Building the new 3D engine for my game

follow me on twitter for bad takes: / jdah__
and check out Atlas VPN while the deal lasts ($1.99/mo for 3 years): atlasv.pn/jdh
GITHUB: github.com/jdah
EDITOR: NeoVim
VIMRC: gist.github.com/jdah/4b4d98c2...
THEME: gruvbox
RESOURCES:
learnopengl.com
opengl-tutorial.org
shadertoy.com

[@memetech-]

This guy is like “welcome to remaking minecraft, today we’re doing something completely different”

[@jdh]

the classic bait and switch 😎

[@memetech-]

@@jdh yup. Just below the right amount of variety with is very slightly more than I like

[@memetech-]

Great video though

[@memetech-]

@@jdh also I suggested in another comment that you should add smaller light-only voxels to make the already barely noticeable effect even less noticeable

[@aprilnya]

and then just remakes minecraft again

[@Samsam-kl2lk]

with the fixed camera perspective, you also only have to create meshes for two sides of the cubes (as long as that doesn't give issues with shadows)

[@geekume5539]

does he have a discord server?

[@Cr_nch]

I think that likely would cause issues as the other faces would be needed to calculate shadows

[@jdh]

this was something I considered :) but as the shadow meshes need all faces (all back faces at least) the mesh still needs to contain the whole cube unless I wanted to start building two separate meshes. However you could always cull other faces via normals during the color/normal pass or index the mesh to only draw -Z and +Y faces on cubes. lots of potential solutions!

[@luna010]

@@jdh disclaimer: this is less of an actual suggestion and more of things that i think would be cool and interesting. maybe you could something like screen space shadows/raytracing for this. They have the benefit of being pixel perfect, and it seems to me like an orthographic voxel game with 2d sprites is pretty optimal for using them. Raytracing voxels is pretty simple, especially if you don’t have to do anything other than shadows. for the sprites, screen space shadowing could be used. the main limitations of screen space shadows are that it only uses depth information so it can’t draw things off screen or tell the thickness of objects, but the sprites don’t have varying thickness and are small and unlikely to cast shadows from offscreen. You could also probably just do some skewing/stretching to the sprites since it’s all orthographic. and they’re in the form of textures. i might try making a shadertoy with some orthographic shadow stuff now..

[@freezado8573]

I find it still hard to sense the correct depth and everything. Maybe you can make surfaces (textures) increasingly darker the lower you get height-wise. Kinda like prebaked shadows

[@jowsey]

Yeah that seems like a good idea, I also still found it really had to understand the depth

[@samuelmcgowan2565]

I second this.

[@Kopigan]

Probably the perspective is the problem. Currently it looks like a 45 degree angle, so the front of a block blends perfectly with the top of a block two places in front. Maybe the angle should be steeper.

[@nsa3967]

@@Kopigan agreed. the character also looks funky with that angle

[@Phroggster]

It sounds like this just needs some 2.5-dimensional ambient occlusion.

[@pneuma-studios2036]

Damn I kinda wish we would've got the "Minecraft-ultra-deluxe-Amogus-Edition"

[@marvinhermann2300]

A M O G U S

[@splatuuber4233]

Maybe next time... I mean we still can dream

[@pneuma-studios2036]

@SplÅtuuber I hope 🙏

[@crst_05]

Honestly I would buy that

[@pneuma-studios2036]

@Trayambak It's too late 😔 Let's shoot for 420 xD

[@blehmeh9889]

2:00 Woah, you should turn this into an Isometric dwarf-fortress-like strategy game and release it as "Ruby Dung".

[@cst1229]

BTW I think RubyDung stood for Rubylands Dungeons. Can't remember the source.

[@jdh]

wow what a good idea! maybe when that project gets stale I can reuse the textures for some cube based survival game later on!

[@devdutmn9608]

@@jdh xD, btw this game looks great. I am learning opengl too and I'm recreating Minecraft, that's how I found you. And I'm so glad I did! Tysm for the content!

[@CaptainWackyLaterNamedHomer]

Fun fact: rubydung was a predecessor to minecraft (which also was made by notch)

[@Ketpain]

@@jdh yeah at the 2:00 mark, I'm trying to learn C++ (I'm literally a nub still though) so I could basically remake a DF like game (could implement The Sims style view as well, where it cuts away a portion of the material to see through things, since it's multi level). The biggest take away from Dwarf Fortress is that it's not multithreaded well if at all, and there's no art. That 3d view that you have is literally something I want in the future.. we'll see if I can even make it that far at all...

