Frameless glass

[nevir]

@Dhusk

Why can’t Boundless do it with blocks?

Blocks are hard for a couple reasons:

@lucadeltodecso

With only ever allowing cubic-glass, it wouldn’t be too hard no, but at some point we would like to allow the glass to be chiselled too if we can, and then it becomes “very hard” to have a consistent “frame” in-texture around the glass. Having a consistent frame is basicly what texture blending is doing, but we only support texture blending on “standard-slopes” and not on square or bevelled shapes (because the effort involved would be monstrous), but texture-blending also largely relies on blends being kind of blurry and not super well-defined, as the “blends” get stretched/rotated and blended on top of eachother, so couldn’t be used for a crisp frame. So we’d be back to only ever allowing cubic blocks like we do right now.

@jesshyland

This was my ideal design for the glass block! Like you, I’m not super happy with the aesthetic of the current glass block, but it looks the way it does for some pretty important tech reasons.

The biggest and baddest reason of them all is that we simply do not support semi-transparent block textures. I asked about this back when I was making the glass block and the thing is, semi-transparency is crazy expensive, rendering-wise. I’m not a graphics programmer so I can’t talk in detail about why that is, but basically it adds a whole nother level of calculations required to every single block, because if just one blocktype is to be semi-transparent, all other blocks are affected by that. Anything that adds to the expense of rendering one block even a little bit becomes a BIG HUGE EXPENSE when you’re rendering a world made of thousands and millions of blocks.

I yelled and screamed about it(well, okay, I pouted a bit) but 1-bit alpha is all I get, so basically a pixel is either completely transparent or completely opaque. No in-betweens! This directly affects specularity and normal maps too, so I can’t have a ‘completely transparent’ block that’s still shiny like glass.

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But doing them as a prop (similar to doors, etc) is more reasonable:

@jesshyland

What’s more likely than a shiny new glass block is window props, since props can have nice semi-transparent materials and therefore much glassier-looking glass. I’m hoping we’ll have more news to share on windows soon.