8-Bit Minecraft Pt. 2: There's A Reason This Doesn't Exist

The first 100 people to use code INKBOX at the link below will get 60% off of
Incogni: incogni.com/inkbox
The progress on creating a crafting and mining game continues, now with a new release title: 8-Bit Blocks. This installment features a brand-new physics engine, including 3D collision and gravity, building, the beginning stages of mining, inventory management, and many more details all painstakingly programmed in 6502 Assembly for the Commander X16 system. The first release of 8-Bit Blocks is available now (see details below).
What happens when classic mining meets 8-Bit architecture? Pure insanity. I share some tips and tricks in this video that go over exactly how I managed to pull off what at first seem like an impossible programming task: create an interactive 3D world that you can climb around, build bridges in, and be able to create anything you can think of. From laying out the inventory in memory, to saving CPU cycles by re-drawing only highly calculated sections of the screen, this update has it all.
Play the alpha release here at: notin.tokyo/8BB
Join the conversation: / inkboxathenaeum
Other resources:
Minecraft tutorial footage:
• Chop down a tree in Mi...
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[@InkboxSoftware]

The first 100 people to use code INKBOX at the link below will get 60% off of Incogni: incogni.com/inkbox

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

8-Bit Minecraft: There's A Reason This Doesn't Exist

[@JimMilton-ej6zi]

it's a scam

[@yourneighbour3309]

great vid

[@TSTRUSS]

its like promoting temu and established titles, its a scam but most creators don't know that

[@JimMilton-ej6zi]

@@TSTRUSS Either way they should be responsible for anyone who uses their affiliate code and ends up scammed by the service, that's the only way these types of scams will stop.

[@mindthemoods]

Here's an idea: what about a control to rotate the current chunk 90 degrees? So you could see multiple sides of things? I'm sure this would be super easy to implement and would in no way totally break every core system you've made thusfar.

[@yuval3210]

😂😂😂

[@TheGeekRex]

I do wonder how difficult that would be. I don't know a thing about assembly or anything, but wouldn't it simply involve reading the chunk data in a different order? So instead of north to south, you read south to north. Then you just recalculate the player's position and rotation.

[@Gipsy_T.]

Hahahaha that was such a clever joke

[@anchs2501]

​​@@yuval3210 Dear yuval I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to offer a friendly perspective on your recent comment, which contained the emoji "😂" in response to the assertion that "a control to rotate the current chunk 90 degrees would be easy to implement." While humor and laughter are often delightful in the right context, it's essential to consider the appropriateness of such expressions. The original comment simply stated the feasibility and grants of implementing a control to rotate the current chunk 90 degrees which is a straightforward observation and not inherently humorous. Using laughter in response might inadvertently convey sarcasm or belittlement, which may not align with the intention of the original comment. When participating in discussions, it's valuable to maintain a respectful and constructive tone, acknowledging the merit of others' input. By doing so, we can foster a more positive and supportive online environment for everyone. I appreciate your understanding, and I look forward to more engaging interactions in the future. Best regards, Anchs

[@teets3000]

that sounds so absurdly complex it'd be worth it just for the joke

[@mindthemoods]

As both a Minecraft and arcade nerd, I love the absurdity of this project. Really drives home the level of dedication it took to make games with the limitations of older tech. Very impressive!

[@LavaCreeperPeople]

imagine trying to fit a huge game like Minecraft into an NES/Sega Master System cartridge

[@boney2982]

@@LavaCreeperPeoplei can’t imagine it would be very good considering the limitations now a Nintendo 64 would be interesting there’s still massive limitations but you have a lil more wiggle room

[@jmgonzales7701]

would minecraft even function in the ps2? @@leeroyjenkins0

[@blackrainbow4898]

​@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5shut up

[@CallumsArmy]

​@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist5sir, this is 8bit minecraft.

[@boozydaboozer]

Limit item quantity to 6 bits, that way you have two bits left for special flags. Like specifying that the number reflects durability instead of quantity.

[@niktniewiem4785]

yessss! Less is more :D

[@niktniewiem4785]

yessss! Less is more :D

[@thecryingsoul]

I would say limit it to 7 bits, that way you can have a clean 99 limit and an extra bit for a special flag

[@MemeMarine]

The item ID should already be enough for this since you can look up the item and check if it should be stackable or not

[@InkboxSoftware]

Some item types are stackable, some are not. Those that are can use the 6 bits to store the number of items. Those that aren't use the 6 bits to store durability.

