building-blocks v0.2.0

Building Blocks v0.2.0

This release is all about improving what we already had in v0.1.0, and several breaking changes were necessary. Most notably:

• There is an important bug fix for Octree::from_array3.
• We've added a voxel_sphere_cast function that's similar to voxel_ray_cast.
• All of the meshing functions now support TransformMap.
• We've made several API ergonomics improvements.

Most of these changes have been driven by the effort to port the voxel-mapper project from ilattice3 to building-blocks. The completion of that effort confirms that building-blocks is viable for an application which enables interactive voxel terraforming.

What's Next

We will shift focus to adding new features in the next release. The choice and design of the features will be driven by real use cases. We expect to work on:

• procedurally generating large voxel terrains
• procedurally generating large height map terrains
• real-time voxel editing in a Bevy application

Detailed notes

Meta

• started using Github Actions for CI

Core

• add the Point::at trait method for indexing scalar components
• add the Point::map_components method for transforming points component-wise
• add PointN methods:
  • round
  • floor
  • as_2i and as_3i
  • in_pixel and in_voxel

Storage

• remove GetRef and ForEachRef, instead relying on Get and ForEach, which copy
  values instead of borrowing. This had no noticeable performance impact.
• impl Deref for ChunkMapReader so it has access to the methods of ChunkMap
• make ChunkMap::from_serializable and to_serializable async so chunk compression can happen in parallel
• improve copy_extent performance when copying large extents between two chunk maps
• rename ChunkMap::key_iter to chunk_keys_for_extent
• rename ChunkMap::chunk_key to chunk_key_containing_point
• cleaned up the Array trait by extract an ArrayIndexer trait
• rename Chunk::map to Chunk::array
• export type aliases for chunk map with default empty metadata type ()

Mesh

• make all meshing algorithms compatible with TransformMap<Array>
• replace pos_norm_tex_meshes_from_material_quads function with more focused
  methods on the QuadGroupMeta object
• remove the material_weights function, this was very application-specific and
  relatively trivial to implement

Partition

• fixed a bug with Octree::from_array3 that produced incorrect octants; regression test was added
• add a voxel_sphere_cast function, similar to voxel_ray_cast but with a sphere
  traveling along the ray
• add the "partition" feature to the list of default features
• remove "ncollide" features from the list of default features
• rename nearest_voxel_ray_cast to voxel_ray_cast and adjust the API parameters
• add OctreeDBVT::remove
• Octree::from_array3 now takes an extent instead of forcing the input array to
  be the correct shape