super original minecraft clone - devlog 1 14/09

Another new project, this time I’m going to make a start at recreating Minecraft from scratch (how original!!). I won’t be using a game engine, because that’s cheating - instead, I’m using C++ and OpenGL. This is my first real attempt at both graphics programming, and object-oriented c++, so my start will be a bit slow.

What I did

In this devlog, I followed the learnopengl tutorial and made myself a triangle, which we could then turn into a textured cube. I also added a movable perspective camera using some linear algebra, and refactored the code into multiple different files and made shaders, textures and the camera each their own class. Finally I set up a build system with CMake that also copies over textures and

What was challenging

Surprisingly, getting my head around proper C++ was the hardest part. I have pretty good experience competitive programming in C++ but using classes and header files was a bit mind bending. I think I’ve set up a decent codebase to build upon however.

What I’m going to do next

Currently a lot of things (such as the vertices!) are hard-coded, so I need to address that. Only so much fun can be had with a spinning cube.

Next up is probably the logic to turn a 3d map of blocks into triangle meshes. This along with noise is the part of the project that interests me the most - it’s easy to draw a lot of things, but hard to do quick.

I really really doubt that I’ll get anywhere near finishing this project by the end of the month, but maybe I’ll have something to ship. Thanks for reading!