Shaped Clouds

A fast dynamic clouds system, capable of rendering clouds of any shape and form. Generates 2D noise based on textures, then renders that, or anything else, as clouds, using more detailed noise. Meshes can be rendered as clouds, as well as any custom shaders and renderers. Basically anything that can render to a camera can render as a cloud.

I've been working on this for a very long time, so long that it's unrecognizable from when it started. After rewriting all the code several times, beating my head around how to make it work on multiple Unity versions and a lot of bug hunting, I decided to make it an asset and try to sell it. It's available here.

"Snowy Mountain V2 - Terrain" by artfromheath is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution.

"Human Base Meshes v1.3.0" by Blender Studio and community contributions is dedicated to the public domain via CC0.

QuadTree Compression for ComputerCraft Videos

A compression algorithm that converts and reduces the size of a video file very efficiently. Made for a Minecraft mod that adds computers to the game, only supports binary videos (only 2 colors).

ComputerCraft, the mod in question, has a limit of 1 MB total size storage per computer in-game. Naively storing pixels directly to bytes would be extremely wasteful, and even storing each pixel as a bit would still be very wasteful. And for this resolution, there's simply not enough redundancy for most generic compression algorithms to work well.

However, by seeing each frame as a quad tree structure and storing it in the shortest way possible, it's possible to considerably reduce file size. This is overkill for most use cases, and binary videos won't have enough colors most of the time, which is why this method isn't good for many situations. Still, it's a very efficient way to store videos for this one situation.

This project is open-source and the code can be found here.