[@Zeemis]

One of the problems you'll run into with isometric is platforming. Jumping from tile to tile, you can easily become discombobulated. Add a shadow that appears under your character as he jumps to help solve this, this'll help players gauge jump distance.

[@theposhdinosaur7276]

It certainly sounds like a good feature if the engine permits it.

[@nic_lol4202]

But then there would be the problem of having to render the shadow on the lowest block under stanley, since it wouldn't really make sense to have a floating shadow right under your feet while you're falling. Also there would be the problem of having to split the shadow in half while you're standing between a higher block and a lower block, in 2/3 if you're standing more on the block than on the block under ect.. basically it would be needed to render every single pixel of the shadow independently from each other. Also, to make it look good it'd be needed to add a shade to every single block you can stand into in case some of the pixels of them are shadowed. So practically impossible especially with limited VRAM and colours, but this guy is crazy enough to actually somewhat do it, so we'll see

[@NerdGlasses256]

Let's be honest: If someone got this thing back in the 90's on an 8-bit pc, they would be absolutely freaked out, how amazing it is.

[@Forke13]

90's? More like 70's or 80's

[@Scott-sx9qq]

no kidding. i cant wait for enemies and objectives to make it the greatest true 8 bit rpg ever made

[@DaddyGandhi]

​@Forke13 yep seems like people forget we had "3d"(ish) graphics when doom was out in '93 and by '99 we had real 3d with unreal tournament 1 and system shock 2

[@elibecton3558]

most computers were 32 or 16 bit btw, so he would have a lot more to work with

[@ciclon5682]

@@DaddyGandhi actually despite its primitive nature Doom was a fully fledged 3D engine, despite not being able to look up or having rooms above rooms all the collisions and the world itself in doom 1 and 2 are code-wise speaking actual 3D representations with true collision detection and rotating/scaling. the doom engine doesnt simulate 3D it IS 3d. just very archaic.

[@GermanTopGameTV]

When you went into the house, an issue with the current design showed: There's no way to "hide all ceilings". Since you don't have the luxury of the first person cam, you need to somehow be able to hide ceilings, otherwise any cave visit or interior space will suck. A cheap way would be to simply stop drawing blocks that are above in Z and infront of the player (with that meaning the sum of x and y exceed of the block exceed the sum of the x and y coordinate of player itself). This way you could achieve something similar to the sims, where you could hide ceilings and walls in front of someone. A +-1 addition can be used to toggle between "no walls", "half height walls" and "full height walls" if you'd like that option.

[@ibiuld443]

option to cull blocks above player's head is a really good idea

[@icantthinkofaname4723]

My idea would be to not render any blocks that are in front of the player(meaning that their x, y, and z coords are all greater than or equal to the player's, assuming that greater is closer to the camera), but only when the player would be completely covered by blocks. You'd probably also need to render any block faces that shouldn't be visible as black, to prevent x-raying.

[@eboshidori7748]

i know it would probably take a while to redraw (computationally) but redrawing from different angles would be great combined with the suggestion to cull blocks above the player's head; you could even reuse the old code to have 8 directions for the camera. but i would suggest making the top of the block the same size visually as the side of the block for consistency

[@bennettcox1857]

my idea was to add a block for the door and maybe a clear block that indicates a cave entrance, and entering these blocks changes the whole world to the interior space you're entering

[@Brok3nC4rrot]

idea: when your cursor is over a block it should show on screen what the block type is, so that if you're selecting an occluded block (say, you're stuck down a hole or inside your beautiful dirt house), you know what it is that Stanley is looking at

[@SWRDMaster]

And auto highlight the block you are walking towards so you know if it is lava or air.

[@miniepicness]

could maybe draw the same block in a corner or somewhere of the screen

[@AB-Prince]

one feature I think could be useful, if possible, is to have all blocks 2 blocks above the player be invisible if the player is below a celing. so that tou could navigate caves or the interior of a house.

[@haphazard1342]

This might need to be a quick toggle, so that you don't lose track of things "above". It would be cool as a translucent overlay but that's probably too difficult/expensive to implement. It would probably require an extra rendering pass to generate the "top" overlay and then another one to re-render the current level slice and then calculate the overlay effect.

