Program Voxel Minecraft Worlds with C# - Unity 6 Compatible (Udemy.com)

It's mostly her typing out code and barely explaining what it does and why. There is no logic, no assist. It seems lazy where the instructor just wants to pump a video out and make some money.. Good thing I bought it at a discount. It's lazy with barely any learning. She explains what vertices are, but for people looking for more of the logic behind the code, expect none. In another Udemy tutorial (different Udemy course) on C# and Unity, the instructor goes through the code, best practices, making sure there is less likelihood of errors.. Which by the way, this instructor (for this voxel tutorial) just blazes through code typing and wants you to copy paste. She changes around some names and barely tells you... So lazy... And then, I get some errors that I have to go through the code and sort it out and even ask AI for help adjusting. And she sells this garbo at $80 normally and doesn't work hard at all... LAZY.

Enjoyed the course. I liked that it's been updated using a more recent Unity version, with newer functionality to improve performance of the world building. A few lessons, I needed some help from the Q&A sections - things that weren't addressed in the video, or optimizations (or another way to do something being done in the video). But overall, the explanations were clear, and I learned a lot of new things about generating voxel worlds. Not enough in the course to create a full game, but it's a good starting point.

I love the course! For the positives: It has been easy to follow, lots of great concepts and it is everything that was promised. For the negatives: There is so much repeated code! Part of learning programming is if you have to repeat a line of code, it is time to refactor. Especially with the uvBlock array. Creating a simple function to calculate the uv sprites by position in the sprite sheet would be a lot easier for a beginner to understand than that beast of a multi dimensional array. Especially if you were to change your sprite sheet with different dimensions. Although there is value in leaving some of the refactoring to the student after the course is done, there are some things that end up being a potential buggy nightmare. Addressing it earlier in the course might also be good, if some parts are specifically not refactored due to potential performance issues. This is another great course from Penny (I also took the amazing Shader course) but would like to see cleaner code, not just to get it done.

This updated version (as of 2021) is an excellent course and one of my favorites. Great overall strategy for building out, step by step, complex game logic, and incorporating parallelism and asynchrony. The deep dive into C# coding in Unity, really differentiates Penny's courses from the others on Udemy and elsewhere. I have only 2 suggestions. First, consider putting the code in a git repository, with each course section as a different branch. The udemy approach to tacking on resources to lectures feels haphazard. Secondly, and more importantly, the level of coding practices does not match the excellent coding complexity and depth. As an examples, there is frequent duplication of more complex code that might be best reused from a methods and variables. I frequently refactored what I saw Penny perform, in order to avoid repetition and improve code readability. There are also many simple autocompletion tricks that Penny did not use. One of the benefits of code along, is picking up new coding strategies for design, readability and efficiency - and this is less present here. However, I'll repeat, that is updated version is an excellent course and the small suggestions for improvement, are far overshadowed by awesome content and Penny's teaching style. Thanks for another great course Penny.

I write this review after having completed the full course. The good parts: Penny has a great voice and is easy to understand for a non-native speaker. I really liked listening to her explaining the content of this course. It really motivated me to come back to this course and work on it every day. I really appreciate that Penny took the time to update the course for using the C# Job System plus Burst Compiler to get a performance boost. This serves as a good entry into how to to create and manipulate meshes within the new Unity Dots tech stack. Especially since the official documentation is a bit lacking. It shows how committed she is to provide high quality educational content. Penny gives the learner little challenges for applying the learned material on his own, before showing how it's done. I really appreciated this "interactive" approach. Just following someone writing code in read-only mode can be quite boring. The not so good parts: Sometimes there is too much speaking the code out loud while it's written. There is not so much value in this, when I can see the written code. While on the other hand some more detailed explanation here and there could have been added. But usually links to more in-depth resources are provided. Some of the code is written a bit sloppy, poor naming of variables for example. I am aware this is not a course on writing clean and elegant code but in the end you have a running example which is quite messy. I would definitely recommend some refactoring before using the code as a base for more explorations into Voxel Worlds. Overall I really enjoyed this course and learned some valuable new Unity skills.

Edit for Newer version: The new version of the course is very much improved! The explanations of Perlin Noise were good before, but are even better in this version. The end product is a lot closer to a useable project than before. The performance improvements are significant and the teaching methodology is fantastic. My last remaining critique is there are a couple things implemented at the end of the course that were only half implemented and which create major problems the student would need to solve. The way water is implemented means your caves will all be filled with water. And the way the water post processing is implemented makes it look like you are under water any time you dig down deeper than the water level, even when you aren't in the water. It's a cool effect but I'm not sure the approach being used would be easy to fix. It would probably be better to go a different route with the water post processing. So, the time spent on the post processing could probably be better spent finishing up the water implementation so it doesn't fill in the caves, or spending more time on Biomes. I know the course can't go on forever, so I think it would be better to leave out the post processing, and wrap up on a fully implemented water system, so the student ends on a high note and a feeling of completion. --------------------------- Fantastic primer on Perlin noise and procedural generation. Note that (as of August 2021) this is still the original Unity 2017 course. The instructor has promised an updated course, but it hasn't been released yet. I was fooled by the update stamp, and thought it was a newer course. The course as-is has some very interesting concepts, but the code is not optimized enough to create a viable project. Expect to do research of your own to get it in shape to actually use. Also of note, this is one of the instructor's earliest courses, and as you might expect there are some areas that could be smoothed out that are much improved in her later courses. The teaching method is primarily explaining pre-written code, but the problem is there are code additions and refactoring that happens from video to video which is harder to follow along in this style. This is compounded by the fact that the instructor doesn't always catch all of the changes that were made, so several times I had to download the example project because I had no clue what I had missed when following along with the video. Overall decent course and I'm looking forward to the update when it is released.

Dr. Penny de Byl has been promising an update for the past 2 years. There are some real issues about this project as a whole. One of them is faking multi-threading with coroutines, another is the instancing and destruction of every single quad. Even with a job system it's just too much. This course did take me in the right direction, I eventually ,through research, managed to optimize the code, but it's completely different of what this course originally provided. Different enough that, to be honest, I feel like I got cheated a bit. This course should had have a disclaimer about optimization and use of bad practices. For someone of your caliber, the quality of this course does not match.

A pretty solid example of begginigns of a Minecraft world.
It did not have the water decrease in height using slope and height adjustment as it spread from the main block after impacting blocks while spreading out.
Biomes is based on a height system and not a perlin noise application.
They never addressed functional blocks like the forge, red stone etc.... Does not address Zombies or mob spawns.
It could be said that this not expected in the tutorial, but but the title is how to Program Voxel Worlds.
A world is about more than terrain as is evidenced in its definition.
As I said, a solid example of creating the terrain for a Voxel World.

It's been so amazing so far and I love how she is explaining everything so well!

By section 6, you've managed to explain in 20 mins things it took me a month of trial and error to learn on my own. This is a wonderful foundation and is going to save lots of people lots of time! This is great!

This course is amazing! Penny has go to be, hands down, one of the best instructors on game development, Unity, and C#! In the span of three hours, I have learned so much that it rivals my graduate program!

I started learning Unity and C# six months ago (going pretty hard out at it). I had to repeat the course material 2-3 times over to fully grasp the concepts. And boy was it worth it! Very good learning experience overall and a powerful tool to take with for future projects! Thanks Penny, hope to see more Unity related courses from you, I'm pretty hooked!