Multiplayer, kd-trees and water
Multiplayer
Multiplayer will be in the form of a downloadable server which will broadcast its ip to the main server when it
starts up.
Players will see your server on minecraft.net, click “join game” and the game will launch as usual,
connecting to your server. Multiplayer will probably be up to 32 players.
Technically what’s going on behind the
scenes is that each downloaded server will run a very very tiny http server that does nothing more than provide an
html page with the game applet on it. This gives the applet permission to connect to that ip adress, and multiplayer
becomes possible. Combine this with some fancy framing, and it will all appear to happen on a single central web
page.
Huge levels
I added the ability to select the level size when creating a level. Be warned that huge levels really are huuuge and
will require quite powerful pcs to play well.
To battle this, I put in some more work on the rendering, switching
the entire system from a naive O(N) solution to a much nicer O(log N). My first attempt was to use a kd tree, but
that turned out to be extremely inefficient since it only split nodes into two children. Adapting it to a nice
octtree gave some nice effects.
Small levels run ever so slightly slower now because of the overhead, but culling
on huge levels is faster than before.
I also fiddled with the fog parameters to make short view distances look
better. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work too well on the transitions between lit and shadow tiles. :D
Faster flowing water
The old water system was based on chance. Water tiles had a certain percentage chance of polling each game tick, so a
single tile of water could take ages to spread. This behavior is fine for more chaotic things like grass growth and
fire spread, but water really should just rush in as soon as it can.
So I made it do so. :D (see video in next
post)