[@fromixty]

Love to see your channel grow. I said it in the past, but I'll say it again: You're one of the most underrated channels on this platform, and I'm glad your channel was reccomended to me.

[@dingusbingus7463]

I originally found his channel from the NESOS video, I feel like there are plenty of people with this creative mindset but just don't make videos.

[@FlagerMiszcz]

this dude is advertising scam, his channel should be deleted

[@otistically]

The Science Elf and Inkbox are really taking the sentence "if exists, it runs Minecraft" to a whole new level! My respect for you two.

[@SuperJSM]

The Doom situation is becoming the Minecraft situation....

[@dannyweiss5001]

I wonder how would Minecraft run on Conway s game of life

[@Bobbias]

@@dannyweiss5001 very very slowly :)

[@alexela_]

Yeh, I watched both! Even Zachary Staines is trying to get everything to run minecraft!

[@WHYNOTONY]

5:28 the logo colliding with the subtitles was incredible

[@dacueba-games]

David must be thrilled to have this on his computer.

[@poble]

he actually featured it on his latest video

[@reyariass]

@@poblelink?

[@pimwagemans4848]

@@reyariass kzbin.info/www/bejne/o4HYgWSCbNuhqJI

[@aidanmurray8283]

I was blown away with the first video in this series. And again now. It’s unbelievable how week this is turning out. Imagine brining this to your friends house to play in the 80’s - super cool

[@LessThanPro]

Since this is 8-bit blocks, the stack size should definitely be 8. No but really, maybe use the last few bits to affect stack size limits, like how some items are not stackable? Maybe this could even let you have durability using the stack size bits? Great job so far, excited to see how far this gets!

[@bradywb98]

Those “attributes” should be implicitly (or nominally i guess) tied to the block ID, not as a separate value like that.

[@mikafoxx2717]

A stack of 64 would only be.. well, 6 bits. Then another array entry for block type, or maybe durability counter, etc.

[@haazmat]

I love the progress, and the fact that youre not cutting many corners. I feel like most "I remade minecraft" videos would give up at making the inventory, or would make only the most basic items.

[@tomaszwrobel6387]

If you fall into a maze undergroud the outline won't help you. You should be able to change maximum draw height. This could also be used to remove roof of the house to see inside.

[@JeremyFinch42]

"Joe, they turned the frogs 8-bit." "I licked an 8-bit frog once, and I could see the clockwork villagers."

[@xx_epicgamergirl_xx6718]

You should also add an outline on top of interactive blocks like chests and crafting tables so if they are behind a block you still know they are there. Looking awesome so far, Cant wait to see it finished!

[@ShadowManceri]

For walking animation I wonder if you could just recolor the bottom 2 pixels with different shade of blue. Then it might look like the feet are moving.

[@popular_dollars]

Using the sholder buttons to rotate the cursor seems a little unnatural. Have you considered this?: Holding R makes it so the player stands still, so the D pad is free to be used for selecting the 8 surrounding blocks. Holding L or Y also holds the player still, so the up and down buttons are free to change the cursor height.

[@haphazard1342]

I would also consider synthesizing the cursor and character movement. Have the dpad control the cursor position in the x,y plane, and when the player tries to move the cursor beyond the selection range have the character move into the previously-selected position. This might end up being annoying though. Depends on whether you're doing more block manipulation or complex movement. Maybe have it toggle?

[@palmzmetal9131]

Yeah [button] + D-pad Up/Down for Z pos, and D-pad L/R for rotating

[@cst1229]

​@@haphazard1342Maybe the cursor could instead be semi-tied to the player, pointing horizontally in the last direction pressed, and vertically it can be cycled through a few positions using some button (maybe 6; up, a 4-block vertical range in front of the player and down). Though this might be a bad idea.

[@Schmidtstone]

Still amazing project! Can't wait to see where this is going

[@alantyto3627]

Man, I thought you could not stretch the limitations of Commander X16 any further, but you keep up your impressive work! Your devotion is remarkable. This project is hands down fascinating, so please keep going and good luck!

