[Week 1] Voxel editor, procedural planets, minimap

Day 1 of Cella 3D

Here's the vision-

A ship built from parts that actually does stuff. Your motor makes you go. The battery keeps the lights on. Vision gives you sight. Lose any of them and your ship doesn't lose such-and-such hit whatever-metrics, it loses that function. The rest keeps going, or doesn't. Also make it look pretty good, because people like that.

And some things I'd like to prove out-

• FPV flight in this manner can be made fun
• User-controlled craft coexisting with code-controlled can be made fun
• A voxel-ish-style game can be made to be pretty-good-looking
• Ship building in this manner can be made fun
• A fun environment can had where code-ran ships coexist with player-ran ships

Let's line up some must-have to play this out-

• ships, some way to build them
  • yaml or json defined- this is state data but we're not ready for an API and DB
• We need space
  • also state
  • something to put in the background- skybox, some planets, moons and stars?
• We need a simulator
  • let's roll with a fixed tick time, we'll slow the sim down if it gets crazy bad but carrying over all of our spatial hash techniques should give us pretty incredible performance with a bunch of cubes.

And I'm going to build off the 2D Cella stack- it's solid and the Lua integration with frequent interruption is battle-tested.

Let's build that voxel editor.

The gui window is good to go. Let's bring in the palette we used in the 2D sim as it's easy to use. I haven't given much thought about the voxel editor.

Oh, and there's that whole "pretty good looking rendering pipeline" thing.

Nope- not quite wrapped up yesterday.

Side note- I learned early on in this project that LLMs don't seemed to be trained on nearly as much quality Rust content as they do with Python, C++ and TypeScript. I've been impressed with WGSL. That said I really have to keep a close eye on both and it's still often easier for me to hand-code a pattern in place than to walk through it in English. Maybe I'm using the wrong LLM, but I dread the day I become an AI-evangelist.

Where was I? Ah-

Right! Finished up that pretty-good-looking pipeline. I'm certain a fair amount of the rendering pipelines will have to be rebuilt, mais c'est la vie.

Oh, and I wrapped up a kick-ass Voxel editor- or so I think. I like how this cursor works, allowing players (right- "players", not "users", gotta make that stick..) to quickly stack.

Still clearly borrowed from the 2D "organism" stuff, but most of it carries.

Right, it looks like ████ but it's totally configurable- texture, emissive, color, metallicity, all that defined nice and clean so an artist has everything they need to make each cell look pretty-gooder, some day.

This is going faster than I'd expected.

I want to push forward with a new system, and I'll build a plan to tackle some technical debt and poor decisions I've spotted in the code base for later this evening. We'll see how the LLM handles that overnight.

First though, the thought of being able to land these blocky ships on planets, seamlessly, is really appealing, so I want to explore it.

I'd been thinking on terrain generation. Surely there's something state of the art off the shelf I can pull for this? Nope- well, not that I've found though I've heard there are some nnets to explore still. I ended up borrowing from a scattering of documented and coded terrain and terrain-erosion techniques and rolled a solution that works- sorta.

That, some clouds, a touch of atmosphere, and a few other bells and whistles and we're off to the races!

And it's not that bad for half a day's worth of work:

Oh and the procedural-generated-planets with direct-to-land. I built it, it works technically- but the visuals are rough. At realistic scales, I'd crave an algorithm that let me zoom in deterministically- some fractal, or other algo I haven't found yet. So, that means I'm effectively rendering a ton of texture I don't need- but also neat that it could totally be included in collisions if I go that route.

Let's build the main view out now that we have some planets. Maybe we'll render a ship on it too and add some third-person-view CAD-style controls, to get a feel for this thing.

Oh, and a minimap so I don't get lost.

Also a HUD.. something simple to call out the planets, moons and star.

The code base is in good shape. Performance is excellent on my M1.

Next up is a little break for me, then the simulation- time to see one of these fly in space! Then it's on to FPV :)