Hello!  Great to see updates from y'all.

School shouldn't be tedious.... Right now, to get to be able to make your first tool... you have to dig, and I'm gussing it's 1.5 seconds(? 2?) per dig block?

( 64 * 3 = 192 ) * 1.5 = 382 seconds... 6 and a half minutes. (9 almost 10 minutes?)

And then I can find greenstone, and be able to return with it to the surface where my machine.

The document says.
'Where can you find it ?
You can find this voxel in the ground into the central blue flat zone.'  And the picture shows it on top of black rock blue... I know it's just showing the same block on the same oroginal blank stage, but... it does sort of imply that it can be over blackrrock blue - and it never is.

So ... I think " it's just another random block like copper, okay I'll keep digging sideways... surely they wouldn't force me to climb up and down all the time... " and dig t alot sideways, so now 30 minutes later and still no greenrock ...



Most voxelish digging games put rock only a little ways below dirt.... 4-8 voxels... because there's an infinite supply of dirt (blackrock blue).

So, optimally that's 6 minutes after the first 5-8 playing with the RTFM and external help; and having the cursor trapped to the game, so I can't click back on the browser... (tough, I know, to own the cursor, but give it up when you don't have it. )  There are lose focus events that you can revert the cursor capture... )

And if I was really new, I'd be sidetracked by copper and iron and other things, and it would really take me a long time to get to green rock; (I mentioned that earlier, it's realistically at LEAST 7 minutes, to make your first tool).

I wanted to learn to program, not spend my time in a clicker.

-----
let me just reiterate, as i was closing this window... I missed the (X) a little...


1) when the game is not in focus, do not setmousepotiion on mouse event.  (background window of the browser, I miss the scroll bar a bit, and my mouse snaps to the other thing, but I was JUST typing in the browser... and then I have to get back to the scrollbar, but if there isn't actually another window over where the mosue moves, it's stuck, until you hit I to get to invenotry (free mouse) or something

2) alt-F4 doesn't work.

3) window isn't resizable by clicking on the frame (if you could somehow get the mouse off the game-focus )

http://www.evolvingai.org/soft-robots

I ran across this the other day; and you don't have an off topic, and really hope you don't find this too random

I've been tinkering with making a C# port, and was looking for a way to render fonts dynamically instead of having a fixed bitmap font of limited characters.   I stumbled on a C header-only font rendering library https://github.com/nothings/stb/blob/master/stb_truetype.h which is part of  https://github.com/nothings/stb

so I have this class

which uses the c# port of that library and renders characters dynamically into a texture.  (as each character is needed, if it doesn't exist on the bitmap already, render it, copy it to the bitmap, mark the bitmap dirty, then when drawing, if dirty, re-download the image to OpenGL.  Works pretty good...  the GetCharacter routine would have to be changed to support utf-8 decoding instead of utf-16; GetCharacter takes a string and an index and returns  a 32 bit 'rune' named after the character type in Go.

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Instead of porting squirrel and the assembly language I was planning on using C# scripts.  I have basic functionality to load .cs files, compile them and use them.  I don't have the reactor done.  so for now it's just a static rendering.  I made a GLSL shader that generates output that look like the general texture with lines on edges... can even control the thickness of the lines dynamically and face/edge color.

Implemented a texture atlas for everything else; but had to scale the images down and extract single faces to fit in an atlas correctly; but was planning on using the texture more as a decal image and the face-edge shader as the background.  So then moved the face/edge colors into the description file.

But; I'm working on interfacing with a physics engine... I was going to use Bullet, even spent some time to make a new C# port of that since the other is obsolete by 3-4 years.... but in the process ended up stumbling on BEPUPhysics which is already C# and has 4-5x the speed of bullet and already supports multi-threaded dispatch of work.   

I also played with the game 'fortresscraft' which is also voxel based and has conveyors/smelters/etc.  Their version makes ore types un-minable by the player, and you attach a drill to a block and get unlimited ore generated from the drill on the ore; kind of unrealistic... but then you can spend time on the automation instead of strip-mining the world...

----
For now I do very little checking of the C# scripts; but will eventually limit their functionality to just classes the game engine provides and not all of C# library; would be bad to get a script that reads your file system, opens a network connection and dumps all your stuff   Or worse... I do limit them now from using 'System.IO' but will eventually need more checks.  Will be nice once MS has compiler-as-a-service support released; can already do it in Mono.

don't mean to promote it; maybe it will be some inspiration?

Stumbled on this other game...
https://www.factorio.com
short, quick start... guess this game is pretty deep....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sMgtUxpGlPc
there's lots of other in-play videos

Kinda reminds me of what blackvoxel is kinda attempting to be with automation; different but similar?