[@danielgysi5729]

This is way more depth than I expected. Well done. I can't wait to see how far you take it

[@TheAdhdGaming]

suggestion, start + (u/d) scrolls through row in the inventory, use less sprites by using 1 set of tools and changing their colors (stick separate), use smaller flowing for liquids and maybe milk as a liquid, change the player model for armor using change of color pallette, food?, health at 16 to match with the 8-bit, i hope youre having fun making this, good job IB!

[@aiden_3c]

I think having an artificial cap on the number of items you can carry at once would let you open up a few bits for extra info, like durability/enchantments, etc You could also make it so different items have a type (block/armor/tools) so you can set the number of bits allocated to what for each if needed Mostly just spitballing

[@HaydenTheEeeeeeeeevilEukaryote]

I haven’t played this but from the looks I worry the controls may feel clunky. I know it’s probably arrogant to suggest controls then but maybe something like this could be looked at or built off of: • Move: D-Pad • Jump: B • Scroll Hotbar: L/R • Building and Mining: Hold Y, then DPad for lateral aim, L to cycle layer, R to place/mine (depending on what the cursor is overlapping), and still B to Jump to reach higher. • If a sword is held, Y is just a simple attack in the DPad direction, no holding it to pop out the cursor or anything. • Quick-Place Below You: Tap Y with block selected (this seems good gameplay-wise but feels ugly). • Inventory: X My thought process is to speed up and simplify building, and because the cursor only appears when you hold Y it wont ruin screenshots. A, Start and Select remain free and unused for any other controls I didnt think of.

[@greenknight9000]

Incredible work! And I'm delighted to see Emerald Tools be included! Kinda hope that Emerald Tools are the best tier of tools, since that was always a childhood dream of mine hahaha. You're really cooking here, keep up the incredible work! Though I think that 8-Blocks would be a better condensed name for the title

[@patcunha1]

If you one day add furniture, like furnaces or crafting tables, I think it would be a good idea to add an outline to them too. If you put them inside your house you wouldn’t be able to see them.

[@pepn]

This is so impressive! congrats, I can't wrap my head around how much work went into this. Also, the game looks surprisingly playable (the outline feature is awesome)

[@idkk5335]

"should only take me about 2 weeks" 6 months later...

[@toyotaae86trueno]

"vote for you favorite mob" everyone : *W O O D*

[@-AAA-147]

i like how the early public build of this game mirrors the early builds of actual MC lol

[@norkshit]

glad to see more content on this epic project! good luck!

[@coltynstone-lamontagne]

This is super cool, i look forward to future videos on the project

[@the-guy-beyond-the-socket]

common optimisation move is to calcutale which blocks are able to be seen by checking if it has a neighbour block being air every time chunk is changed in any way and only drawing those blocks.

[@bazookasniper5167]

Why not Select+L/R for hotbar so its more like normal minecrafts controls? Also Start+Dpad seems like itd be better for block cursor

[@nikshmytov6561]

I'm very excited to see further progress. Keep it up!

[@KING-JOSEPH]

Loving the how it's turning out. Thx so much for letting us download it also can't wait to play

[@Pedrerrique]

This is amazing, please continue this project!

[@Gamesaucer]

It might be a good idea to add something like a way to display a "slice" of the world, to make it easier to go underground. Just having an outline won't be too helpful in that scenario, since you still can't see the blocks blocking your way, even if you know where _you_ are. I think the most straight-forward way of doing this would just be to have the ability to hide the top _n_ layers, which would allow you to scroll down to the vertical position you want to look at. Some complications with this method arise if you want to hide things from players like the position of ores, which could be done by rendering blocks that are covered on all sides using some placeholder "hidden" sprite instead of the normal one, until they are uncovered. Though I don't know this architecture at all, so there might be better ways to do it.

[@gavin5410]

I feel like the bumpers should definitely be for controlling the hotbar, while the start+dpad combo seems a really elegant way to move the cursor around. If you use start+dpad up/down to move the cursor's height, that even frees up another button on the right hand side of the controller

[@TheDogn]

So glad to see you're following through with this!

[@fintux]

This is starting to look super cool I'd propose select + should buttons for selecting a block instead of start + arrows left and right. It would play nicely together with choosing the block cursor with just the should buttons. Thanks for the video!

