It seems like there are always concerns about the game lagging due to too much going on at once. I was wondering, would it not be slightly faster to render a block in a single color than to use a texture map? If that's the case, I would suggest that, upon loading the image file containing the textures during the process of loading a map, it would find the average color of every texture and save those values. Then, when rendering the blocks on the map, if the block is further away than some distance, it just colors the block the appropriate averaged color instead of drawing the texture, and if it is far away enough you wouldn't really notice the difference.
The other thing I was wondering... for things that are really far away (like the current limit of rendering on "Far" rendering distance), the recognition of separate blocks on the screen starts to decrease, so in theory it should be faster to replace all blocks at that distance with a rough approximation of larger triangular shapes. If you've ever played any old games that were at the dawn of 3D graphics back in the early 90s (Ultrabots comes to mind), which often had hills made out of huge triangular pyramids composed of only 3 triangles each, that's what I'm thinking of. It would be so far away that you wouldn't even notice it was much lower detail. 3 Triangles might be too simplistic, especially if you have build structures, but surely there is room for tons of simplification still. A chunk could regenerate this simplification when the player leaves the chunk. Since this is only a graphical representation, it really wouldn't matter if it doesn't match up between one player and the next in multiplayer.
Basically, it seems to me like having every single block that is rendered get just as fully rendered as the nearer blocks is very wasteful and not really necessary. Simpler is faster, right? And if we can get faster rates doing things like this, we could then have more leeway in doing things that would slow the game down otherwise. You could trade this for farther render distances than the current "far" distance.
using triangles in a square based game would actually increase the number of polygons on screen.
Minecraft's graphics are not what is holding the crappy computers down anyways - it's the ram and the cpu. Neither of which have anything to directly do with graphics.
you can put on fog and install a "clean" or "simple" (or whatever) texture pack as well.
Clean/simple texture packs are texture packs that greatly reduce the total number of colors, and makes all textures smaller in file size, and require less work from the GPU to render. But again, it won't help much. maybe 10 or 15 fps at max.
using triangles in a square based game would actually increase the number of polygons on screen.
What I meant by this... suppose you have a typical "minecraft mountain" that is probably about 50 blocks high, and 70x70 blocks wide... and assuming it's narrower at the top than the bottom, you probably have something on the order of 60,000+ blocks in that mountain to render. If you have occlusion culling on and it is only rendering blocks that are visible from your present position, the mountain is probably still requiring at least a couple thousand blocks to be rendered when viewed from any angle. So instead, you replace the entire mountain with 5-10 huge triangular polygons that approximate the shape of the mountain. But since it's so far away, it doesn't look much different from how it would look if you just rendered the blocks.
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The other thing I was wondering... for things that are really far away (like the current limit of rendering on "Far" rendering distance), the recognition of separate blocks on the screen starts to decrease, so in theory it should be faster to replace all blocks at that distance with a rough approximation of larger triangular shapes. If you've ever played any old games that were at the dawn of 3D graphics back in the early 90s (Ultrabots comes to mind), which often had hills made out of huge triangular pyramids composed of only 3 triangles each, that's what I'm thinking of. It would be so far away that you wouldn't even notice it was much lower detail. 3 Triangles might be too simplistic, especially if you have build structures, but surely there is room for tons of simplification still. A chunk could regenerate this simplification when the player leaves the chunk. Since this is only a graphical representation, it really wouldn't matter if it doesn't match up between one player and the next in multiplayer.
Basically, it seems to me like having every single block that is rendered get just as fully rendered as the nearer blocks is very wasteful and not really necessary. Simpler is faster, right? And if we can get faster rates doing things like this, we could then have more leeway in doing things that would slow the game down otherwise. You could trade this for farther render distances than the current "far" distance.
Minecraft's graphics are not what is holding the crappy computers down anyways - it's the ram and the cpu. Neither of which have anything to directly do with graphics.
you can put on fog and install a "clean" or "simple" (or whatever) texture pack as well.
Clean/simple texture packs are texture packs that greatly reduce the total number of colors, and makes all textures smaller in file size, and require less work from the GPU to render. But again, it won't help much. maybe 10 or 15 fps at max.
Un-rendered -> Mono-color rendering -> texture overlay?
USER CONTROL PANEL -> USERGROUPS -> SEARCHER -> SUBMIT -> USE SEARCH!
What I meant by this... suppose you have a typical "minecraft mountain" that is probably about 50 blocks high, and 70x70 blocks wide... and assuming it's narrower at the top than the bottom, you probably have something on the order of 60,000+ blocks in that mountain to render. If you have occlusion culling on and it is only rendering blocks that are visible from your present position, the mountain is probably still requiring at least a couple thousand blocks to be rendered when viewed from any angle. So instead, you replace the entire mountain with 5-10 huge triangular polygons that approximate the shape of the mountain. But since it's so far away, it doesn't look much different from how it would look if you just rendered the blocks.