Half-OT:
Can anyone recommend a game engine for making games in Minecraft style?
Preferably something that runs on multiple platforms and has some kind of map editor.
Can anyone recommend a game engine for making games in Minecraft style?
Preferably something that runs on multiple platforms and has some kind of map editor.
VoxelJS didn't have commits for 5 years now, but it seems to have a bit of tooling.
1. There is a huge modding community so while your mod might be somewhat interesting on its own, the rest of that community can interact with it too, doing things which you didn't conceive of, but nevertheless would not have existed without your mod and that adds even more value.
Example:
Applied Energistics is a mod about storing things as data and then accessing that data over a storage network. Inside the game you walk up to a terminal and type like 'coal' and see that somewhere in the network is some coal, which you can now pick up and use from this terminal, or maybe you're carrying some stone you don't need, you just drop that into the terminal and it's stored on some disk elsewhere. Is managing disk space, etc. fun? For some people it is.
Thaumcraft adds a system of elemental magic to Minecraft. You can discover what "elements" make up blocks in the world, even enemies you meet, and harvest them to do magic. You can convert the magic into some sort of liquid or gas and combine it in new ways to make things from it.
So then an author says these both sound good, let's apply AE to Thaumcraft, and they make Thaumcraft terminals in AE, so now you're storing magical elemental fluids as bytes on a storage network. You cast some spells, realise you're low on fire element, you run up to a terminal type 'ignis' and get some fire element from a remote storage system.
2. There's an enormous ready to go audience for modded Minecraft. So that's low friction for going from an idea to getting some playtest feedback. You have an idea, you make it out of existing mods, maybe some parts are sketched in, some configuration values are pretty arbitrary. You upload that and people can try it immediately on any platforms that play Java Minecraft (so not consoles). If it sucks you can throw it away the same week you started it.
You can take this really far (e.g. some packs involve actual custom programming just for that one pack) or just throw together a dozen things you like and see if it's fun with them all together with no tweaking at all.
I'm all with you that actually doing something original is much more fun, but this isn't that.
"I want to build a shitty minecraft but with my name on it"
The only thing that Minecraft has going for it, is its unique type of gameplay. The sheer power of its original concept even elevated the hopelessly backwards retro graphics to its own genre.
I'm just saying, because simply modding Minecraft wasn't enough, that comes with "licensing issues", aka they can't say "I made this".
But thanks for the info!
And marching cubes is actually a method to get rid of voxels, in a sense. You don't use marching cubes if you want that ridged low-res voxel effect.
No and yes. The minecraft engine is polygon-based, and the polygons are just making voxels.
It's definitely limited though.