[@josycavre3608]

Whoa, this is really awesome, I like demakes and such of games and this is by far one of my favorites, I hope you keep working on it and add a lot of things to it. I have a suggestion, the outline on the player is fine but, is there a way to make it so if you go behind a block or underneath a block (roof) those blocks dissapear or if it's even possible become transparent, yk as a way to see what's going on, kinda like Project Zomboid does.

[@Temac000]

Great vid. I thought a bit about the inventory. You can theoretically store a bunch of 6 bit numbers packed together, but in case of such a small inventory it wouldn't be beneficial since you'd spend more memory on fetching/storing the number instructions, compared to how much you'd save. You'd need somewhere around 160 slot inventory to just gain net 0 compression with such a method. Also this wouldn't be as fast as just fetching a number from memory directly. So having 64/256 item slots is purely based on what you prefer more

[@work_account_]

This is turning out even better than I expected keep it up man

[@bennie.379]

this was an awesome video! excited to follow the development! this sounds like a fun project to turn my unboxed raspberry pi4 into. have a faux usb nes cartridge that loads the game when you plug it into the pi console. cool stuff man! when you get to chests, if theyre behind cover thatd be neat if an outline appeared around em whenever your white outline triggers (if a wall isnt between you and it)

[@OddyBuilds]

Simply phenomenal work! Perhaps the coolest trick you did was block placement around the player - and speaking of, I emailed you a character sprite sheet for you to freely use if you want it! Hope it helps!

[@InkboxSoftware]

Yes, I got it, thanks for your contributions!

[@lythd]

cant wait for the next video! im working on coding for the 65c02 as well so i truly appreciate the struggle, although im certainly not doing anything as graphically impressive as my surrounding hardware isn't as "impressive" (relatively speaking)

[@Illogical.]

I'm also making a Minecraft-like game from scratch in assembly! My project has been on hold since a few days ago. I will likely need to pick a different assembly language and rewrite the world generation and camera control code. I expect my project to take a few years, but right now, I need a break from it.

[@SomeBlokeOrWhatever]

Two things: 1. Ink blocks by Inkbox was a genuinely clever name. Darn. 2. Now, I dropped out of a programming-related major because I lacked the touch (I'm in audiovisual production now-) but I distinctly remember one of my professors back in the day telling me that "whatever project you're working on, when you are estimating how long it'll take, take whatever estimate you made, add two and go up an order of magnitude to get the time it'll actually take" - So like, if you think it'll take 2 weeks, it'll take 4 months. Edit: Actually third thing, Subbed :)

[@assert_justice3783]

Out of the countless Minecraft clones on KZbin this is by far the most impressive

[@karyjas1]

This might be very difficult, but a very significant improvement - dont render a certain area around the player of blocks that are all above the player +2 blocks. The player highlight helps, but you can still very much get lost. Even in the very house you built

[@Quest-Giver]

I think the overlay system to show where your character behind a wall is very cool! I have an idea that you've probably already thought of as well but i'm going to comment anyways because this video is wonderful. have you considered adding a mode to only render any block lower than your current Z axis, a "no-roofs" style view, so you could actually go spelunking in a cave and have some sort of real view of what's actually in the cave? instead of groping around in the dark, navigating only by memory and trial/error. I hope you consider it, I look forward to seeing what you do next :)

[@teaspoon966]

This is awesome, both the project and the videos!

[@larrythemagicdragon58]

He says "with the next big features to be added being proper mining, and terrain generation, which should probably only take me about two weeks I'd guess" So we'll be seeing the next update in about 8ish weeks!

[@amobiusv]

I really liked the video and all the progress you've made since the last one, but I have some suggestions related to the controls. When you added the option to scroll through your hotbar for different items, the player is required to hold START and then use the D-pad. This is a good solution, but as you said, using START for this kind of functionality does feel strange. Why don't you switch it to holding the R shoulder button and then navigating with D-Pad? And I know you already using this button for switching the target block, but you could implement the same controls for this too. Hold the L shoulder button, and then left and right on the D-pad rotates the selection around you. And similarly, holding L but pressing up and down just changes the height of the selected block. This way, you go from requiring 3 buttons for block selection to only 1 (plus the D-pad), which might prove useful since the controller doesn't have as many buttons as modern ones. Only drawback is that you can't move while switching the target block, but if it wasn't a problem for the hotbar, I believe it should be fine here.

