Lootfest Live Design - FAQ

When is the game released
-Sometime between mid-Nov and early Dec, unexpected problems always show up and I am only a one man team.

Cost?
-3bucks

Is this Lootfest2?
-No, Lootfest2 will be released next year, this is "just" a map editor mod of the game series.
LF Live Design = Free building, toys and zombie hordes
Lootfest2 = Fantasy adventure, item managment, world exploring and more loot.

Will Live Design have any updates?
-Yes, I am aiming for pretty frequent update at least for the first year (minimum one each 3months). All progress I make in the Lootfest series (the zelda like game) will be transferred on the Design mod.

Why dont you add torches, ladders, night/day cycles, dynamic fluids or *insert MC clone expected feature here*??
-I never had a lack of ideas, time is the main issue here. I also have to weight features against each other depending on their time consuming. Light effects are for example very complicated and I could easily add 5new monsters, 10 new materials and 4brand new toys in the same time period - what would you choose?

Technical Details
-The world is made up by 512*512chunks, each chunks is 32*64*32 blocks large
-It takes about 30min to walk from the center to the world edge
-The game only saves chunks that are changed. The more areas you build on - the larger will the save file get.
-Putting a block on every single chunk in the game will take about 2years of around the clock work, and you will end up with a save file around 400MB
-The world block light calculations and generating takes 65% of the game's total CPU, and is by large the biggest performance bottleneck.

What are the Voxels made of
Basically it is a runtime generated mesh that I create a surface with, giving the illusion of blocks. In more detail, I start off with a grid (byte[,,]) of numbers, each number is a material and zero is nothing. I check each position, if it have a material then I check all it's neighbor blocks. If anyone of these are zero I will place a polygon there, reprecenting a face. All shadows and such are made by changing the vertex colors. The Primitives 3D example is a good example of how to create generated mesh.
I am pretty sure that Minecraft use about the same method as I, specially be course it is known to not use any hardware acceleration. But I think Fortress Craft is using shader effects to create their shadows instead, which means less control but the light changes can be instant.