A bunch of quality-of-life changes.

General changes

• New versioning scheme. Public tests now specify last two digits of the year and week number in the tweak version. So this new release is version 0.0.1 with a public test for week 50 of year 2024
• Experimental single-player support; new C++ API for managing an SP session has been also implemented for all the GUI things that might want the player to join or leave a game world.

Protocol improvements

• Protocol V9 no longer has a server password field in the Login Request packet
• The aforementioned Login Request packet’s fields are now used in full; both client and server validate their VDef2 (voxel registry) integrity

New voxels

• Glass. That’s it; it is rendered semi-correctly now. Specifically for glass, I added a special option to disable depth-sorting chunk meshes that might speed things up on lower-end machines by sacrificing cross-chunk visibility of blending voxels.

Notes for nerds

• The game’s source code and CMake scripts have been re-done to utilize precompiled headers; this single-handedly sped build times up to five times the previous speed. The entire project (WITH ALL THE DEPENDENCIES including FetchContent’ed GLFW) takes about 41 seconds to build!

What’s next?

• Lua support, I guess? I’d love to have at least some interactivity in the console and support for some plugins that don’t mess with the game itself too much. It’s not like I want a Luanti clone :)
• Liquids, I guess? I’d really like to try my hand at doing this
• Actual good surface feature generation; I really want to do that. These pillars are getting annoying