[@eboatwright_]

This is such a cool project! Can't wait to see what comes next

[@krestofelo8757]

very cool project, I like a lot what you made so far, keep going!

[@thebig_steel]

This is really impressive, you should be proud of what you've achieved even in alpha

[@rowboat10]

If you're doing start for alternative inputs, definitely use select for the pause menu, or something like select + start

[@Scott-sx9qq]

im sure you probably already noticed this but theres quite a few cases where the player will be moving as the UI overlay is drawn causing the player area to draw overtop of the UI. so you might want to change the order of operations there or make it wait until the player stops moving to draw the UI. Thanks so much for releasing alpha!!

[@RedFeather_Gaming]

I honestly love the way this is going- this is absolutle legendary stuff happening right now, keep it up!

[@boulderguywhy]

This is looking really nice! one feature that i think might be appreciated is the ability to rotate the camera, and some way of viewing the interior of a cave. It's nice that you can know where your body is underground, but how can you navigate out if you can't see any of your surroundings?? And what's the point of completing builds if certain angles of them will never be visible anyways? otherwise, i think your game is awesome!

[@DonnaPinciot]

Hey, I forgot about this! Cool to see the project's still around.

[@lokelaufeyson9931]

this is nice, great work and progress so far. I hope it gets finished.

[@a_pi_guy]

amazing videoa i was wondering when part two was coming out! 😁

[@PregnantSausage]

You and the MegaMan (for X16) dev vlogs are my fav.

[@eboshidori7748]

i know it would probably take a while to redraw (computationally) but redrawing from different angles would be great combined with the suggestion to cull blocks above the player's head; you could even reuse the old code to have 8 directions for the camera. but i would suggest making the top of the block the same size visually as the side of the block for consistency

[@mateusvmv]

Project Zomboid has a nice feature where walls get transparent once you get behind them, allowing you to see the interior of houses or look through windows. I don't know how they implemented it, or how hard it would be to translate it to minecraft glass blocks or something, since their game has all the information about what is an interior and what is a window, whereas in minecraft anything can be a window or a wall.

[@howmanylanasarethere]

I still can’t believe you’re able to do this! Amazing work! Also, I think I would use the full byte just for the quality of life.

[@pingidjit]

I still barely understand the words you say but this looks epic and I cannot wait to see what you do next

[@robinrauber2264]

Really cool project! Instead of the Outline showing up when you move behind blocks, the blocks could get transparent in a radius around the player. Would be very interesting to see how this would work so you can look inside your builds as well :)

[@DeltonAdamsLEGO]

The design reminds me a lot of Sim City 2000. Love the work!

[@furnaceheadgames9001]

7:57 in the minecraft xbox 1 edition 'a' was used for jumping, b for dropping stuff, y for inventory, x for crafting or creative inventory, the button with 3 lines was used for menu, the button with 2 squares was used for the player list and host privileges, left joy stick was used for moving, right for rotating, the cross thingy was used to move on the xy plane while flying, the big thing on the top left was used for mining, the one on the right was used for placing blocks, and the 2 little things on the top were used to switch hotbar slot.

[@thesossinay6198]

Absoluetly love this series!! Please continue!

[@loganiushere]

This is... incredibly impressive. As someone who has been working on an _eerily similar_ project, Minecraft on the TI 84 Plus CE, which uses a 8/24 bit hybrid eZ80 (were you inspired by TheScienceElf's video too?), I know how hard this stuff is. (Except I've had the luxury of writing most of the code in C++, I only wrote some performance critical code in eZ80 assembly) I never even dreamed of adding survival mechanics and I gave up on implementing chunking long ago. What you've done here is amazing. Bravo.

[@thebigheartyradish]

this game looks sick already! can't wait to see this blossom into something amazing

[@kiwirocket64]

I think there should also be some way to see things underground. I think there should be a layer system kind of where, after going down underground say like five blocks then whatever is on top will go away so that you can see what you were doing kind of like culling but for visual reasons

[@8_BitKing]

great video and I love this project! keep it up!

[@jacobpavone3477]

i think blocks within a certain radius of the player above their head should be hidden, so you're only ever seeing the floor and walls near the player, but never the roof over their head. this would make it so you can actually go inside of a house and see what you're walking into instead of stumbling about blindly with only a silhouette to know where you are. however, this does mean redrawing pretty much everything in that radius of the player since you can't exactly peel back stuff that's already been drawn. no idea how it'd be implemented, i can only think of ways around it like simply flattening the chunks to have a smaller height limit and generating structures without roofs. actual players will likely be placing up walls and floors anyway and forgoing things like a roof just so they can see the interior of their structures, so having flatter chunks might not be too unreasonable.

