DESIGN.md

Working Overview

Rendering

• Blaze uses raw WebGL shaders to render everything in a scene
• A render distance must be provided that is defined as chunks from the player
  • anything outside this distance will not be rendered and old chunks/entites outside this distance will be culled
• Blaze controls all chunk rendering
• Entities can be created using Blaze's API which can be toggled for rendering
  • Entities can only be rendered as cuboids of any width, height and depth
  • Entites can be textured by with a BLZ_CubeMap
• Chunk geometry calculations are performed on a seperate worker thread

Textures

• Blaze has 2 texture types BLZ_Tilesheet and BLZ_CubeMap
• BLZ_Tilesheet
  • Tile size must be 16x16 or 32x32
  • Must be layed out with 3 columns per rows
    • columns 1-3 represent the top, sides and bottom of a voxel respectively
    • each row will correspond to a voxel ID
    • first row correpsonds to voxel id of 1
  • used for rendering of all voxels based on their ID
• BLZ_CubeMap
  • [IN PROGRESS]

Voxels

• Voxels are always 1x1x1 and axis aligned
• Voxel can range from 0 to 255
  • however 0 is always used to represent EMPTY/AIR

Chunks

• Before generation the chunk size can be set
  • width and depth must be equal and greater than 0
  • height cannot exceed 256
• Chunks are represented in memory using flat Uint8Arrays to allow for easy parallelization
  • each value in the array corresponds to a voxel id
  • this means you are limited to 255 different voxel types as 0 is counted as EMPTY/AIR

Generation

• Blaze is built to handle chunking and procedural generation for you
• All generation occurs on a seperate worker thread
• A generation callback can be provided to modify chunks as they are created by Blaze
  • this callback is provided with the raw Uint8Array of chunk data and the chunk's x and z coordinate

Physics/Collisions

• A physics pass will be performed every frame to apply gravity and collisions to any physics enabled entities
• Collisions are resolved using an AABB voxel collision algorithm
  • this algorithm is not the most realistic or accurate but is very efficient

Entities

• Entites can be textured using BLZ_CubeMap textures
• Entites do not have to be axis aligned

Player

• Blaze provides a default player controller
  • the default player bounding box is 0.8x1.8x0.8
  • Callbacks can be registered for common events such as picking voxels, collisions, etc