Sortis - A paper empire game I settled on the name Sortis from the latin because you don't play every turn in the game instead you skip ahead and calculate what happened at the point you want to make a genuine change to what's going on. Its a way of having the mechanics of the computer adding 1 wheat each turn without you having to manually add 1 wheat each turn. The literal translation is "of the lot/ of fate/ of oracle". Its etymology stretches back to a series, chain or row; which is equally relevant to this game. I'd love for the word to come to mean computationally reducible, a generalisation of closed form.  I have been working on a game recently that is played on paper but has the emergence of a procedural game like Minecraft, without forcing the player to do all the computation that would normally require.  What I wanted from this game was the feeling of progression, automation and discovery without needing anything other than pen and paper. I als...

I have been enjoying exploring the ideas behind procedural worlds and in a previous post even showed a simple voxel renderer based in THREE.js which would load chunks when the camera got close enough to the edge. That was based on the great tutorial here which explains how to create a voxel-based mesh in THREE.js such that it doesn’t use all of the machine’s resources for the smallest of worlds. I found that to be an invaluable source of information and continually referenced back to that throughout the weekend. Looking back at my git logs for this project to be able to type this up, I have no intention of this post being a tutorial in itself, my progress was as follows: Walking around rather than observer view Sideways collision detection - not walking through the map Changing to a system where there was a sensible grass - sand - water height system Adding trees Another optimisation for terrain generation in addit...

 I've been working on an extension of the Voxel mesh in three JS that I built in this blog post and I'm thinking of developing it into an upcoming game at ManicVoxels.com To be able to expand the reach of the game to lower-power devices I needed to make the program more efficiently rendered. This would allow the players on the lower-powered devices to still have a reasonably sized world around them. When looking at the Greedy meshing tutorial from 0fps I really struggled to work out what the algorithm was. I then realised what is actually going on; you start in the top left, you go as far right as you can and then you go as far down as you can. You then repeat this until you have a new mesh. Once I'd worked out what greedy meshing was doing I could start to code it up. I've also added an animation of the algorithm below. In the animation, you can see the cursor moving from the top left to the bottom right. As if goes if the square is to be included in a new mesh then ...