[@misterk7_-]

this is like the ultimate crossover over channels, games and content I love

[@steegen101]

Start + D-Pad seems better for the cursor than Y + L/R to me, since you could get some more control over which block your cursor is on with the D-Pad rather than rotating through 21 blocks in the same order. I can imagine missing which block I meant to have the cursor on & accidentally mashing the cursor 21 times instead of 20. The D-Pad method would need you to pick a new button for raising the z-axis of the cursor however. (assuming left/right control x-azis and up-down control y-axis)

[@dak1308]

You could optimize chunk rendering up to a fraction of current amount of draw calls. Since your isometric view hides blocks on diagonal (block with coordinates [2, 2, 63] won't be displayed if there is a block at [1, 1, 64] and so on) you can vastly reduce unnecessary draw calls. Let's say one chunk is 64x64x64, you only need 168 draw calls, since 168 is the maximum amount of displayable blocks. This means you need 168 diagonals going through the chunk, staring from its faces (left right and top). You can begin rendering with the bottom furthest diagonal (let it be [64, 1, 1]), since it will cross only one block you can, assuming there is one, you can draw it. Then you can move up by 1 and after reaching the top repeat the procedure at [63, 1, 1]. Going through the diagonal itself is also a straightforward process: after each iteration if the block isn't in place (it is air) increment x and y and decrement z. Repeat the loop until reaching a block and that's it.

[@backgroundnoise8013]

You are amazing, we should send you back in time, so that you could release this for the NES

[@jam560]

Insane project and im gonna be here to watch it every step of the way

[@TheInfiniteAmo]

You could do a super simple walking animation by just moving the very ends of Stanley's feet up and down (erasing and redrawing the bottom pixels alternatively). Make the center line of his pants darker blue to distinguish each leg might help too. I'd also make the player outline behind objects dashed instead of solid though that's personal preference.

[@eu7059]

14:30 maybe you could use the extra bits to save the durability of the tools, or some other aspect of the items that may be relevant

[@shadowphyre4746]

Dude this is bonkers! I can't wait for more videos on this! I really hope your channel grows to milions (sure will, and I can say I was here early).

[@Ikxi]

just watches the excel video this looks hella interesting and you make me wanna code in assembly on the 3ds instead of c++ even though I think it would be totally stupid, but kinda fun gonna try and watch this tomorrow

[@Gipsy_T.]

This is awesome, keep it up i have never been more excited about assembly in my life

[@wizarddev3506]

You should definitely make different textures for the armor in the inventory and in the game.

[@faik...]

I think adding a feature where you can see the slice of the world would be really cool, you would see blocks only up to a certain height. Because right now you can't really see inside of your house or inside of a cave for example. Not sure if you can actually implement it though :/

[@jon_franklin]

I'd say that because the inventory is probably going to be quite small and the number of block types and stackable items will be limited that 256 per stack makes a good amount of sense. I also have a feeling that with the limited controls and hardware it'll feel more annoying to have to go back and forth between building and resource gathering.

[@PatrickTheArtist715]

Yoo, this is so cool! I'm definitely going to download and track the progress of this game!

[@NimhLabs]

You _COULD_ get around potential slow block placement by giving Stanely a "building" animation. Just loop through that while rechecking the chunks display stuff. Have something be all, "hey, we figuring out how to draw the overworld"--and every time you are writing to screen with that set, you'd draw Stanely dancing or some crap

[@Kaj0Jaj0]

I love this project, it feels like something that should happen im not sure of this was the idea for it but it reminds me of the old mc isometric screenshots and yeah im not sure if you can play it on pc but even if you can't I still definitely will play 8BB

[@gunkwizardry]

the best thing about this video is the addition of copper tools!! thank you for your service

[@MakhnoDripGod]

this is really well done, however a question I have, why not use 65c816 ASM for this? less limitation and it also has a 6502 emulation mode and you can still represent everything as 8 bit, even if you stay in 16 bit mode on the 65c816 the whole time