Infiniminer Source

I spent the day working with XNA, trying to draw cubes. I got one drawn, but it was white, rather than covered in grass like the model should have done. I tried messing with the material to be not an image file, and that only partially worked - it was greenish, but not like it appeared in Blender. Anyway, that's good enough for me to start working on multiple blocks. So I did.

When I filled a 3D array with them, it worked... but it rendered very slowly. Whatever I'm doing is apparently an inefficient way of doing it. It was about this point that I discovered something: Infiniminer was written in XNA and C#. Exactly what I'm using. Infiniminer uses the world-out-of-blocks system. And it apparently works well. It's also open source. So I'm going to crawl through the source code and see if I can't learn some ways that they were using to get all those blocks to be handled efficiently enough to run real-time. From a preliminary skim-through, what I need will be buried pretty deep into the specific implementation Infiniminer did. Apparently it's client/server based, and it didn't have an XNA Draw() method. So I'll have to more carefully look into how the world is kept and rendered.

I am also realizing that I need a blog not just for Adventurer, but for all the games I work on as a whole. I'll see if I can't rename this blog, or else make a new blog and link you all to it. Also if you'd really rather me return to Adventurer rather than work on this, go ahead and vote over on the right side of the page. Likewise, if you're excited about this, go ahead and vote. I'd like this to be fairly community driven.