Cryptovoxels Blog

tldr: Cryptovoxels runs with about 20x less lag than it did yesterday.

I’m not sure if it’s just a Cryptovoxels thing, but I find that it’s always the smallest tiniest improvements that make the biggest difference.

Now that desktop and mobile are starting to look pretty good (other than performance issues, but that’s a story for another blog post), I finally got some time to dig into the VR experience for Cryptovoxels.

Destros, aka Destroy With Science has been working with me on Cryptovoxels since mid-August. He’s a Javascript developer from way back, having worked extensively on Patchwork and Loopdrop. His work on Patchwork is super interesting because it is a decentralized social network, which will help on our journey to a decentralized metaverse.

Cryptovoxels has just broken 1500 minted parcels, and has reached the threshold where we could no longer load the world in a single request, and instead had to break it up into a bunch of smaller requests.

At this moment…

Today I released a feature that’s been kicking around for over a month. Support for full color tiles. If you have enough COLR (1 COLR per voxel), you can upload and use color tiles. Your favourite minecraft skin, the super mario tiles, or some hand drawn specialty tiles of your own.

There is amazing content in Cryptovoxels, but it’s hard to find. So I’m doing some work to make it easier to find. It’s a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, exploring all the art galleries of Cryptovoxels, and stumbling upon a build you haven’t seen before - but for new people, and people who are busy and time constrained (as most of us are to be fair), it’d be nice to drop straight into some of the best content in the world.

At a users request (thanks Edmond!), I added Undo to the editor last night. When you’re working on your parcel, all your edits are stored in an undo buffer, and if you make a mistake, just hit ctrl-z (or command-z on mac) to undo your edits. You can press undo multiple times. There is no redo button yet though, so be careful you don’t go back too far.

I keep putting off having a proper builders competition in Cryptovoxels, because we don’t have public build areas (yet!), so you’d have to be a land owner before you could submit something in the competition. But the prize is to win some land in Origin City - so it’s a catch 22.

I want Cryptovoxels to be buttery smooth. So fast and smooth that you don’t even think of it as a game. It’s just a really fast 3d webpage. No stutter, no lag, no waiting while big pieces of geometry page into the world. I want Cryptovoxels to be faster than google maps and load quicker than twitter. It’s a long term goal, but I think it’s doable. Here are the steps I’ve been taking to work towards it.

I’ve been working on the Cryptovoxels mobile app (for android and iOS) and I thought I’d discuss some of the upcoming features and some of the design decisions.

So just before I went away on holiday, I started working on porting the main engine from Babylon 3.3 to Babylon 4.0. Babylon.js is the game engine I use for Cryptovoxels, and it’s been awesome to use - so I was super keen to get on the latest and greatest version.

On Thursday I took the Cryptovan down to the beach in Wellington and parked up. I had to go forward and reverse a few times until I found a nice flat park, with the back of the van facing north so the sun streamed in. It’s a few days after the winter solstice here, and the temperature is about 13°, but it’s lovely sitting in the van and getting out of the house.

This is pretty exciting news, Oculus Quest support just dropped. It’s very beta, but it works. Put your Quest on, load cryptovoxels.com, then click enter in vr.

This one has been a long time coming, and was blocked on me working out how to convert a gif into a sprite sheet.

The Cryptovoxels roadmap exists mostly in my head, and in a bunch of github issues on the issue tracker. While I’m sitting at this cafe, I thought I’d try and put a braindump down of everything in my head for the next few major versions of Cryptovoxels. This post is the approximate road map over the next few versions (we’re on version 1.0 now, hoping to release 2.0 in July and 3.0 in October).

The 12” Macbook pro is a super cool laptop, but it has two things that make Cryptovoxels run really slow:

In cryptovoxels, anything that’s not a voxel or an avatar is called a feature. The images on the wall, the big 3d text, the push buttons, particle effects. And the tool for editing features was really creaky. It was designed for laying 2d things on the walls, and until now, it hadn’t really worked properly for the 3d features. After todays release, it now works amazingly well for editing 2d and 3d features, and I added the M key.

In the tradition of adding awesome features in half an hour, this morning I added time travel to Cryptovoxels. If you go to your parcel settings page, you can see all the previous versions of your parcel, so you can review your build progress.