voxel_engine 0.3.0-dev

The pure-Dart half of the voxel kit: chunk grid, meshing, streaming, physics, world generation, block and item content, signals and a TCP net layer.

Changelog

0.3.0-dev

• ChunkWorkerPool.defaultWorkers is two thirds of the cores (workersFor, new), no longer all of them but one: 8 on an M2 Pro instead of 11, 5 on a Galaxy S24 instead of
  7. Past that the window's fill time did not fall (on the phone 735 ms with 5 workers, 728 with 7), each job ran slower (a mesh 10.6 ms at 4 workers, 15.8 at 7), and the extra isolates took the cores the UI and raster threads need.
• ChunkStreamer sends a chunk's mesh job when the last generation of its ring lands, no longer at the next update: the window's fill was 387 → 350 ms in a prototype (M2 Pro, radius 6), and the ring's copy leaves the frame for the message handler. Only the nine chunks around the one that landed are looked at, so jobs that answer at once (a headless world's) still fill over several updates.
• ChunkMesher.build no longer allocates on every cell of its loop: the ladder, the rails and the fence drew with closures declared in the loop's body, which captured the cell's variables, so Dart allocated a context for them on every one of a chunk's 32768 cells (and boxed the cell's coordinates into it), whatever the cell held. They are methods now; the meshes are the same, vertex for vertex.
• ChunkMesher keeps the four surfaces it fills from one build to the next: each build allocated 4 × 216 KB of growable arrays, and again each time one doubled, all of it garbage once the result was copied out. A result's arrays are exact-size copies now, which outlive the next build as before.
• ChunkMesher.buildWith (new) meshes like build and hands the result to a callback, its arrays the mesher's own and valid only inside it. ChunkWorkerPool's workers use it: they copy the mesh into transferables anyway, so the exact-size copies build makes (~0.3 MB for a chunk of the example's hills, and 64 KB of light) are no longer made.
• eulerYXZInto (new) writes eulerYXZ's rotation into a quaternion it is given, the product of the three axis rotations worked out by hand; eulerYXZ is built on it. A rig part posed every step no longer allocates eight vectors and quaternions for it.
• NetHost.broadcast encodes its message once for every peer, no longer once per peer, and each send is one write, no longer two (writeln wrote the line, then the newline): a host's 20 Hz state of 40 creatures cost it 369 µs with 4 peers and 797 with 8 (M2 Pro), against 106 and 122 now. EncodedMessage (new) is a message encoded once; NetConnection.sendEncoded (new) sends one to a connection.

0.2.0-dev

• ChunkMesher merges cube and liquid faces greedily: coplanar neighbours of the same block, light, AO corners and lowered top become one quad, across a direction only where the AO does not change along it, so the interpolated colour is what the unit faces had. The kit example's radius-6 window meshes 114,193 faces where it meshed 185,130 (solid −31%, liquid −98.5%). Breaking: the per-block colour variation is no longer in MeshSurface.colors (it made every face different); a renderer computes it from the cell with the new ChunkMesher.voxelTint, as voxel_scene's terrain shader does. The glow surface, meant for an unlit material, keeps it baked and unmerged.

0.1.2-dev

• Formatted by dart format at the 120 columns the code is written at (formatter: page_width: 120 in analysis_options.yaml); pana took 10 pub points for formatting.
• Pathfinder.find keys its cells by an int (the offset from the start, packed) and keeps its nodes in lists reused from one search to the next, allocating nothing per cell it opens; the paths are the same, the search about 1.6 times faster. A PathCosts callback that searches again throws a StateError. With 40 creatures (mobs:6, M2 Pro) a step's p99 goes from 8.7 ms to 4.7.
• ChunkStreamer.getBlockXYZ and lightAt find a chunk by shifts and an int key (ChunkStreamer.keyOf) instead of a double division and a record key: 41 → 14.5 ns and 66 → 32 ns a call. ChunkStreamer.chunkAtXZ returns a column's volume the same way. ChunkSize gains shiftX/shiftZ and maskX/maskZ.
• ChunkStreamer.chunks is read-only (an UnmodifiableMapView): the streamer keeps it in step with the int-keyed copy its queries read.

0.1.1-dev

• No code change. The README says why the web is not a target: streaming spawns isolates and net.dart is TCP sockets, through dart:isolate and dart:io.

0.1.0-dev

First version. It is the five pure-Dart packages that came before it — voxel_core, voxel_worldgen, voxel_content, voxel_signals and voxel_net — merged into one package with a library per subject. No code changed in the move; package:voxel_core/voxel_core.dart became package:voxel_engine/core.dart, and so on for the other four.

• core.dart: VoxelBlockTable, ChunkGenerator, ChunkWorkerPool, ChunkStreamer, ChunkMesher with light and ambient occlusion, VoxelBody, VoxelRaycast, Reach, LiquidFlow, Pathfinder, VoxelModel, EditDeltaCodec.
• worldgen.dart: WorldGenSpec compiling to a ChunkGenerator — biomes by climate, terrain recipes, caves, ores, trees, plants, structures, and FastNoiseLite.
• content.dart: BlockRegistry, ItemRegistry, MiningRules, Inventory, RecipeBook, LootTable, StatusEffects.
• signals.dart: SignalNetwork and SignalRules for wires, levers, lamps, doors and pistons; RailGraph for rails that lay themselves.
• net.dart: NetHost, NetConnection and connectToHost over TCP.
• voxel_engine.dart exports all five.
• A sixth example, voxel_engine_example.dart, runs the subjects together.
• Dartdoc describes the behaviour in its own words instead of by reference to another game (ItemType.tier, VoxelModel, VoxelBody.wading).