Snapshot 8 - Chunk loading improvements (8.8x faster)

Chunk mesh preparation is now 8.8x faster than in the previous snapshot. This translates to all chunks in a 10 render distance loading in in roughly 20 seconds instead of over 2 and a half minutes.

Changes

• Pretty much only changed chunk mesh preparation code

Known issues

• This release doesn't introduce any new bugs to my knowledge

Snapshot 7 - Rendering Improvements & More

This snapshot adds lighting, animated textures, better handling of transparent textures and resource pack caching again among other changes.

If you have previously used an earlier version of Delta Client you will need to delete ~/Library/Containers/dev.stackotter.delta-client because I made some breaking changes. If you don't know how to do this, run rm -rf ~/Library/Containers/dev.stackotter.delta-client in Terminal

Changes

• Lighting is now rendered and also updated when a block changes
• Animated textures now work
• Transparent texture mipmaps now look nicer
• Transparent blocks no longer incorrectly cull blocks around them
• Startup time is now 4-5 seconds instead of 40 seconds because I cache block models again
• Added direct connect
• Cleaned up disconnect and error message screen styling a bit

Known bugs and limitations

• Sky lighting is not updated
• Lighting does not use a proper lighting curve so looks kind of unnatural
• Animated texture interpolation is not supported (used by things like magma blocks)
• Lighting updates are quite inefficient, joining Hypixel is impossible now because of the amount of block updates

Snapshot 6 - UI Improvements

This snapshot changes some parts of the UI to make them a bit more intuitive.

Changes

• Changed button styles to look nicer and have clearer semantics around primary and secondary buttons
• Buttons are now fixed width and fit together neatly in UI elements with lots of buttons
• Put secondary actions on the left instead of the right to match macOS (I just chose a random side before and I was wrong)
• Updated default FOV to match vanilla (it's now 70 and I had it as 90 before)

Thanks to @ninjadev64 for suggesting these changes.

Snapshot 5 - Bug fix and a UX tweak

Bug fixes for snapshot 4.

Fixed Bug/s

• Fresh installs were crashing because of multiple issues all of which are now fixed

Improvement

• The client also prompts users to login if they are not logged in (instead of waiting for them to try and join a server)

Snapshot 4

In this release I created a whole new UI and cleaned up the overall user experience. I also rewrote the way block models are loaded in. I also split the core functionality into a package called delta-core but that won't affect you.

Warning

This release is slower than the previous release because I haven't gotten around to reimplementing some of the caching code and there is also a bug that causes all chunks to be loaded at the same time (which drops fps to less than 1 when initially joining a world, but it does mean they load faster lol).

When joining a server just wait until all of the chunks have loaded in. Then the fps should be fine. I will fix this issue in the next release.

Features

• New, more intuitive and less buggy UI.
• A new in game menu for changing settings while playing on a server
• A new input system that is way less buggy and automatically captures your cursor when rendering starts
• A new block model loading system that should allow for much neater caching (when I get around to it). This rewrite also fixed all bugs to do with block model loading from the previous release (that I know of).
• SRV record support (some servers use SRV records (like delta.stackotter.dev the official testing server) and the client didn't used to support that)

Known Bugs

• Mipmapping causes transparent textures to get darker further away
• Transparent blocks allow you to Xray (any face touching the transparent block doesn't get rendered)
• Translucent blocks aren't translucent
• Animated textures show as a debug texture (I just haven't gotten around to them yet)
• Fluids (water and lava) don't render at all (hasn't gotten around to this yet either)
• It is possible to access regular settings while in game by hitting command+comma

Snapshot 3

This preview contains most of the planned features for 0.1.0 minus some rendering features and other polishing. After joining a server click on the render window to be able to move. Mouse to look around and WASD to move. Space bar to go up, shift to go down and control to go faster.

Please note; The date of this release is wrong because I changed the tag name. See the commit for the actual date.

New Features

• New icon
• Multi accounting (can now easily switch between multiple accounts
• Improved UI for editing server list
• Rendering multiple chunks at once
• Basic face normal based shading (sort of)
• Mip mapping to remove artifacting
• Rewritten rendering system (rewritten multiple times)
• Rewritten chunk meshing system (more reliable now)
• Much neater code (you probably don't care about this one)
• Frustum culling
• Free-cam movement (like spectator mode, it is free-cam because I don't have a collision system yet and I don't want people getting kicked for flying while testing the client.
• Multipart structure rendering (like fences and stuff)

Known Bugs

• Mip mapping introduced weird behaviour for transparent textures
• Block models have some issues to do with culling
• Transparent blocks on the ground cause incorrect culling (X-ray)
• Sometimes certain chunks just don't want to render
• Turning fast causes frustum culling to lag behind the view somehow

Snapshot 2 - Bug fixes

Just fixes a few critical bugs present in snapshot 1.

Please note; The date of this release is wrong because I changed the tag name. See the commit for the actual date.

Bugs Fixed

• chunks with negative coordinates weren't rendering
• the client required re-logging into the mojang account quite often
• empty arrays in some packets were causing fatal errors and crashing the client
• should now work pretty well for normal vanilla servers

Known Bugs

• servers like hypixel and the hive don't work because of a flaw in how downloading the terrain is currently performed. the lobbies are sky islands and contain empty chunks with messes with my maths

Snapshot 1

The initial proof of concept with a significant amount of foundation work done.

Please note; The date of this release is wrong because I changed the tag name. See the commit for the actual date.

Features

• smooth initial launch (downloading assets and such)
• support for mojang accounts
• basic configuration ui for server list and accounts
• support for online-mode servers (hypixel is weird though and currently doesn't work)
• support for offline-mode servers
• render player's current chunk (with no animated textures, multipart structures, block entities or proper biome colouring)
  • no movement yet, player must be moved around with tp commands by another player

Metrics

• file size: 5.2mb
• startup time: 0.85s
• time to join server: 0.38s
• ram usage on main screen: 40mb
• ram usage when playing on generic survival world: just under 95mb