Terraria 3D (Mod)

This is a mod that renders Terraria in 3D. The constraints of the shader model made this a challenging project. I got the render function sub 1ms making gameplay butter smooth.

View Source

Background

Terraria 3D was originally an unreleased feature from my paid Terraria modding work in 2014 (see Terraria Modding and Rendering Terraria in 3D). In January 2019 I dusted off the idea and rebuilt it from scratch for tModLoader, the dominant mod loader for the game. This rendition was better than the original in almost every way. The big issue was performance.

It was running in a few days, and a few more days after that it was running smoothly. The biggest hurdle was being limited to SM2 in XNA. I spent about another 3 weeks adding features and squashing bugs.

The Poor Man’s Ambient Occlusion

I came up with a super cheap set of instructions to do AO in my shader. I’m stuck with SM2/3 and instruction count is super limited. Pretty pleased with how much depth it adds to the image.

Virtual Reality

Started playing with this mod in VR. I couldn’t render the headset view on a separate thread. This is an issue because Terraria is capped at 60 fps. For a smooth VR experience it should be 90fps+. Here is a puketastic capture from my experiments.