To bad that drawback you excluded there is the reason this has not yet been implemented.
Lighting calculations are a pain in a game like Minecraft. [...] I don't expect colored lights anytime soon though.
Yeah, I live in a fantasy world where I tend to exclude such crucial things. I was only attempting to pretend as if the creators had resolved any performance issues as far as the lighting. Which would leave me to the only other drawback in my oppinion.
I do wish I knew more about programming and Tech. Thanks Slay3R? for spelling that out to me in layman's terms.
If you look very carefully in the upper left corner in nocte's video you can see the FPS. It's real blurry, but you can make out some numbers. If you pay attention to when he is looking at his transparent blocks there are significant FPS drops and vertical shearing. I don't know anything more about his engine, what language it's in, whether it's openGL or direct3D, or if he's improved it since this video was made, but I do know that he isn't using many transparent blocks and is suffering performance drops. Putting this feature into minecraft would require a total rewrite of the graphics engine to support it at all, and it would still suffer drops. When you get some moron who decides to stack 100 of these blocks in a row you will see terrible FPS.
So when you ask for colored glass you're really asking mojang to rewrite minecraft from scratch ( probably in c++ ) just to add an unnecessary graphical feature that will hurt performance and keep people with low end hardware out of minecraft altogether. Given that translation from java to C++ is not simple, the process could take a year just to get back to where the game is now. ( look at xbox and pocket editions, those are essentially re-writes and they are moving slow )
Additionally your colored glass making colored light idea would really really hamper performance and is not physically correct. Light is made of many different wavelengths, and we see these different wavelengths as different colors. When light passes through colored glass, lets say a red one for example, pigments in the glass absorb all wavelengths that are not red. So only the red light gets through and that's what we see. If you place a blue block after the red one, the blue block will absorb the leftover red light and there won't be any light left over for you to see. So adding several colored glass blocks to get white light is the absolute opposite of what would happen in real life, in real life you'd quickly filter out all the wavelengths of light and have nothing left.
@Dorrax
I really like that you paid attention to that fact "... in real life you'd quickly filter out all the wavelengths of light.." As I am a huge fan of art and perception.
On your response tho, I think the general question falls down to weather or not you would like it. wich i am peaked to know weather or not you would like it.
It seems that because of the performance issues you are opposed. however, is there anything other than that wich would cause you to be against it?
As a concept if it were designed off of a Red Yellow Blue design it would make sense to keep to only 3 primary colors so that there arent tons of new blocks but you might still get the same asthetic feel.
Alpha blending in OpenGL is actually quite easy. It's just two lines of code to enable it and perhaps a couple of texture loading changes. The real issue is the render order. In order to get accurate blending you have to render 'back to front'. Blocks furthest away from the camera have to be rendered first and blocks closest last. This requires sorting which can be very costly and a pain as it is also dependent on the camera angle (pitch/yaw) along with the camera position.
It's possible but just quite costly.
exactly. Infact I feel porting a version minecraft to C++ would be a difficult but very smart move in the long run.
Dorrax, you treat me like I know nothing of game development
exactly. Intact I feel porting a version minecraft to C++ would be a difficult but very smart move in the long run.
It would be just another minecraft clone unfortunatly. While minecraft might have been better in C++ instead of java, notch used java, and minecraft is the best minecraft clone. While alpha blending is easy the hard part is depth sorting. Even if you can just turn it on with 2 lines of openGL, you are telling the GPU to do a ton more work every frame. In fact, I don't think C++ or java matters in that case because jlwgl uses the java native interface for openGL, so minecraft's graphics are C++ in the end. ( C++ would still reduce the CPU use, which could help, most of minecraft lag seems to be chunk loading ) If you really want to make a C++ minecraft just because you can then go ahead, but it sounds like too much effort just to get better transparency.
It would be just another minecraft clone unfortunatly. While minecraft might have been better in C++ instead of java, notch used java, and minecraft is the best minecraft clone. While alpha blending is easy the hard part is depth sorting. Even if you can just turn it on with 2 lines of openGL, you are telling the GPU to do a ton more work every frame. In fact, I don't think C++ or java matters in that case because jlwgl uses the java native interface for openGL, so minecraft's graphics are C++ in the end. ( C++ would still reduce the CPU use, which could help, most of minecraft lag seems to be chunk loading ) If you really want to make a C++ minecraft just because you can then go ahead, but it sounds like too much effort just to get better transparency.
