Simple Miner

A Minecraft-inspired tech demo was developed to explore procedural generation techniques and their applications in game development. The project focused on implementing procedural concepts to create dynamic environments, laying a foundation for more advanced systems in future projects.

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Development Specifications:

Engine: D3D11 (C++)
Platform: PC (Windows)
Development time: 3 Months

Table of Contents (Click the title to go to section)

Core Tech Demo Systems

Terrain Generation flowchart

Foliage Generation flowchart

Core Entities/Mechanics

Terrain chunk
- A literal “vertical slice” of the world, extending from world bottom to world top.
- Chunk block types are initialized on chunk creation/activation based on a simple random generation scheme; the “terrain height” of each block column is based on the global block coordinates of that block’s column with a slight random variation

Chunk Block generation logic

Huge Persistent World
- A larger number (1000+) of active chunks, activating & deactivating chunks on the fly.
- Support a larger number (1000+) of active chunks, activating & deactivating chunks on the fly.
- Fresh internal hidden surface removal; unnecessary faces are not built; dig-revealed faces are.

Lighting and Digging
- Indoor/outdoor voxel-grid light influence maps, propagates around corners, not through walls, etc.
- Block face quad vertexes are colored based on light influence values from neighboring blocks they face.
- Chunk activation is masked by sky-colored fog which thickens to 100% opacity before activation range.
- Day/night cycles, in which the sky (and fog) modulate between light blue (noon) and black (night).
- Lightning strikes (from Perlin noise) which temporarily lerp outdoor light and sky color toward white.
- Digging and placing blocks – including glowstone and cobblestone – correctly updates light influences.
- Light influence values are quickly and correctly (re)calculated upon chunk activation & deactivation.
- Light influence from adjacent chunks correctly propagate across chunks, above and below ground.

Chunk lighting calculation

Rivers, Trees, and Biomes
- Biome factor:
  - Humidity: Below a certain Humidity threshold (e.g. 0.4), Grass and Dirt blocks on or near the surface are instead replaced with sand blocks. Humidity also affects Beaches (see below).
  - Temperature: Below a certain Temperature threshold (e.g. 0.4), Water blocks are instead replaced with Ice blocks.
  - Hilliness: The overall hilliness (mountainous-ness) of the terrain is dictated by this factor, determined by Perlin noise that is entirely independent of the actual terrain height Perlin noise. However, the normal terrain height Perlin noise is scaled (multiplied) by the Hilliness factor, so when the Hilliness is low, the terrain varies little; when Hilliness is high, the terrain height varies dramatically.
  - Oceanness: A large-scale, low-octaves Perlin noise determining how “oceanic” it is in any given area. Above a certain oceanness threshold (e.g. 0.5), the terrain is lowered by a certain amount, approaching the maximum ocean depth. Below this minimum threshold, the terrain is as it would be otherwise based on other factors.
  - Tree Density: The overall density of trees (or cacti) scattered across the surface. See the Trees requirement below for details on how this Perlin noise biome factor applies.
- Rivers
  - Take the absolute value of your terrain height Perlin noise (i.e. the one you had from before) in order to get “bounces” off the zero-crossing line, producing nice, nearly-endless rivers.
- Beaches
  - If Humidity is moderate or low (say, below 0.6 or 0.7), replace grass blocks (only) exactly at sea level with sand blocks instead. Areas of moderate humidity should have beaches; wet areas (high humidity) should not.
- Trees
  - Each column in a chunk has a certain Tree Density value (biome factor) to it; this represents how frequent trees are generally in this area.

Game/Graphics concepts/systems learned

Perlin Noise
- Perlin noise can be used to generate various effects with natural qualities, such as clouds, landscapes, and patterned textures like marble. Perlin noise has a more organic appearance because it produces a naturally ordered (“smooth”) sequence of pseudo-random numbers.