[@raidcrhonos]

* Dude's spending years making an easy and intuitive interface for their 3D modeling software * This dude: nah... I'll just "type" it out

[@notalostnumber8660]

As the other comments say, change the angle, as the perfect π/4 makes it harder on the depth perception Orthogonal projection is hard, but it's looking neat!

[@7amalex763]

JDH, you inspire me with your PC Building and coding. I jumped into a new job soldering electronics to PCBs, and I am equally excited about software, too. I wouldn’t have gotten as far this year without your inspiring youtube videos. Thank you 🙏

[@thatoneguyyouforgotthenameof]

“I won’t abandon it after two videos” Hey at least it took over two videos

[@fntthesmth423]

This guy is the antithesis to "graphic design is my passion"

[@alexr.j2518]

I think having the whole perspective rotated around the up axis would make it easier to feel the depth of the world. Great video :D

[@GerinoMorn]

Interestingly, you are literally reiterating my thoughts and ideas, testing them, and hitting all the pitfalls I was afraid of. Meaning I will wait for you to succeed and then have my gamedev be a breeze ;)))

[@amilismurfs]

this looks great. I'm excited to see where this project is going.

[@raidcrhonos]

Very nice. I always get excited to see those when they come out

[@CreaZyp154]

I love your videos. For the game, I suggest reducing the brightness (making it darker) of the blocks depending on its height

[@puppergump4117]

I'm guessing he tried something like that but there's 16 levels of block height and 16 levels of brightness so it might be weird

[@smellthel]

I’m excited for where he goes with this!

[@raphaelmateusdasneves772]

I have never seen the inline keyword being used so much outside my own code. Maybe it will become strong again one day :')

[@jdh]

inline = speed ofc

[@tappineapple3381]

Or you can be a menace and use it on your global variables

[@puppergump4117]

@@jdh I heard it's slow to compile lots of inline functions

[@switchblade6226]

friendship ended with inline, constexpr is my best friend now

[@memetech-]

Maybe make the light calculated using 9ths of a tile or even just 4ths so it’s harder to tell it’s just voxel lights Voxel lights lite Voxel lites

[@maxemore]

voxites

[@krtee43]

You should do a series where you break down each stage of game development and explain some of it in more detail

[@ossiehalvorson7702]

Including developing the engine? Seems like a good way to kill months and lose subscribers. It's paint drying level boring when you get into the nitty-gritty. It's more interesting to me than the average person, and a lecture on quaternions still about killed me. Game developers clench their teeth through those bits so they can get to the stuff that's actually fun about game development.

[@puppergump4117]

@@ossiehalvorson7702 Maybe the real fun about game development was the math we learned along the way

[@limeedhot]

@@puppergump4117 :|

[@griffinbrooks6748]

JDH: releases 2 videos to us in under a month Me: why the gods have bestowed upon us **LIGHT**

[@deathzero0212]

Funny how I just made something like this 2 months ago, only in the reverse direction your project is headed. I started with a 2d engine that rendered tiles isometrically but contained 3d data structures for the world. After a lot of struggling when it came to the concept and visual design, I ended up rewriting it into a 3d engine instead and just making it 1st person while the underlying code remained mostly the same. I look forward to seeing what you do with this concept. It's tricky but there is some potential for unique gameplay mechanics if you can solve the visual design issues.

[@drowned_minds]

i have only few youtubers i get excited when they upload and you are one of them(been since you made your first c++ mc vid)

[@divine203]

The best engineer on youtube....wish to be as good as you someday

[@kajvanveen5302]

Same 😂

[@mgssscrazy]

Practice makes perfect! Choose project ideas and implement them. The best way to learn many of the topics in his videos is by building stuff. You'll get there with dedication and effort 😉

[@kajvanveen5302]

@@mgssscrazy cant even come up with ideas 😂

[@JoshuaBarretto]

One technique you could try to improve the light map is to track the light level using a fractional value rather than an integer. The algorithm is exactly same, with one exception: the first iteration of light propagation gets a directional bias (from the light's intensity, to the intensity - 1) depending on where the light source is within its source tile. That should smooth things out and make the tiling less obvious while the light source is in motion.

[@blubloos]

I think it's looking pretty interesting thus far in terms of the graphics style. Interested to see where this goes

[@josefambruz9473]

I was once creating very similar game in terms of looks, but never finished, so I like to see that you are doing something similar. To make the depth be even clearer, you could tint the blocks based on how far are them from camera, kind of what they are doing with the dwarf fortress steam release.

[@spacefanatic1223]

Your hard work is appreciated!!

