Rimecraft

Rimecraft was developed using the Unity game engine in C#. It also uses the Unity Job system to multithread the chunk generation in the project for performance benefits. When working on Rimecraft I had to procedurally define where each block in the world would be through using gradient noise. The gradient noise I used was 2D, for the terrain height, and 3D Simplex, for the caves/caverns. I even layered the 2D gradient noise to get a better more terrain-like look. In this case, the look we were going for was snowy hills.

Other than this procedural generation, I also had to build the meshes and create a chunk system so that the world could be infinite. After all, you cannot have a single mesh to represent an infinite world. Unlike Minecraft, my approach was to use a 3D chunk generation system which allowed the game to have an infinite height/depth too. For the lighting, I took advantage of the High Definition Render pipeline from Unity. After generating the meshes, I needed to allow the player to modify the meshes and the actual blocks in the game. This involved creating an API that allowed anything to modify the blocks. So if I wanted to create explosions I could.

That being said, this was all done in 2 months so there was a strict deadline. I didn't really have much time to explore gameplay so really this project is a tech demo of a procedurally generated world you can explore. Overall during the experience, I learned a lot on creating procedurally generated content and multithreading.

I worked on this project a 2nd time to make Multi-Rimecraft which adds multiplayer to the existing project. To do this, I went with a client-server architecture. I put the chunk generation on the server side (and player representation). To update chunks, I used TCP messages on block updates. For updating player movement, I used UDP as there was no reason for lossless movement.