Celestial
This was a project started by me and @MitchTalmadge in 2013 in attempt to make a Minecraft-Shores of Hazeron cross-over game.
With our limited knowledge, this seemed to be a pipe dream. However, we accomplished far more than our expectations.
Engine
As one might quickly notice, this is completely written in Java. The jMonkeyEngine was the engine of choice; we had only designed and developed small Minecraft mods and Java Swing applications prior to this game's conception.
Voxel Mesher
Luckily for us, someone with more knowledge than us had developed a voxel framework, Cubes. Thanks to being written so simply, we were able to understand how it worked and build upon it.
Progress
Well, let the screenshots do the talking:
Known Issues and Limitations
Here's what we concluded:
- Floating-point errors make space games hard to do, as the devs from Kerbal Space Program showed later on
- Quaterions are hard, but not impossible. @MitchTalmadge taught himself enough linear algebra theory to get our planets to rotate and revolve around the sun.
- Perlin Noise is complicated, but feasbile. I managed to create some sort of random terrain generation using Simplex Noise.