[@nolram]

A few ideas : - RGB lighting ! - HDR lighting, increase the maximum light luminance for creating bright lights and then you can also do - HDR Bloom/Glow :) - ACES tonemapping

[@ahmetardakavakci]

at first i thought you were using an ide because of the code completions and bottom tmux screen, your vimrc is amazing

[@harshchikorde9495]

Can you please make your videos a little more descriptive like about an hour because I love what you do and wanna get through your process of learning and execution in detail.

[@ganglians]

You've successfully coded your way out of drawing

[@Luckychew]

That lighting technique is cool o-o

[@crst_05]

Great job jdh, thanks for being so inspiring!

[@loganhodgson6343]

A better way to get some depth is to change the angle of the camera slightly to make the elevation change of the tiles a different size than the surface tiles.

[@HedenCop]

Super cool video. I'm blown away that you can hard code all this. I'll stick to my nice premade 3D engines 😳😂. I would like to add that i am not so sure about the perspective, i still can't tell how tall things are and where they are in the map. That being said this was still an awesome video, looking forward to more

[@CYON4D]

Very nice work but I would have definitely kept the isometric perspective since it is the best view for conveying the sense of depth.

[@byronwezvo]

Please finish this project... It has a lot of great engineering from ground 0 🙏

[@HomeofLawboy]

The camera angle makes everything really confusing most of the time, even with hard edges. Others have sugested changing the angle (just the tilt) to break the simmetry between the side face and the top face, I also wanna suggest experiment with not perfect cubes, e.g. the cube's height is 90% of the top face's lenght, so it's still a square face at the top but more of a squashed down cube. Other than that, loved the art style, good job!

[@user-rr8hc8ls5n]

I think this can go on forever

[@tristacho5472]

2:00 gives me age of empires 2 vibes for some reason I dig it

[@Liloulalalala]

one of the best coding channel, your videos are really realxing

[@Omena0]

The first test looked the best, try putting the camera angle diagonal, it will be better

[@creatar2446]

I feel like the grass blocks should have a normal map too because now it looks a bit like plastic with a flashlight shining on it, keep up the good work.

[@Skeffles]

I really like how stylised the game became as the video progressed. I've been thinking if similar lighting could be possible in 2D isometric games without resorting to 3D. 3D might just be the easiest option 🤷‍♀️

[@Kiwi-fl8te]

You'll have to do something for the player to be visible in tight places or behind walls. I think one possibility would also maybe be to let te player rotate the camera by increments of 90 degrees. But even that won't fix the issue of tight spaces. Maybe when the player character goes behind a wall, that wall should become transparent ? Seems like for a Minecraft-type game this might be tough. If I recall correctly MiniCraft, one of Notches smaller projects, had only two layers, with the ground you walk on and 1 height of walls. Something akin to Don't Starve. You'd then go underground at specific places and the underground would be a two-layer space following the same rules.

[@kenopyowo]

2:04 that could be a really cool wallpaper

[@morgan0]

it may be easier to discern differences in height with something like minecraft's connected textures (i think just a modded in thing). so like on the inner edge of a block there are some tufts of grass, and everything is a little darker, and on the outer edge it kinda falls off a bit. or something like that. bricks could use a different arrangement that creates a border, plain dirt could have rocks on the inner edge instead of dirt, etc. though i do admit that it would be more work than what you did already.

[@liamtaylor2560]

Ah, so we're remaking Habbo hotel now. Got it

[@Aidensan11]

i actually love the 2d sprite with 3d lighting

[@skejeton]

this is like roller coaster tycoon craft

[@Serioustar]

I imagine you're one day going to make your own coding language

[@luauvm]

He has, iirc he made an Assembly language for his own computer

[@puppergump4117]

Maybe he can name it after a snake and completely destroy the meaning of programming

[@Test-iv4pm]

It is difficult for me to tell what is casting a shadow sometimes when the shadow is next to an edge-detected edge.

[@MESYETI]

would love a game that looks like this

[@kxtbit]

Could you theoretically make the lighting spherical instead of “diamond-shaped” by replacing the breadth-first search with one that works based on the Euclidean distance from the center?

[@nini700]

I'm annoyed youtube doesn't recommend me your videos. I love them u_u

[@joelitoperez3108]

Great content keep up the good work

[@martingogaming1777]

Where did you learn OpenGL? Nice vids, can't wait until the next one!

[@mashug1731]

He has mentioned his tools in description

[@martingogaming1777]

@@mashug1731 THANKS, how didn't I see that lol

[@magmaslasher7604]

My favourite part of this video is when multiple times I understood a concept *better* than I did after he explained it.

[@deionalexeigonzales]

dont worry the 6 months upload schedule if far better than code bullet's 1 year(maybe) schedule

[@Lim95]

Finally back to game dev

[@M4gidev]

This is very similar to the game I'm making, making it really difficult to understand the depth of the objects, the solution I came up with was to make a blur and fog based on the height, the most challenging of all is to make a good algorithm to be possible see inside closed areas, this is not found on the internet, I had to create my own solution.

