Seeing Spheres

Looks like I dropped the ball on a weekly journal, but that's okay! I took a break from everything and had a vacation (i.e., I visited my friends and family back in Canada). Back in the game and played around with "voxelizing" spheres.

Although I could use this as a "brush" for creating voxel landscapes, my guiding reason for creating a voxel sphere is for finding a radius of chunks around the player to load. Right now I grab a cube of chunks, so to speed things up I can just grab a sphere of chunks. I'll also reduce the amount of data I'm loading into memory. Eventually I'll also do some frustrum culling so I don't render unnecessary chunks.

My approach is rather simple and likely not perfect, but for now it'll get the job done. It's simply an extension of the midpoint circle algorithm for three dimensions. In Python it looks something like this:

def sphere(cx, cy, cz, radius):
    for p1, radiusError in midpointCircle(radius):
        for p2, _ in midpointCircle(p1.x, radiusError):
            yield cx + p2.x, cy + p1.y, cz + p2.y

Some optimization tasks that I plan on working in the near future:

• Use the sphere code to decide which chunks to load around the player.
• View frustrum culling of chunks. I just render everything in front of the player right now, so this should shave off a millisecond or two each frame.
• Store voxel mesh in six VBOs corresponding to each face (i.e., [+,-] × [x,y,z]). That way we can quickly cull based on the camera's view vector instead of pushing everything to the GPU and having it cull. I expect to trim off another few milliseconds with this optimization.

Outside of that, I have a few other tasks to work on:

• Introduce a system that processes input and maps inputs to actions. For example, one could bind an "exit" action to the escape key, a "move forward" action to the W key, and so on. I haven't worked out the design yet, but will likely go the simplest route to start.
• Make scripts useful. I can run a script every frame right now, but I can't have a script run on certain events or do anything else meaningful right now. I also need to expose anything useful from the engine to the scripts.
• User interface. Thinking about using Awesomium or the Chromium Embedded Framework. In other words, an HTML-based UI engine.