn another generator to ensure we dont miss the change.

It's a proper distributed systems problem!