[@AlienLogic775]

I think you should use a camera angle like at 2:00. It way better to give perspective. In the other, even with black edges, we cannot estimate height.

[@heitorheitorheitor8158]

For those who want to know what’s his neo vim theme is, it’s called *gruvbox*

[@slBrelaz]

I don't care how much the game changes, whether it's a good or bad game, or whether or not you finish it (although for your sake I hope you do). I'm subscribing because I love devlogs. So please, please keep this up longer than 2 episodes!!!

[@oobie3193]

Two games you might find inspiration from could be Dead Cells and Octopath Traveler. Dead Cells had 3D models which were then converted into 2D via rotoscoping if I remember correctly. Octopath Traveler is a 2.5D game that has a similar look to the first iteration of the sprite earlier in the video.

[@mobslicer1529]

could you like in-depth tutorials on rendering cause that would be epic

[@mythenmann]

2D sprites with normal maps... this looks awesome.

[@teslainvestah5003]

Your smooth lighting is much better than minecraft's! Minecraft has had broken ambient occlusion since it was first added, and you just... didn't do it wrong. What an amazing thought.

[@kleesup]

He is back!

[@RedSW]

looks awsome!

[@thehambone1454]

What is the technical approach used to make a 3D object look like pixelated? Is it just using gl_nearest for the textures + ortho camera? Or rendering the player to a texture and then applying gl nearest? I didn’t catch how to do that.

[@safebox36]

This reminds me of LandTraveller, it had the same 2.5D style voxel aspect. And I tried to go for a similar style but 3D hard.

[@theothetorch8016]

I love how I didn't have to watch any of your previous videos to understand "and no, I won't abandon this one after 2 videos". (#LifeOfAGamedev)

[@d3r1n]

Pure mad genius.

[@xamtastic]

This is so amazing

[@navanithkumar9359]

I like your videos. Btw which editor are you using?

[@sadhlife]

That 3d to pixel art idea sounds a lot like what Randy is doing.

[@ari_archer]

Nice, using lightline, same

[@dameck9570]

Hey, great video. Could you give some information or sources about your (n?)vim setup? I tried setting up my vim as an IDE serveral times, but most of the times I just failed

[@sleepymushroom9403]

Can you recommend any budget friendly laptops it or PC to start game development

[@vicix_dev]

Wow, so cool! It reminds me of doom and destiny world like a lot!

[@abhishekmaurya8330]

Can you please make a setup tour or workflow type of video i would love to see how the heck you code gigantic things in just few days 😁😁

[@timadams1662]

Randy did this same thing, it's crazy bruv....

[@vincentv.b.2132]

This dude makes it look so easy. Unfair :(

[@soumcaranormal6699]

This man is the definition of "hey Ferb What are we gonna do today?"

[@Psychx_]

Great video! What's that "console IDE" you're using called? It seems very efficient.

[@invisibleimpostor299]

he seems to be using Sublime Text

[@backwardspy]

vim.

[@theemacsen1518]

He is using Vim with Tmux

[@shoeman256]

What is the ide your using again? I know you mentioned it in an earlier video but cant find it :(

[@viskyboi1275]

where did you learn all this? I wanna learn too

[@TheGreatProphecy]

whats up with the weird lighting space between and under blocks.

[@andrewhamel1]

PLEASE hook me up with what this ide set up is, is it vim or emacs, and how did you get the lint/autocomplete stuff working? I am ready to drop vscode for this. Even if that means tmux

[@fossoso]

Could you please create a playlist of the songs you use in your videos?

[@martinjakab]

You make more progress in one day than Randy makes in a year

[@bp9696]

Love your videos!

[@anatolysavin3175]

hey can you make a video on how to learn programming and how much time does it take

[@neozoid7009]

Awesome Coder Heart🤣 Creating own model also from Code. Cool dude

[@BobzBlue]

can Conway's game of life be used do calculate light or something else?

[@dude3594]

Does anyone know what the song is at the beginning

[@scaffus]

This was a shitty day but you uploaded a video ! :D Love your content

[@samuelmcgowan2565]

Nice :D I think the edge lines need to be more subtle. Also, they appear to be on the outside of blocks, rather than part of them, which is a bit jarring. I don't know how easy that is to fix?

[@samuelmcgowan2565]

Also some random rotation could be nice for the textures to prevent tiling.

[@ParisMitchellVariety]

Hmm... The 3D-to-pixel thing seems right up the alley of something that @RandallThomas would do