One of the more expensive operations in a Minecraft-like engine is lighting propagation calculation when you’re not in direct sunlight. None of the screenshots show underground environments with torches/other light sources. Is this handled? I would imagine Blueprint would have trouble doing the required calculations every time a block is created/destroyed. Moreover the existing lighting in the screenshots with the nice shadows and sun-rays might even get in the way of underground lighting, I suspect. I’d love to know about your plan for underground lighting, if you’ve given it any thought yet.
Lighting also greatly affects mesh chunk creation because once you start propagating lighting information you have to regenerate neighbouring chunks every time a voxel is added/removed to make sure the lighting is updated, this is a very large performance cost (comparatively)
The other performance cost in Minecraft-like engines is that once you start adding caves you all of the sudden have a lot more exposed voxels faces to render, and performance suffers. Minecraft uses a “cave culling” system for that, you can read more about it here:
I also noticed some of your trees are cut off, they’re probably on the edge of chunks and the tree generation doesn’t flow smoothly into neighbouring chunks, this is yet another tricky problem to solve, the the bigger the structures (eg. villages) the harder the problem, at least computationally.
At this point I don’t think it’s fair to make performance comparisons as the hard problems don’t appear to be solved yet. But it is looking very impressive, and I have no doubts it can look better than Minecraft in the end, but I’m not at all sold on doing all the hard problems in Blueprints, you’d likely have to migrate to C++.