So I am in the process of creating a voxel sandbox survival game (minecraft clone) in javaFX. I am at a point where I need to come up with a way to load the chunks in my surrounding given a render distance setting.

At first I thought this was a simple as iterating through the chunk coordinates in the players vicinity and adding them to the world if they did not already exist (done by initializing new chunk) or adding a pre-existing chunk if they did (done by manager) such as this:

public ArrayList<Chunk> getChunksToRender() {
//Defines the starting chunk to begin iteration. This chunk is in the corner of the area that should be rendered
//playerChunk is the chunk that the player is currently in.
//Chunks are at locations divisible by 16, e.x 0,0,0 |16,16,0 | 16,32,0
        Point3D start = new Point3D(playerChunk.getLocation().getX() + (renderDistance * bounds),
                playerChunk.getLocation().getY() + (renderDistance * bounds), playerChunk.getLocation().getZ());

        

        chunks = new ArrayList<>();
        for (int i = (int) start.getX(); i < start.getX() + (renderDistance * bounds); i+= bounds) {
            for (int j = (int) start.getY(); j < start.getY() + (renderDistance * bounds); j+= bounds) {
                if (manager.containsChunkWithLocation(new Point3D(i, j, 0))) {              
                    //Gets pre existing chunk from chunk manager and adds it to chunks to be rendered
                    chunks.add(manager.getChunkWithLocation(new Point3D(i, j, 0)));
                }
                else {
                    //Creates new Chunk at location (i, j, 0) xyz coords
                    chunks.add(new Chunk().initialize(i, j, 0));
                }
            }
        }
        //Returns chunks to be added to world by chunk manager
        return chunks;
}

bounds is the chunk width and height (Same number, 16x16 in this case). All chunks are at the same Z coordinate (vertical). However as chunks are created and loaded around a player, they eventually cross the x and y axis. I am trying to think of a solution that accounts for the eventual transition from a negative coordinate to a positive and from positive to negative.

A visual example of what I was going for below. The green arrow represents the order in which the chunks would load, iterating through each one in the players vicinity and loading it:

But I quickly remembered that this 3D space is cartesian and this method quickly falls apart when an axis is encountered.

How would I go about implementing something that accounts for axis? I'm not necessarily looking for code, but I am just not sure how to go about doing this. Any help would be appreciated!

posted over 2 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

2y ago

cuzzo‭

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