OpenGL performance improvements... requires a pretty advanced OpenGL Level?  But some of it is interesting in pointing out that there might be more.
http://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2014/03/20/opengl-gdc2014/

Did notice a few articles that OpenGL is faster tha D3D ...
http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/133824-valve-opengl-is-faster-than-directx-even-on-windows

Success!
I have a block called 'fertile ground' that in a second or 2 from creation grows 'low foliage' aka food.
food will eventually age and become medium and tall; which will be unusable by the first animals... a block called rabbit and a block called fox....
------------
I implemented a type called ZVoxelRef
#ifndef ZVOXEL_REF_DEFINED
#define ZVOXEL_REF_DEFINED

#include "ZVoxelSector.h"
#include "../ZVoxelExtension.h"
class ZVoxelWorld;
class ZVoxelRef
{
public:
ZVoxelSector * Sector;
int Offset;
int x, y, z;
UShort VoxelType;
ZVoxelWorld *World;
ZVoxelTypeManager *VoxelTypeManager;
ZVoxelExtension *VoxelExtension;
ZVoxelRef( ZVoxelWorld *world, ZVoxelTypeManager *vtm, long x = 0, long y = 0, long z = 0, ZVoxelSector *Sector=NULL, UShort VoxelType = 0, int offset = 0 )
{
this->x = x;
this->y = y;
this->z = z;
this->Sector = Sector;
this->Offset = offset;
this->World = world;
this->VoxelType = VoxelType;
VoxelTypeManager = vtm;
}
static int ForEachVoxel( ZVoxelWorld * World, ZVoxelRef *v1, ZVoxelRef *v2, int (*f)(ZVoxelRef *v) );

};

#endif

that I for implemented for the result of raycast at maxiter... before I changed method to render selection cube in space in front of player...


// modified GetVoxel which just returned the UShort from a world coordinate
//  to return the World, Sector, relative x,y,z within the sector, and the UShort type
// the sector has it's x,y,z scaled world coordinate... so the absolute coord is knowable from the reference.
... reviewing this a little... the ref could be used for all the temp variables themselves... this actually returns a copy of the world coordinate, React uses it as x,y,z within the sector...
inline ZVoxelRef *ZVoxelWorld::GetVoxelRef(Long x, Long y, Long z)
{
  ZVoxelSector * Sector;
  Long Offset;

  Sector = FindSector( x>>ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_X , y>>ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y , z>>ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Z );

  if (!Sector) return NULL;

  Offset =  (y & ZVOXELBLOCMASK_Y)
         + ((x & ZVOXELBLOCMASK_X) <<  ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y )
         + ((z & ZVOXELBLOCMASK_Z) << (ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y + ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_X));

  return new ZVoxelRef( this, VoxelTypeManager, x, y, z, Sector, Sector->Data[Offset], Offset );
}


inline UShort ZVoxelWorld::GetVoxel(Long x, Long y, Long z)
{
  ZVoxelSector * Sector;
  Long Offset;

  Sector = FindSector( x>>ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_X , y>>ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y , z>>ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Z );

  if (!Sector) return(-1);

  Offset =  (y & ZVOXELBLOCMASK_Y)
         + ((x & ZVOXELBLOCMASK_X) <<  ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y )
         + ((z & ZVOXELBLOCMASK_Z) << (ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y + ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_X));

  return(Sector->Data[Offset]);
}

-------------
Used this in VoxelReactor to call React virtual method in voxel table...
      Long RSx = Sector->Pos_x << ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_X;
      Long RSy = Sector->Pos_y << ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Y;
      Long RSz = Sector->Pos_z << ZVOXELBLOCSHIFT_Z;
  ZVoxelRef ref(World,VoxelTypeManager, 0,0,0,Sector );
    // z, x, y should just be ref.x, ref.y, ref.z, ... redundant copy
      for (z = 0; z < ZVOXELBLOCSIZE_Z; z++)
        for (x = 0; x < ZVOXELBLOCSIZE_X; x++)
          for (y = 0; y < ZVOXELBLOCSIZE_Y; y++)
          {
VoxelType = *(VoxelP);
            if (ActiveTable->Get(VoxelType))
            {
              if (!Sector->ModifTracker.Get( MainOffset ) ) // If voxel is already processed, don't process it once more in the same cycle.
              {
                switch(VoxelType)
                {
default:
  ref.x = x; ref.y = y; ref.z = z;
  ref.Offset = VoxelP - DisplayData;
  ref.VoxelType = VoxelType;

IsActiveVoxels = true;
ref.VoxelExtension = (ZVoxelExtension*)Sector->OtherInfos[MainOffset];
// not sure what St is ...
//St[i]->ModifTracker.Set(SecondaryOffset[i]);
VoxelTypeManager->VoxelTable[VoxelType]->React( ref, LastLoopTime);
break;


Well... it was a lot harder than I thought...

http://youtu.be/F4AUEHm7BAk

work in progress; maybe

inner corners are unsmoothed... just smooths the outer edges.

Have many corner cases that have multiple solution paths... light right now single blocks and single rows of blocks don't smooth either....

and I have a broken corner that could be better; not to mention all the directions that are yet missing.

was going to map textures on diagonals such that if it's a top & left visible, to show the top and left side of the texture, so the diagonals would get an extra line; right now all left & anything is left and any right & anthing is right and any forward & any is forward and same for back; sorta, top&((right/left)&(back/front)) is top....