Hallo pretty big changelog because I didn’t do anything for a bit oops

TLDR; Cleaned out old bugs, did a performance pass, built actual world simulation and did a full graphics overhaul

Bugs: Chunks were silently vanishing past a hardcoded cap that was way too low for default settings, no draw, no shadow, which turned out to be that “chunks glitch out while moving” bug. Fixed it plus streaky stars, a moon that looked like a tiny sun, and water growing phantom walls at chunk borders from an earlier fix. Teleporting somewhere far caused a 1004ms freeze. Profiled it instead of guessing and found the GPU arena was doing a full reset every time. Fixed properly and worst case is under 12ms now.

Performance: Frame time was 15.5ms. Turned out shadows were re-rendering every single frame for no reason, only redrawing a cascade when it actually needs to cut that down 89% and dropped the whole frame in half to about 2.3ms. Built a couple things expecting wins that turned out to be losses when actually measured (one was 28% slower), and almost built a whole defrag system for the arena before realizing it wasn’t fragmentation, it was just too small so I bumped it up and the problem vanished on its own.

Real world woahh: Flowing water, colored block light, ore veins that actually clump instead of speckling everywhere. Rewrote falling sand and gravel, the old version was doing 118k lookups a tick and never even stopped. Rebuilt caves properly using two noise fields overlapping instead of one, actual tunnels now instead of flat noodles. Also chunks exist at any height now, no ceiling at all. Building that surfaced 3 old bugs that had been broken this whole time.

Graphicss: Water got reflections, caustics, underwater god rays. Found an evil ass NaN bug doing the caustics where the seabed was rendering as solid black rectangles until I caught it. Rain and snow are generated entirely in the vertex shader, so 30k drops cost one draw call and zero buffer uploads. Volumetric clouds and cloud shadows now share the same noise field so they can’t disagree with each other. Also fake normal maps with zero authored art, the pixel art textures already have the detail baked into their own shading so I just reused that as the normal map, completely free. Built and killed an atmosphere LUT after measuring it three separate times, kept losing to the simple hand tuned sky. Also fixed emitters like lamps flickering their own glow depending on the angle you looked at them.

Next up is audio, a settings menu, and makign the game look better somehow