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Minosoft rendering system

(I'll extend this document when I find time or motivation)

General

Minosoft uses OpenGL 3.3+ for rendering. The whole rendering system is abstract, so a port to opengl es or vulkan should be easily possible.

Everything is working in shaders (written in glsl), some things even have multiple shaders.

Integration

The whole render system is like a separate module. There are almost no references to it, only in PlayConnection.kt. Everything is event driven (or abstract).

Loading

The whole render system gets loaded, as soon as you tell eros to connect to a server. Everything gets downloaded then and the render subsystem loads.

Textures

Static textures

Textures that don't get modified anymore (like block textures or items). The textures are stored in 5 dimensional way (2d for x and y coordinates, 1d for the texture index (aka. what texture), 1d for the resolution (like 16x16 or 32x32) and the last dimension for mipmaps). Every vertex can have an additional animation id, that is done via an uniform buffer.

Dynamic textures

Used for e.g. skins.

(Performance) optimizations

  • Chunking (like minecraft does it)

Culling

Minosoft is using multiple culling techniques that all work together to archive the best performance.

  • Face culling (glCullFace; gpu only)
  • Neighbour culling (hide unseen faces; cpu only)
  • Frustum culling (hide what is behind you/not in the camera perspective)
  • View distance clipping (maximum render distance)
  • Occlusion culling (hide chunks that are not visible (e.g. caves from the surface); cpu and gpu)
  • Greedy meshing (combining multiple blocks into a single face) not really worked and even got removed

Renderers

Even the render system is dynamic. There are a lot of so-called renderers (e.g. WorldRenderer, ParticleRenderer or GUIRenderer) that get registered dynamically while loading. So extending the system is pretty easy and moddable.

Render phases

There are multiple render phases. 3D breaks when it comes to transparency, or it gets optimized when drawing in a specific order (gpu occlusion culling). For example a render phase is OPAQUE or TRANSLUCENT. It basically lets all renderers draw their opaque objects first and then draw transparent ones.

Transparency

100% transparent pixels get discarded in the shader. That makes no problem. Translucency is getting hacked with glDepthMask(false). It is not the best solution but a good workaround. Some face sorting is needed in the future.

Lighting

Lighting is done as soon as a block changes in the world. Increasing light is a lot faster than decreasing light. A custom light engine is included, all server light is ignored by default (documentation needed).

The lighting on the render side is done via a lightmap, basically another uniform buffer.