Jess talked about it here:
I bet that would work well as a prop (would probably follow similar placement rules to doors/portals; & wouldn’t be chiselable). Honestly, having that would probably alleviate most people’s wants
2 Likes
Creativerse has glass blocks as well and they look very good.
their glass has partial transparency, which is something boundless can’t do with blocks
Why can’t Boundless do it with blocks?
Blocks are hard for a couple reasons:
But doing them as a prop (similar to doors, etc) is more reasonable:
1 Like
Technically water already has the exact same problems glass would have if it were semi-transparent. When you have multiple overlapping layers of water visible, you can get some really funky looking rendering. We made it less funky by having water write to depth even though its semi-transparent… but that introduced other problems that it screws up various other things like not being able to see particle effects through water or making the volumetric fog interact strangely when water is in the background. So we “could” make glass semi-transparent with those same gotchas and glitches, though it would still require an extra mesh per chunk compared to now to be rendered. The main reason you dont generally notice this stuff with the water, is the water “tends” to be a single flat plane, without multiple overlapping plains of water, and without much going on “under” the water for you to notice the problems… but glass would not be used like that, so you “would” notice the problems straight away.
One thing I would really like to experiment with at some point given time (time is never available…) is with an overhaul of the rendering pipeline to experiment with order-independent transparency solutions which would let us have “proper” semi-transparent water as well as semi-transparent glass which wouldn’t have any glitchy problems though would still be more expensive compared to the water now.
(Equally I’d like at some point to experiment with screen-space reflections so that we can have water reflect at any height in the world, and to allow reflections on specular objects and even blocks. Of course screen-space reflections aren’t perfect and things that are reflected right now in the water, would not necessarigly be reflected any more. Eg right now you can see planets reflected in the water even if the you cannot see the planet on the screen otherwise which would no longer work. Trade offs.)
(Equally I’d like at some point to experiment with further overhauls of the rendering engine to get better performance with more deferred rendering, but now we’re really talking time sinks…)
12 Likes
If they can make signs turn into one big sign, they can make glass do the same with the frame on the outer edge’s, just like signs. AND signs are not thick as a entire block.
Signs have to be rectangular, and are individual meshes which makes them far more expensive than glass too.
1 Like
good to know. I’m not a programmer, so I wasn’t sure how it could work. Maybe the easiest way is just to make the frames as small as possible. the giant border is really the biggest deal breaker.
Oh I have an idea. What if the border is thinner, but is Bright instead of dark? Like a white border. Can you guys try a thin white border, and see what that looks like?
It would be cool if glass had textures, but no borders. Like some kind of rippled, or shiny texture so it doesn’t have to be invisible.
2 Likes
ikr, nothing says it has to be clear. Maybe useful if the dev’s posted some screen shots of what they are limited to, maybe some color/texture/frame combinations available,and do some voting. just an idea so we can get an idea.
2 Likes
You don’t need frames on glass. It can be a slight off color but still see through. It just needs a slight tint to it for normal colored glass. Then it would be possible to use other items in the game to create color dye to turn them different colors. Really isn’t that difficult to make them look good.
The back end coding side of it all is a different story but making things look good visually isn’t really that difficult when there are thousands of games that have used glass in a variety of different qualities and uses.
For me, the only reason to ever make glass is to use it in a recipe to make something else. I will never use the current glass block in the game cause it looks ugly.
That’s called opacity. The game engine allows one bit for opacity. 1= fully opaque (solid), 0= no opacity (transparent). There is no level of in between.
This is not a case of “oh golly it’s simple!” It’s much more complex, and lots of tricks and techniques have been tried.
1 Like
Minecraft, for example, does the same thing: block texture textels can either be opaque, or completely transparent, but not semi-transparent (tinted).
I do wonder if we could pull off a borderless variant of the Minecraft texture - maybe by having the “streaks” clustered near the edges of the texture
The game could support semi-transparent textures, but judging from what Luca’s been saying, that would probably involve an engine overhaul (I doubt we want to wait that much longer), and even then would still be a decent performance hit (which might make things like PS4 support more difficult, and require more tradeoffs with other graphical features)
Actually Minecraft does have tinted glass in many colors. However the way the Boundless engine was created it doesn’t have the ability to do that. And that’s fine. The absence of tinted glass is not gonna break the game for me. We just need to learn to build without it. I’d much rather have the game run smoothly then try and implement something that could potentially drop my FPS.
4 Likes
Doh, so it does 
1 Like
Havok, that’s why I said from a coding back end it’s a different story. The idea of frameless glass blocks is a simple one. Implementation may not be. I don’t need to be corrected on the reality of this.
Having smaller frames down to almost completely unnoticeable is by far the easiest solution to implement. That sounds more like an art texture thing than a coding issue.
If this is a game engine thing that they need to make a modification to, then the question that needs to be answered is how expensive is making that change. Is it worth it? Is the cost higher than putting in something of more content for all of the players to enjoy? Does it push release date back significantly since it’s a game engine change? Does making the game engine change open up for future possibilities with future content to make them better game features?
Product development is never simple. Which is why I mentioned the back end coding part in my post is why it probably is complicated to do.
i think it could look better if its same but less dense
flatter glass glass is to thick in boundless
1 Like
Totally agree. Having the frames so far apart is one reason it looks so bad. If glass blocks only had a frame on one side it would look significantly better and would be much easier to see out of cause you wouldn’t be looking through two sets of frames.
1 Like