The titles will only get weirder from hereon, people. I apologize, in advance.

Aaaaaanyways... I am sinking my already soaked feet deeper into the murky waters of "maybe original, maybe not". As stated in an earlier entry, I have taken the advice of trying not to be too original with my project, lest I go spinning off into The Void, never to return. As also stated, I am brushing up against unoriginality by doing what I did back when I first got into C++ and OpenGL: Making a Minecraft clone. Except not really. And today's entry is heavy on the "not" part of that!

One thing I like about  lot of games, which Minecraft sorely lacks, is dynamic detail. When things are far away, make them rough. When things are close, make them detailed. So I brushed up on octrees, and I just did the first real test of the results. It's just a sloooow building up of the fundamental functions, but it seems to work. So I can go up to my Borg-cube-like test chunk of blocks, and it looks like this:

Aaaaand one step closer, and it looks like this:

There is no correlation between any of the cubes inside, it's all just random. But the idea of one big thing breaking into a lot of smaller things is now planted. Now it just has to grow. And be optimized, because this stuff is.... whew....

What this means for my "original or not" struggle is that I am still following a well-known, established model: A Minecraft clone. However, I am already moving away from the strict Minecraft format, and staking out something of my very own. This is a balance I would like to keep for a long while on this project, the balance between "I'll just do like others" and "I'll do my own thing, dammit". It seems a good way to have my cake (i.e. follow the advice not to be too original) and eat it, too (i.e. be somewhat original).

Let me know if any of that makes sense and/or seems interesting, in the comments!