Speaking of multitasking. You know what I think would be fun, and awesome but probably isn't likely or possible(or already has been done in which case I'm an idiot and stop reading this)? Threads for calcs.

Yes, it has already been done, but it has much overhead.

But the real question is do they have GPU's?

That depends on your definition of GPU.. The LCD controller (PL110) can do some basic things itself, but nothing useful.

I'm way to lazy to check or ask if this is at all possible or whether or not it has or has not been done. This post is actually more of me showing my appreciation of the challenges of multi-threaded process/rendering.

Yep, that's really the case. Multithreading can be a PITA..

Anyway, AWESOME game/engine/thingi Vog, I haven't been checking up on it for a while but it looks GREAT!

Thanks!

Quote from: Vogtinator on June 02, 2014, 04:16:43 pm

Quote from: mdr1 on June 02, 2014, 04:13:01 pm

Quote from: Vogtinator on June 02, 2014, 04:05:41 pm

Not really. I could generate 10MB of Chunks and use that, but it'd take 10 minutes to generate and also 10 minutes to load each time you want to play.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "even though it reduces the speed".

I was asking if instead of loading a block of map each time you need it, you could begin to load it progressively when we come close to it. This progressive load would reduce a bit the speed but would make the "loading" disappear.

That's basically how it works now...

Why, then, does it have to load all the generated chunks at start? Can't you just load selective parts of the file into memory, accessing like an array? (Guessing you don't have arbitrarily large block data yet, but you could still stick that at the end (found by a position dictated in the header of the save).)

File access is SLOW. Slower than generating chunks on-the-fly. That's why I just load every Chunk in the savefile directly at the splash screen..

Ninja edit: It looks awesome. Nice work.

Tee-eitch-ex!

大声笑！它支持TI-NSPIRE CAS号！
它的工作太棒了！虽然我喜欢原来的材料  .

Great to hear that it works on HW as well as on nspire_emu

Also, most of us don't speak chineese

At my school the teachers can now take chinese lessons for free. God knows why, but my history teacher really annoys me.
Sometimes, when he walks into class he greets us with "Nǐ hǎo" 

But BTT: I'm currently in the process of thinking about redstone, and I haven't found the best solution yet.
I thought about giving each block a bit, which indicates whether it's powered or not, and a tick() function for redstone-active stuff.
The problem is, that if a wire is between two blocks and you power one of them, the wire also powers the other block.
Now, if you turn the block off, the other block is still active and the wire lets it propagate to the other block. Now both blocks will stay powered forever
Does anybody have an idea, which is simple, elegant and also fast?

Quote from: Vogtinator on June 02, 2014, 04:05:41 pm

Weird. For me it's almost a 100% improvement.. It can't be slower, though. Maybe you accidentially changed the max. distance?

Actually, the "fast mode" is faster but involves much more "loading"...

That's just because of the higher FPS you also walk faster to the next unloaded chunks. You could turn the speed to "slow", I guess.

Quote from: Vogtinator on June 02, 2014, 04:05:41 pm

Not really. I could generate 10MB of Chunks and use that, but it'd take 10 minutes to generate and also 10 minutes to load each time you want to play.
And I'm not sure what you mean by "even though it reduces the speed".

I was asking if instead of loading a block of map each time you need it, you could begin to load it progressively when we come close to it. This progressive load would reduce a bit the speed but would make the "loading" disappear.

That's basically how it works now...

It's time for the newest, greatest, most stable and best release yet: v1.0!
Bad news first: No major no features, no redstone yet. But I'm working on it 
I wanted this release to be stable and with all known bugs fixed, and redstone is the opposite...
I also focused on performance. Just try it out yourself, it's a big improvement!

But now the good news:
New features:

• Support for non-cx cals! Due to the limited amout of RAM the worlds can't get very big
• Font rendering! 
  
• Help screen! 
  
• Settings!
  
  Also reintroduced transparent leaves. You can change the walking speed now!
• Some reworked graphics!
  
• Fast mode! 
  
  The "face-combining" can be seen here, so 4 faces are drawn as two triangles now.

Bugs fixed:

• Fluids not updating unnecessarily
• Wrap around in block list
• Use the touchpad/clickpad for navigation!
• X and Z-Interpolation issues fixed!
  
  You can see close blocks now, have fun digging!
• Some refactoring..

That's about it. It took much longer than expected, but I tried to fix every bug I found 
And a short note at the end: I changed the savefile version again, so if your world doesn't open, you'll have to open and save it with v0.9 first.

That version just crashed on startup. Sorry

Could you try it again? Maybe there wasn't enough RAM available.

I think it may be Ndless 3.6/OS 3.6 that is the problem, since Matref had no issues, and he has OS 3.1/Ndless 3.1

That may be, but it works on CX CAS 3.6 (emulated) and CAS 3.1 (emulated clickpad) without any issues 

I downloaded the grayscale version and put it on my Nspire CAS (grayscale) touchpad. I get the splashscreen, then the UI for half a second, then it exits. It is in the root directory. I am using Ndless 3.6

Do you know why this is happening? If so, what's the fix?

Do you have a touchpad or not?
Does it work if you press (and hold) the ESC key?

So are these worlds now infinite?

No, not infinite, just 69905 blocks in X, Y, and Z-direction
But there will be more and more glitches and artifacts the further you go.

There also seems to be an xray bug where if you're underground, you can walk up to a block and see all through it

I know, but I can't seem to find it 

Wow ! Those are good improvements!

Nonetheless, the game... laggs. Why does it lagg more with water and lava?

That's a bug I found yesterday by accident and I already fixed it (Water was spreading to blocks even if there's already water)
And it will always be somewhat slower if water and lava are visible as blocks under water or lava still have to be drawn as you can dive.
(I COULD rerender the world if you're submerged, but that'd take some seconds, which would be very annoying if you're swimming just beneath the surface)
That's also the reason why I retained from natual water sources such as seas, oceans or underground lava.

Feature requests:

• Be able to open the menu or quit the game even when there is the "loading" label.

I can insert a if(keyPressed(KEY_NSPIRE_ESC)) somewhere in the middle of the splash screen, that shouldn't be too bad.

• Move on the items selector menu with the touchpad.

Ok, will do.

I think the priority is the speed up all the "loading" during the game.

That's terrain generation and it will probably not get much faster.. Unless I can find a better way to generate terrain.

Quote

Just a quick question: How much could I increase startup time?
In v1.0 I'll implement some more optimizations, but it'll result in a slower start.

I think the speed during the game is much more important than the startup time. I think you can grow it up to 40 seconds (currently 22 seconds) if you add a loading bar.

I hope I don't reach 40 seconds, but it's likely the framerate will increase by ~20-100% in some cases!

Thanks for your work! Do you mind if I upload it on tiplanet?

Not at all, if you put a link to the github release page or this thread, just so that everybody can find the latest release and source code.