I set up an irc channel for Minecraft
Also, I’ve been thinking some about performance, and would love to hear some informed opinions on this.
Right now, I’ve got space for 256 16x16 textures in a single texture atlas 256x256 pixels in size. The use of
atlasing means I can’t join a line of two blocks (or more!) with the same appearance into a single quad but have to
break them up into individual objects.
If I were to rearrange that atlas into a 16x4096 texture, the textures
would all be on top of each other, making it possible to wrap around in U. This is west-east on the top and bottom
faces of blocks, and along the entire y plane for the rest of the faces.
Quad count is expected to drop by many
percent in almost all scenes.
However, I’m worried about the performance of 16x4096 textures on older hardware. I vaguely remember something about
textures not in the form 2^n^2 not being ideal, and that going over 256^2 can cause crappy hardware to show how
crappy it is.
I have vague plans about porting minecraft for Android in the future.
