glCraft

A minecraft clone made with OpenGL, written in C++

I am learning computer graphics, and the basics of game development. I think that the best way to learn something is to use it to create a minecraft clone, so I made this, which is also my first C++ project. Making this was a great journey, I learnt a lot. I created the game entirely from scratch except the libraries, compilers, the operating system and other software that I used to make this.

Screenshots

• Building and destroying blocks
  
• Ambient Occlusion
  
• Post-processing effects
  
• Procedural world generation
  
• Semi-transparent blocks
  
• Order-Independent Transparency mode
  
• The chunks are hollow on the inside
  

Building the project

• How to build it in CLion

  • Clone the repository

  git clone --recursive https://github.com/Isti01/glCraft.git

  • Open it in CLion and press the green magic button.

• How to build it using CMake

  • Clone the repository

  git clone --recursive https://github.com/Isti01/glCraft.git

  • Build the project the build_type can be either Release or Debug

  cd glCraft
  mkdir build
  cd build
  cmake -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=<build_type> ..
  cmake --build .

  • Run the game on Linux with an optional save to load:

  ./main <saved-world.glc>

  • Or on Windows with an optional save to load

  main.exe <saved-world.glc>

Features

• Rendering

  • The chunks are hollow on the inside, so most of the blocks that are not visible are not sent to the GPU.
  • Each vertex in a chunk is only 4 bytes long to make the game as memory-efficient as possible (on the GPU side).
  • The game has animated textures and an animated skybox.
  • The game supports ambient occlusion, post-processing and semi-transparent textures, the chunk meshes are sorted before drawing.
  • The world rendering has order independent transparency rendering mode implemented from this paper.

• Gameplay

  • The game has very basic, minecraft-like physics, with two movement modes:
    • One that is similar to spectator mode (the default).
    • One that is similar to the movement in survival.
  • The game has block placing, block picking and block breaking. - maybe the most essential feature
  • Implemented a basic UI to change the active block, load saves, and load custom textures for the world.
  • The world is generated procedurally using a seed, and loaded dynamically as the player moves across it.

• Controls

  • Left Click to break a block
  • Middle Click to pick a block
  • Right Click to place a block
  • WASD to move around
  • Shift to descend when physics is off
  • Space to ascend when physics is off, or jump when physics is on
  • Ctrl to go faster
  • Esc to open the menu

Libraries that I used

• FastNoiseLite - for terrain generation
• GLAD - for loading OpenGL functions
• glfw - for managing the window
• glm - a great math library for working with OpenGL
• imgui - for creating the amazing UI in the game
• lodepng - for loading PNG textures