Of course it would be a minecraft "clone", it would be minecraft. Not some kind of 3rd party development. And I know for a fact that porting games to C++ is always smarter in the long run considering we are currently doing the same thing with our games from XNA C# and java to C++. It wouldn't just allow for transparency to be implemented but for hundreds of features that Java limits through performance reduction.
Java was smart to use when Minecraft was young but it's getting to that point where it could use the upgrade. Not to mention all the money mojang has access to; the port wouldn't be that far-fetched to accomplish.
Right, I would assume your demonstration works no different than how water, ice or lava works in MC. So logically, it shouldn't make any difference how many glass blocks are placed.
Might I ask, galactic_muffin, what software do you use to create your images? They are of a rather high quality, and I would like to have such high quality images in my thread on farming.
Might I ask, galactic_muffin, what software do you use to create your images? They are of a rather high quality, and I would like to have such high quality images in my thread on farming.
Yeah, I live in a fantasy world where I tend to exclude such crucial things. I was only attempting to pretend as if the creators had resolved any performance issues as far as the lighting. Which would leave me to the only other drawback in my oppinion.
I do wish I knew more about programming and Tech. Thanks Slay3R? for spelling that out to me in layman's terms.
GARRthePIRATE Plays Modded Minecraft
So when you ask for colored glass you're really asking mojang to rewrite minecraft from scratch ( probably in c++ ) just to add an unnecessary graphical feature that will hurt performance and keep people with low end hardware out of minecraft altogether. Given that translation from java to C++ is not simple, the process could take a year just to get back to where the game is now. ( look at xbox and pocket editions, those are essentially re-writes and they are moving slow )
Additionally your colored glass making colored light idea would really really hamper performance and is not physically correct. Light is made of many different wavelengths, and we see these different wavelengths as different colors. When light passes through colored glass, lets say a red one for example, pigments in the glass absorb all wavelengths that are not red. So only the red light gets through and that's what we see. If you place a blue block after the red one, the blue block will absorb the leftover red light and there won't be any light left over for you to see. So adding several colored glass blocks to get white light is the absolute opposite of what would happen in real life, in real life you'd quickly filter out all the wavelengths of light and have nothing left.
I really like that you paid attention to that fact "... in real life you'd quickly filter out all the wavelengths of light.." As I am a huge fan of art and perception.
On your response tho, I think the general question falls down to weather or not you would like it. wich i am peaked to know weather or not you would like it.
It seems that because of the performance issues you are opposed. however, is there anything other than that wich would cause you to be against it?
As a concept if it were designed off of a Red Yellow Blue design it would make sense to keep to only 3 primary colors so that there arent tons of new blocks but you might still get the same asthetic feel.
GARRthePIRATE Plays Modded Minecraft
exactly. Infact I feel porting a version minecraft to C++ would be a difficult but very smart move in the long run.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
It would be just another minecraft clone unfortunatly. While minecraft might have been better in C++ instead of java, notch used java, and minecraft is the best minecraft clone. While alpha blending is easy the hard part is depth sorting. Even if you can just turn it on with 2 lines of openGL, you are telling the GPU to do a ton more work every frame. In fact, I don't think C++ or java matters in that case because jlwgl uses the java native interface for openGL, so minecraft's graphics are C++ in the end. ( C++ would still reduce the CPU use, which could help, most of minecraft lag seems to be chunk loading ) If you really want to make a C++ minecraft just because you can then go ahead, but it sounds like too much effort just to get better transparency.
Java was smart to use when Minecraft was young but it's getting to that point where it could use the upgrade. Not to mention all the money mojang has access to; the port wouldn't be that far-fetched to accomplish.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
-Server Owner, Eagle Scout, Minecraft Vet since '09
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
Right, I would assume your demonstration works no different than how water, ice or lava works in MC. So logically, it shouldn't make any difference how many glass blocks are placed.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
My mega long suggestion for Brewing & Farming!
I used Autodesk Maya and Photoshop.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin
My mega long suggestion for Brewing & Farming!
With Photoshop alone, you can make high quality stuff. Those diagrams I made were just Photoshop.
~Epic Space Milk Muffin