Procedural Terrain Generation: The procedural terrain generation makes use of a deterministic pseudo-random Perlin Noise function that takes the two-dimensional position of each block column and generates the height for that column.

Basic 3D Physics: The game makes use of a combination of preventative and corrective AABB collision detection to detect and resolve collisions between the player and the voxel world. The game also contains basic physics such as gravity, acceleration to move the character, linear damping to act as air resistance and impulses for jumping.

Voxel World Global Illumination: The voxel world is pre-illuminated to create the effect of lighting on objects in the world before the more accurate lighting pass takes place. Each block type has an internal illumination value which basically determines that block's translucency and emissivity and this value is used to propagate the illumination of light in the world. Environments exposed to open air are naturally brighter and environments which are hidden, such as caves or building interiors, are naturally darker.

Split-Screen Two-Player Mode: The game consists of a split-screen two-player mode with individual controls using an XBOX or similar controller and independent terrain generation and post process effects. The terrain is generated independently around each player if they are far away from each other and merges together when they get closer.

Depth-of-Field Effect: The depth-of-field effect makes use of OpenGL's frame buffer objects (FBOs) and the depth buffer to apply a post process effect that mimics the camera and human eye phenomenon of showing objects in focus with sharper clarity than those out of focus which are blurred out in order to convey the depth of a scene.

Screen Shatter Death Effect: The screen shatter death effect is a post process effect that gradually blurs and decolourizes the scene to black-and-white as the player is taking damage from the AI entities. Once the player loses all their health, the screen breaks up into smaller shattered fragments that go flying off-screen. The screen goes back to normal after the player respawns back into the world.

Blinn-Phong Lighting: The game makes use of high resolution textures containing diffuse maps, normal maps and specular maps and applies the Blinn-Phong lighting technique to create realistic lighting in the scene. There are two types of lights in the game, local point lights and global point lights.

Day-Night Cycle: One of the lights used in the Blinn-Phong lighting is a global point light that acts as the Sun. This light rotates around the player from East to West over a fixed amount of time and changes colours as it rotates around the player mimicking a day-night cycle. This also tints the skybox based on the time of day.

Photo-realistic Water Rendering: The water rendering uses FBOs to render the reflection and refraction for the water into two different render targets which are combined together and distorted using a distortion map before being mixed with the water's tint to create photo-realistic looking water. The depth buffer is used here to determine the water's depth at any given world position and tint the water accordingly in order to realistically show the depth of water at that position.

Underwater Effects: Coming Soon!