A Minecraft clone with parallel procedural generation

Disclaimer

The vast majority of this code was created by jdah. I was simply left astonished by his work and felt inspired to add something to it. Even this beautiful picture below is only his merit, not mine :)

This is my thesis!

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This project is my thesis for the Computer Science and Engineering bachelor's degree at the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna, Italy. The aim was to use a NVIDIA GPU with CUDA enabled to parallelise the procedural generation of the height maps and blocks in the chunks of the world. All the code I added is available in the src/cuda folder, with minor changes made to src/world/gen/worldgen.c.

The parallelised code proved to be faster than the serial code on my machine. While being efficient, this version can be still improved in many ways.

If you're bold enough to collaborate or to propose your changes, I'm definitely interested. :D

Setting the project up

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Requirements

• CUDA enabled GPU
• CUDA Toolkit installed and environment correctly set up; it's not that easy, it may take a while...
• Unix-like environment

You will probably need to know the compute capability of your GPU and change the Makefile in the root directory accordingly. Line 60 is what you're interested in, and it looks like this:

$(CUDA_COMPILER) -arch=sm_75 -dlink $(CUDA_OBJ) -o gpuCode.o -L/opt/cuda/nvvm/lib64 -lcudart

Change the -arch=sm_xx option with your compute capability without a dot written in place of xx. You can find your GPU compute capability by looking it up here: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus. As an alternative, you can try completely removing the -arch=sm_xx option.

Building

You will need to install a bunch of libraries. Depending on your linux distribution, you may need to change the package manager used for installation. Here's a general command taken from jdah#40:

sudo apt install clang cmake libxss-dev libxxf86vm-dev libxkbfile-dev libxv-dev libxrandr-dev libxinerama-dev libxcursor-dev libxi-dev -y

Unix-like

$ git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/Martinetto33/minecraft-weekend.git
$ make

The following static libraries under lib/ must be built before the main project can be built:

• GLAD lib/glad/src/glad.o
• CGLM lib/cglm/.libs/libcglm.a
• GLFW lib/glfw/src/libglfw3.a
• libnoise lib/noise/libnoise.a

All of the above have their own Makefile under their respective subdirectory and can be built with $ make libs. If libraries are not found, ensure that submodules have been cloned.

The game binary, once built with $ make, can be found in ./bin/.

Be sure to run with $ ./bin/game out of the root directory of the repository. If you are getting "cannot open file" errors (such as "cannot find ./res/shaders/*.vs"), this is the issue.

Windows

Good luck 🤷‍♂️ probably try building under WSL and using an X environment to pass graphics through.

Troubleshooting

In case the project does not compile, throwing errors regarding implicit function declaration, modify the CMakeLists.txt files in the library folders as specified in this issue: jdah#97.

In summary, you need to go to ./Makefile and modify it by adding the following line to the CFLAGS:

CFLAGS += -Wno-error=implicit-function-declaration

Then you need to go to ./lib/cglm/CMakeLists.txt and look around line 36, right under some code performing string(REGEX REPLACE "/RTC(su|[1su])" "" ${flag_var} "${${flag_var}}"). There, you will find a line like this:

add_compile_options(-Wall -Werror -O3)

You need to modify it as follows:

add_compile_options(-Wall -Werror -Wno-error=array-bounds -Wno-error=stringop-overflow -Wno-error=array-parameter -O3)

Now you should be able to run the make command in the root directory.