Time for some math (excuse if its wrong):
Each chunk is made up of blocks 16 x 16 across, and 256 high (yes, the height is at 256 blocks!!)
which means a single chunk holds information about 16 x 16 x 256 = 65536 blocks.
If I set a draw distance at 30 (extremely far, farther than MC and if I'm correct, Castle Miner), it should allow me to see a world of 51 x 51 chunks (needs double checking).
Let's count some blocks:
51 x 51 x 65536 = 170,459,136 blocks (170 million)
And this is running at a stable 58-60 FPS without lag. This is on a PC, not an xbox 360. Moving around, digging, placing blocks. The engine seems extremely stable. This also, with vertical sync set to true, and using Reach profile (XNA terminology).
What does all this mean for me as a player/gamer?
A very fast game engine. Less stress put on drawing the world. More options to add more game features. Put it this way: if I enable fly mode, it is impossible for me to outrun the terrain generation. Again, the math might be wrong. I just wanted to give some idea of how exciting it will be to play a game based on this new engine :)
60fps on the xbox or on your nice gaming pc?
ReplyDeleteon the development PC, which is a VM running with a 256MB virtual graphics card, single cpu core, and 3gb of ram. win7.
ReplyDeleteI'll do some checking of xbox stats once the game gets to that point. will be interesting to see if the engine holds up to some of the other engines on the xbox 360. i think Castle Miner's voxel engine is the fastest i've seen on an xbox 360.
should get some good stats back from alpha testers on different configurations of hardware.
Inside a VM - thats cool... might still be faster than a xbox :-)
ReplyDeleteCastleMinder is not open source or anything is it? Are you just basing your opinion on playing it?
No, CastleMiner isn't open source. It's just my opinion of it's speed, from looking at it from videos on YouTube. I haven't had a chance to play it yet.
ReplyDeleteOther people have told me that CastleMiner is a fast engine, from their experience when playing it.
I think xbox 360 will run into memory problems at far draw distances. This game will need optimizations purely to get it to draw as far as possible on an xbox 360. I don't imagine any lag during gameplay, only how much can be put onto the screen each frame.