noa-engine

An experimental voxel engine.

Example games:

• Minecraft Classic - official minecraft game built on this engine
• noa-lt - game world containing "slides" for a talk I gave on voxels in JS
• noa-examples - repo with minimal hello-world and testbed game worlds
• old testbed - outdated, but colorful

Usage

The easiest way to start building a game with noa is to clone the examples repo and start hacking on the code there. The comments in the hello-world example source walk through how to instantiate the engine, define world geometry, and so forth.

To hack on the noa engine itself, you'll want to clone this repo alongside your game content, and make the latter depend on the former with a local file dependency (i.e. file:../noa in package.json). Note however that webpack is picky about this - see the examples readme for details.

Docs

See the API reference for an overview of engine classes and methods. Docs are evolving though, some details are only documented in source comments. Documentation PRs are welcome!

Status, contributing, etc.

This library is under active development and contributions are welcome! If you have a nontrivial feature in mind, probably best to open a discussion issue first though. The goal of this module is minimally only do voxel-specific things, and otherwise to stay out of your way.

Please note that all feature work is in the develop branch; please send any PRs against that branch!

For code style/formatting, the repo includes config files for eslint and js-beautify, which are both dev dependencies. If you use VSCode for editing, here are the extensions I use to run them automatically: beautify, eslint.

Change logs

See history.md for changes and migration info from each version.

Migration notes:

• v0.28: improves swapping between world data sets (see noa.worldName).
  Removes duplicated voxel padding in each chunk (this means world generation no longer needs to be deterministic!)
• v0.27: adds world origin rebasing. If you encounter new bugs related to entity positions, see positions.md
• v0.26: game clients should declare a dependency on @babylon/core, rather than manually loading babylon.js and leaving it in global scope. This allows tree-shaking to happen, greatly reducing (production) bundle sizes for typical games. For sample code and configs see noa-examples.

Credits

Made with 🍺 by Andy Hall, license is MIT.

Uses Babylon.js for 3D rendering.