Minecraft in the BGE: optimizing the draw call

Minecraft = thousands of blocks. I know notch struggled with this and found a clever solution by creating a chunk system and an occlusion system.

1 chunk in minecraft is 65,536 blocks, I’m finding that a top layer of 5,000 blocks is enough to slow down the engine.

Now finding ways to optimize the draw call would benefit anyone who is making a procedural game in blender. (draw call means the number of objects being drawn on screen)

Let’s get a discussion going and see what we can come up with.

I’d like to start by saying the top layer of blocks, the one’s that don’t even need occluding, are slowing down the engine.

What kind of wizardry do you have in mind?

maybe there’s a way to occlude any face that is hidden on an object?

Honestly, my advice to you is:

Don’t try to completely recreate Minecraft in the BGE. As much as I like the BGE, it just can’t handle the processing power Minecraft requires.
It’s like having a plate of soup instead of a bowl of soup. It’s just not going to work.

Although I WILL say that, if you want to make a voxel game with limits, it isn’t impossible.

There is no thousands of blocks in minecraft, I mean, not literrally, every chunk is only a mesh, and this mesh do not have cubes inside, this mesh only have the shape of the terrain, and it does not use a oclussion system (yes it uses, but not with the terrain).

hmm, do you think it’s possible to achieve the same thing in blender?

I’ve seen that video, it does look good, though my recreation of mc is a bit more functional, inventory, save/load, mpc’s. Sort of the whole nine and I’m really looking to somehow, by any means, create a procedural terrain that is viable

fairly technical so It’s going to take a bit of time before I understand 2d perlin noise. I really see this helping me out, thank you

There are some patches out there that work towards realtime object batching in the BGE, but as the engine is likely to be removed from Blender within the next few years, I don’t know if it’s ever again going to see major functionality upgrades such as this.

Previous attempts to make Minecraft in the BGE have been met with major speed issues, it will be very difficult at the least to make a minecraft-sized block world that runs good.