4D Miner Devlog #1: New Lighting and World Generation!

Hello everyone! I’m mashpoe, and this  is the first 4D Miner devlog update. The first thing you’ll probably notice  about the new update is the lighting.   Here’s a side-by-side comparison between the  lighting in the latest version of the game,   and what I showed off in my  first video about 4D Miner!

Lighting isn’t the only big change, but it’s  the first thing I worked on for this update. If you become a 4D HyperSupporter on my Patreon,  you’ll actually be able to vote on certain   aspects of the game. A while ago, I created  an exclusive poll for my wonderful patrons,  

And they voted on which feature  I would add to the game first! Improved lighting was the most popular choice  with 96 votes, followed by the addition of a   new passive creature with 66 votes, and  controller support with only 7 votes.

I will still be adding new creatures and  controller support to 4D Miner in the future,   but the patrons decided that the game’s  lighting was a higher priority for now. Now I’ll explain how the new  lighting system actually works,   and how it directly affects gameplay  beyond making the world look nicer.

Lighting calculations require  a lot of processing power.   Computers can process 2D lighting with relative  ease, but 3D lighting is much more complicated,   and requires a lot more processing power as  a result. This forces game developers to work   very hard at optimizing their lighting systems  so their games can maintain stable frame rates.

4D lighting requires even more processing power,  which means that even a basic lighting system for   4D Miner would be very slow and require a ton of  optimizations for the game to still be playable. I chose to improve lighting in  4D Miner with a technique called   “Ambient Occlusion,” or “AO” for short.

Ambient Occlusion is one of Minecraft’s  primary lighting techniques,   but this wasn’t always the case. In early versions  of Minecraft, the lighting was a lot more rough   and unnatural looking. In october of 2010, a  mod called “Ambient Occlusion” was released,   and as the name implies, it introduced  ambient occlusion to Minecraft.  

The mod was later renamed to “BetterLight,” and  additional smoothing techniques were included. Ambient occlusion changes the lighting of  different points based on their surroundings.   Basically, the more “stuff” there is near a  point, the less that point will be exposed   to ambient lighting, and the darker  that point will appear as a result.

Ambient occlusion was fully added to Minecraft  on february, 2011, in the 1.3 beta update. The   creator of the BetterLight mod actually helped  Mojang with the lighting in this update! Using a similar technique, I was able  to add 4D ambient occlusion to 4D Miner. 4D Miner’s ambient occlusion  causes blocks to cast a “shadow”  

Of sorts. Possibly the coolest thing  about this is that you can see the   shadows of blocks from outside of your  current slice of the world! This means   you can actually use the lighting system to  your advantage and find nearby resources! In this clip, you can see  the shadow of a tree trunk,  

But you can’t see the actual tree trunk because  it’s not in the player’s slice of the world!   When the player’s view is rotated in  4D, the tree trunk becomes visible! Ambient occlusion is considered  to be a “fast” lighting technique,   but I’ll explain why it’s still much slower in 4D.

Before I get into any technical details, I want  to briefly let everyone know how you can access   these new features right now! Like I said earlier,  lighting isn’t the only new thing in this update.   There are actually two other major features  that I added, and I will show them off later  

In the video! You can access these new  features right now by joining my Patreon!   All of my 4D HyperSupporters get to play the  newest updates much earlier than everyone else,   and by supporting me on Patreon, you will be  helping me to continue the development of this  

Game. You will also get to provide early feedback,  and your voice will be heard the loudest! Alright, now I’ll explain some of my struggles  with implementing this new lighting system. In a 3D block game like Minecraft, each block  has 6 faces. On each face, there are 4 vertices,  

And for each vertex, the lighting is  determined by checking 3 neighboring   blocks. That means for every block face, 12  checks are performed for neighboring blocks,   and since a block can have up to 6 visible faces,  there can be up to 72 of these checks per block.

