Notices by Angle (angle@anticapitalist.party)

As a Computer Nerd, I have very little reason to fear settings menus, and indeed it's a little strange to contemplate that anyone else might, but it helps to keep in mind that different people are different and have different capabilities. :/

Frankly, you'll see this attitude all over the place if you look for it. Social activities, plumbing, cooking, relationships, electricity, finance, all sorts of things where sometimes serious caution is the right approach, but it might not be obvious once you're already capable in the area.

I make fun, but, this is a serious thing for a lot of people. I myself felt like this a lot back when I first started using a computer as a kid. And It's not entirely unreasonable - if you don't know what you're doing, it is entirely possible to cause yourself all kinds of problems and make your life much more difficult, maybe even take serious financial damage if you're particularly unlucky.

Instructions: "Now, open the settings menu and-"

User: *Gasps, widens eyes, grips arm rests, looks around nervously* "Whoa whoa whoa, you want me to open the *settings menu*? Isn't that *Dangerous*? What if something *Bad Happens*?"

I will again defend the idea of using algorithms on mastodon. To put it simply, the effort and expertise required to maintain ones feed with the existing tools of Mastodon is more than most people are interested in investing, and rather than telling them they need to work harder and learn more until they leave, I think we'd be better off offering better tools.

Now, again, I don't want to just implement a single algorithm and foist it on everyone, I want to offer users a selection of algorithms and the tools required to understand and customize them. And yes, this will demand it's own effort and expertise from users, but I think that can be mitigated. Personally, I'd start users out with plain chronology, the current algorithm the majority of the Fediverse uses, and then try make it easy for users to upgrade?

@alcinnz I was thinking about that. Sounds like a ton of work, but it could be worthwhile!

...So, if I want to actually get involved with Serious Linux Development, is there a good way to go about it? Like, a major Linux dev Discord or the like I could join? :/

Lol, no, wait - this doesn't work super well for chunks that can change without the player moving. Like, if you stood still watching people demolish a mountain, it wouldn't start drawing anything behind it until you moved your camera. So, Maybe I want to mark things both as 'in frustum' or 'out of frustum', and update that when the camera moves, while also iterating chunks that are in frustum regularly, even if they weren't drawn last frame and the player didn't move their camera? :/

Yeah, I could use the method I described above with frustum culling for determining if a chunk is in frustum, and then use it again with actual bounding box draws periodically for checking if in frustum invisible chunks have become visible... :/

Alright, I implemented it. Seems to work pretty well? Hard to be sure. :/

I went ahead and did some detailed profiling, seems my directional and point lights and my transparency sorting are the big performance problems. Not much I can do with the directional lights, I think, and I'm not sure how to approach the transparency sorting, but I have some ideas for the point lights.

Render Clearer: 0.014336 ms elapsed
GBuffer Drawstarter: 0.011264 ms elapsed
UBO Manager: 0.001024 ms elapsed
Skybox: 0.200704 ms elapsed
Frustum Setter: 0.0 ms elapsed
Surface Geometry: 0.421888 ms elapsed
SBuffer Drawstarter: 0.024576 ms elapsed
GBuffer Drawfinisher: 0.002048 ms elapsed
Transparency Sorter: 5.40672 ms elapsed
Surface Fragments: 1.942528 ms elapsed

SBuffer Drawfinisher: 0.080896 ms elapsed
Emission Lighting: 0.248832 ms elapsed
Directional Lighting: 4.871168 ms elapsed
Point Lighting: 4.539392 ms elapsed
Bloom: 1.209344 ms elapsed
Tonemapping: 0.0768 ms elapsed
Outline Shader: 0.001024 ms elapsed
Block Outline: 0.001024 ms elapsed
Debug Window: 0.016384 ms elapsed
Outline Finisher: 0.001024 ms elapsed
HUD: 0.024576 ms elapsed
Render Loop: 19.68128 ms elapsed

Working on my textures again now, because one of my friends was experimenting with procedural textures. Right now I'm mostly just adapting his code, but I hope to make my own contributions soon.

Added some surface noise, and applied the noise to specular and roughness material properties, as well as color:

Messing around, applying my new procedural noise textures to soil, as well as stone. Thinking I should start seriously working to make this a game other people can actually play? Probably want to focus on entities, if so. Getting collision detection and throwing together a basic little FPS would probably be pretty easy? :/

Okay, definitely going to start working to make this an actual playable game. I just fixed a couple of annoying bugs, so, time to start looking at entities. Either getting rendering to a place where I'm happy with it, or doing collision detection and some basic physics? Not sure. :/

Went ahead and formalized a dev cycle on the wiki. Not entirely sure how I feel about this? It feels like it'll be necessary once I have enough people, but I might be jumping the gun a bit. We'll see. For now, anyone who feels interested in participating, feel free to DM me! XD

https://gitlab.com/AngularAngel/omnicraft/-/wikis/Dev-Cycle

https://gitlab.com/AngularAngel/omnicraft/-/wikis/Current-Dev-Cycle

Super tempted to make my own minecraft. Write in the functionality of all my favorite mods from the start, make everything super detailed, exactly the way I want it. I'd probably never finish, but it could be fun. XD