Sam Hogan – I Made Minecraft Without Blocks

Minecraft the most frequently cloned video game except for maybe flappy bird the core mechanics of minecraft are simple enough that i was able to recreate it in just 24 hours using the unity game engine it has infinite procedurally generated terrain caves water trees even mining wait that’s not actually minecraft

There’s no crafting or biomes or like i was saying it’s pretty much exactly like minecraft which is actually a big problem because cubes are pretty boring games like astroneer no man’s sky and many others generate procedural destructible terrain but with no cubes in sight here’s the new challenge

Figure out how these games work and convert my minecraft clone into something with much more realistic terrain it should be procedurally generated infinite and fully destructible let’s start with the basic sine wave if you really use your imagination it sort of looks like some hills or something so let’s turn it into terrain

In order for it to actually be rendered by a game engine we need to somehow convert it to a mesh made out of triangles in 2d we can accomplish this with an algorithm called marching squares marching squares will build up our mesh one piece at a time by checking how the terrain intersects

With many small square shaped regions for our terrain generator we’ll use the 3d version of marching squares called you guessed it marching cubes and instead of a sine function we’ll use some slightly more advanced coherent noise functions which create much more natural looking hilly terrain alright let’s get programming uh hmm

After reading through a bunch of articles and maybe stealing a little code i was able to get started on my own implementation and after a few hours of work we’ve got a pink rectangle all right there we go here is marching cubes generating a mesh from 3d simplex noise yeah i don’t even

Understand now let’s add this to the existing minecraft world the terrain generator works by splitting the world up into smaller pieces called chunks which can be loaded in and out as the player moves around so just swap out the blocky mesh generator for marching cubes and it works without any problems

Okay now we can walk around some procedurally generated terrain So the blocks are definitely gone but as you can tell the terrain isn’t really smooth the solution to this is interpolation basically we’ll use some voxel data to estimate where the terrain intersects the edges of each marching cube which will give a better approximation of the surface

So let’s steal some more code i mean program that and what the okay something’s not right my code actually worked Now the terrain is nice and smooth but it’s suspiciously smooth and still doesn’t look like real terrain the solution fractal noise fractal noise just takes a bunch of noise layers of decreasing scales and adds them together each contributing smaller and smaller details and the result is much more natural looking terrain

Throw on a brand new grass texture and uh yeah that looks pretty bad but it’s probably the most you can expect from me now let’s add in some caves just like in the minecraft clone we’ll use some 3d noise to cut pieces out of the terrain but this time the transition between the

Caves and the surface ended up being a little bit of a challenge because i had to deal with that whole interpolation thing but i eventually sorta figured it out and we’ve got caves again next i added water chunks back in which worked perfectly with the new terrain system

And slapped on that amazing stone Texture I unfortunately couldn’t just reuse the tree generation code from the minecraft clone so What i ended up doing was taking a sphere and a cone and sort of combining them together and Trees For terrain modification i want to make something similar to astroneer where you dig these nice circular holes and build these big worm things so what do we have to do just raycast and then increase or decrease the closest voxel values should be pretty easy right after a lot of tweaking we’ve now got

This cool little mining and building mechanic Next i played around with masking and transitioning between different noise layers so now we can create larger scaled features like mountains and oceans finally i made very high quality snow and sand textures and the terrain generator is pretty much done so you can explore procedural terrain and mine

And build stuff sorta but like all my games it doesn’t look very good i’ve been wanting to try out unity’s hd render pipeline which will give your game aaa quality graphics with just a few clicks anyway after 9 hours countless pages of documentation and 57 google searches i finally sort of understand

How to use hdrp here’s the final result So this was minecraft without blocks and i guess without crafting and pretty much everything else in minecraft except for like mining i guess you