EDIT: I set up Github Sponsors incorrectly. I linked it to my personal account instead of the organisation that owns the private repository. I've reconfigured it and am waiting for Github to approve it. Should be ready within 24 hours, sorry about this!
EDIT 2: still waiting for an approval from Github
Github Sponsors is set up! If you are a paid Patreon subscriber, link your Github Account to Patreon to get access to the source code and live updates. No need to pay anything extra, it's a perk of this Patreon membership.
Please let me know if you get access to the repository successfully.
That's the main purpose of this post, but I'll also give an update on what else I've been working on.
I've written the script and have started working on the animations for my next video, which is about optimising the voxel renderer for Sector's Edge up to 4000 FPS. This video might turn out to be my longest yet at around 12 minutes, since it covers so many different aspects of rendering and optimisation.
I'm also super passionate about voxels and I'm going all-out on the animations. So far I've spent 16 hours on the first minute! Although that included all the groundwork setting up the renderer and extracting code out of Sector's Edge.
I've also spent some more time on the low poly renderer:
Added a save system for inventory, trees, buildings, items and physics objects (e.g. a log)
Experimented with biomes, which failed. I added sand near the water though, and more grass in areas with less trees (to create meadows vs forests)
Optimised rendering from 160 to 240 FPS by batching all trees, buildings and items into one draw call and all physics objects (logs, dropped items) into one draw call
I tried out point lights (e.g. campfire shadows) for the first time and loved the result! It needs some optimising though, it drops from 250 down to 200 FPS.
Start learning to create pixel art textures in Aseprite. So far I've created grass, flowers, tree bark and tree leaves. It isn't easy to create pixel art, I have much to learn!
I also tried making a tree, but that broke time and space
This morning I had an idea for rendering more realistic 3D crepuscular rays, where I select random positions around the player, and check if it is half in shadow and half in sunlight.
If so, it places a 2D plane there that's angled towards the sun. The benefits of this are:
you don't have to be looking at the sun to see the rays, which was a downside of screen-space crepuscular rays like in Sector's Edge
they are super fast to render at only 0.02ms!! The Sector's Edge screen-space rays rendered in 1.4ms. This approach is 70x faster!
they interact with the scene in 3D correctly, i.e. behind/infront of trees