Welcome to the very first Alpha release of the Eidos Engine! This massive update establishes a rock-solid, high-performance C++ voxel foundation. We completely rewrote the core rendering loop, eliminated multithreading bottlenecks, and implemented a flawless smooth lighting system.
Here is what's new in v0.0.1:
Core Performance & Engine Optimizations
Zero-Copy Mesh Swap: Completely eliminated FPS stutters and main-thread freezing when breaking/placing blocks. The mesh is now built in temporary buffers by background threads and swapped instantly using std::swap.
Y-Culling (Sky Optimization): Chunks now dynamically track their maximum terrain height (maxY). The engine completely ignores empty sky space during mesh generation and light calculations, resulting in a ~60% faster chunk generation speed.
Smart Multithreading: Terrain generation and mesh building are now strictly separated into dedicated lock-free thread queues, preventing race conditions.
Advanced Voxel Lighting System
Double-Buffered Lighting: Fixed the dreaded "Dirty Read" artifacts (black borders between chunks). Chunks now compute light in a hidden shadow buffer and commit the results instantly, ensuring neighbors never read uninitialized 0 light values.
Diagonal Light Fix: Expanded the lighting neighborhood check from a 4-way cross to a full 3x3 chunk grid. This permanently fixes black triangular artifacts on chunk corners.
Cascading Light Updates (Echo Fix): Light no longer bleeds through newly placed solid blocks or gets "trapped" in enclosed rooms. Light accurately flood-fills and triggers neighbor updates only when actual brightness changes.
World Saving & Loading
Smart Delta-Saving: The engine now only saves chunks that have been actively modified by the player. Unchanged terrain is ignored, saving disk space and reducing I/O overhead. Data is efficiently serialized into binary .bin files.
60-Second Auto-Save: The game safely auto-saves your progress in the background every minute without dropping a single frame.
Seamless World Entry: The loading screen now intelligently waits until a radius of 12 chunks (or your current render distance) is fully generated and lit before dropping the player into the world. No more falling through the void!
Gameplay & UI Polish
Zero Input Lag: Breaking and placing blocks is now truly instantaneous. Only the targeted chunk (and strictly necessary borders) are flagged for updates, rather than a massive 3x3 area.
Cinematic Main Menu: The main menu now features a dynamic 3D panorama. If you create a world named MenuPanorama and build something epic, the main menu camera will beautifully orbit your creation. Otherwise, it defaults to a scenic mountain landscape (Seed: 2026).
UI Refactoring: Extracted all 2D overlay logic (Loading Screen, Crosshair, Waila 3D block preview, Version Watermark) into a clean, decoupled OverlayUI module.
Installation:
Download the EidosApp.exe (or the attached .zip archive), extract it to an empty folder, and run the executable.