A full year since my last post. What a slacker. Well, here’s some pictures of the past weekend’s crafts.
I’ve never actually played MineCraft, it always seemed pointless to me. I’ve got a tote-full of Legos in a closet that hasn’t been touched in a decade. If I wanted to build things with blocks, I’d take them out. But the thought of programming a block world appealed to me on some level.
Seeing screenshots and videos of MineCraft in action, I thought it looked ugly, crude, and far too simplistic. So I started with the thought of dynamic lighting. Deferred rendering seemed like a good place to start. So I threw a bunch of hardware instanced quads at a deferred renderer, added a thousand lights, and that’s the basic result.
In my opinion, it’s not bad for a long weekend’s work. So now I’m wondering, why does MineCraft look so bad? If I can do this in a weekend, what are the people behind MineCraft doing fulltime? They’ve gotten hundreds of thousands of dollars from players, right? Pay someone to make it look better.
(And no, this is not me trolling for a job.)
