The Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm™ Part 2 - Traversing the graph
31 August 2014
Now that we can build a visibility graph out of the cubic chunks, we need to find a way to search which ones are actually visible from the player’s point of view!
Probably there are many ways to use the graph we have right now, but they all hinge on the same performance/accuracy trade off.
The Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm™, or, making Minecraft faster
31 August 2014
The Advanced Cave Culling Algorithm™ is an algorithm that I happened to come up with during the development of MCPE 0.9, after we tried to enable cave generation in the worlds and being hit by how slower the game just became - it would hardly reach 40 fps on this year’s devices!
Fortunately, turns out this culling approach works pretty great with good culling ratios going from 50% to 99% (yes, 99%!) of the geometry, so it allowed us to generate caves on all phones instead than on the most powerful ones only.
On top of that, it gave a nice speed boost to Minecraft PC after it was backported :)
I think it might be an interesting read, and perhaps it could be useful to the countless voxels games being developed, so here’s how it works!