Computers are pretty fast, so doing that many  checks per block isn’t too big of an issue. Things get a bit more complicated  when you’re dealing with 4D blocks,   which need 7 neighbor checks per vertex.   Each 4D block face has 8 vertices, which means  there are 56 checks per block face, and since  

4D blocks can have up to 8 visible faces, there  can be up to 448 neighbor checks per 4D block. Remember, there can only be up to  72 neighbor checks for a 3D block,   which is a lot less than the 448  checks that a 4D block can have.

You also have to take into account that each chunk  in a 4D world has a lot more blocks to begin with,   and whatever the player can see at any given  moment is only a tiny slice of the visible chunks.

All of this means that it takes a ton of  processing power to generate lighting for a single   chunk, and in order to make this run somewhat  smoothly, I needed to do a ton of optimizing. I don’t have enough time to explain  these optimizations in too much detail,  

But the gist of it is that I had to completely  rearrange the way chunks are stored in memory,   and I had to come up with a way for each chunk  to cache information from neighboring chunks.   This allowed for the mesh and lighting  generation to be seamless without being too slow.  

There were a lot of other huge changes behind the  scenes, and I would like to explain everything in   more detail, but I need to show off the  other two big features in this update! The second thing I added  to 4D Miner in this update  

Is something many people will find  more exciting than the new lighting! 4D Miner now has world seeds! Before this update,   each world was identical, but now  worlds generate with randomized seeds,   and you can enter your own seeds which will  generate the same world every time you use them.

Seeds are very important for  these types of sandbox games.   Now every world you create will be unique! The final feature I want to talk about is the  new world type. You can now create flat worlds,  

Which is very useful for building. 4D terrain can  be difficult to work with, and if you want to be   able to make structures on perfectly level ground,  you can now do so by creating a flat world! Sadly, there isn’t a creative mode in the  game yet, so you can’t get resources to build  

In your flat worlds without copying  a save file from a different world.   Luckily, this process is pretty straightforward.   All you have to do is copy the “players.json” file  from a world where you have building materials   in your inventory, and use it to replace  the “players.json” file in your flat world.

In the future, I will probably  add a bonus chest to flat worlds   so players can have access to building materials. Now I want to highlight some new bugs  that I haven’t been able to fix yet.   The worst bug is actually  caused by the game’s credits.  

I added the names of all of my Patreon supporters  to the game’s credits, but for some reason,   a bunch of textures can get overwritten by  the patron’s names. This can be very amusing,   but it makes the game unplayable. As long as you  don’t open up the credits, this won’t be an issue.  

If you do open the credits, you can  fix everything by restarting the game. The most annoying bug is that the clouds  are no longer visible. I’m not sure why,   but it probably has something to do with the fact  that I had to rewrite a ton of the graphics code.  

Hopefully I will be able to fix this soon! Now I want to thank all of my   Patrons! Without all of you, I wouldn’t  be able to keep working on 4D Miner, so   thank you all for believing in this project and  providing support for its continued development!

I have some cool stuff planned for the next  update! Since so many of my patrons wanted   me to add a passive mob to the game,  that’s what I will be working on next. I will also be working on a video focusing  around content from the 4D Miner community.  

I don’t know when I’ll be able to release it,  but it will probably be my very next video! Thanks again to all of the patrons,   and everyone else who helped out  with the game and its community! I hope you all enjoy this new update!

One thing I realized when optimizing  the new lighting is that 4D chunks   have a ton of surface area, and there are almost   as many blocks bordering each chunk as  there are blocks inside of each chunk. When lighting is being calculated for any given  chunk, it’s much slower to check blocks from  

Neighboring chunks, and this was one of  the biggest things slowing the game down. My solution was to store a copy of each  chunk’s neighboring blocks alongside the If you want to be able to participate  in future development polls,   please consider supporting my patreon!  If you become a 4D HyperSupporter,  

Not only will you get to vote in future  polls, but you will also have exclusive   access to the latest updates to 4D Miner  before anyone else, which means you will   get to experience the newest features and  you will be able to provide early feedback!