Hello everyone, welcome to 2026!
There are a lot of changes in this devlog, most of them related to the surface above the dungeon. I wanted to create a well-developed starting location, as this is one of the few safe areas in CaveVox that the player will return to.
Surface
Initially, I thought about making it static, but then I decided it should work with chunks. So now there’s a separate generator for this task. Here’s what it does:
The surface is created from dirt and grass. Grass can also have different types.
Trees are generated across the map based on height. They come in different types and heights, mostly tall dark firs.
Small objects like grass are drawn. In the future, I plan to add stumps and mushrooms as well.
It’s important to note that the foliage is animated and sways, tree trunks are visible, and shadows from trees and grass are rendered.
On top of this scene, a safe camp and the dungeon entrance are displayed. Since I previously centered the dungeon, this is literally the top central point.
I also bound interactions with objects for future use, like trading, but I haven’t added characters for this area or the trading system yet.
Additionally, I added particles for leaves falling from trees, as well as environmental SFX like light wind.
Rendering
The main change in rendering is the use of Greedy Meshing with a significant twist. My method differs in that I only create the shape without considering other factors, which results in a minimal number of primitives in the scene. Then the data is sent to the shader, where it uses the chunk's 3D texture to retrieve additional information, and everything is drawn. This minimizes CPU time spent creating the shape, while the shader handles the rest. It significantly speeds up performance and also preserves mesh-based collisions.
Previously, there were issues with the shader generating the back side of faces, which is now easily fixed.
Also, objects that are meshes without logic are now drawn in batches as Multi-Meshes. This significantly speeds up rendering of things like grass on the surface or spider webs in the dungeon.
Visual Style
New door models have been added, as well as the first arches (more types and columns are planned).
Object placement has been fixed (previously they were offset from the original center). This allowed removing unnecessary nodes and standardizing positions for all objects.
Torch extinguishing has been added and object interactions updated.
New achievements in the new style have been added.
Conclusion
In the near future, there will be a lot of work on the network part and core player mechanics. I hope this devlog was informative, and thank you for reading it!