BlockWorld is set in a game set in a world made of cubes. Probably sounds somewhat familiar...
I started writing it in December after playing Minecraft for a couple of days. I thought Minecraft was *AWESOME*. I have yet to see any design and development decision in minecraft which I feel is even remotely questionable. I am in awe of many of the development and design decisions in Minecraft.
After a couple of days playing Minecraft, I'd built a portal to the Nether. Then I built a new world, and made another portal.
Then I set about trying to build something similar, only somehow better. Worst case, it gives me something to do whilst Notch adds new features to Minecraft!
I have to say, there is a lot more work involved in doing this than I initially anticipated.
What I have working so far:
- landscape generation, using Perner noise
- an OpenGL renderer
- basic crafting
- basic monsters
- basic inventory
- some toys which I shall keep under wraps for now, but which I think are kind of interesting
- ... and then I started adding a network a few weeks ago.
My original plan was never to add a network at all. That was going to be my 'differentiating feature' in fact, the lack of a network. Lack of a network would give me lots more time to concentrate on designing interesting monsters, and environments and so on.
But I couldn't resist adding a network, so now I'm in the middle of debugging all sorts of icky errors and trying to glue things together and it's going a bit porridgy...
But it's gradually advancing.
In the past I have a whole bunch of other half-finished projects:
- Opensource metaverse project,
http://manageddreams.com/osmpbb/ an opensource version of SecondLife
http://secondlife.com cited briefly in Wired
http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/news/2004/12/65865 , but which I abandoned pretty much the exact day that the SecondLife client became opensource
- An AI in C#, and another in Java, for
http://springrts.com ,
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=20262- a 3d rts map designer for springrts,
http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=8094&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=60I've put quite a lot of effort into playing with 3d virtual worlds in the past, and I think the idea of using voxels is fascinating. It simplifies things at so many levels. For example, physics is so much easier to handle without having a bunch of irregularly-shaped meshes flying around...
I fully expect this project to add to my ever growing collection of half-finished virtual-world projects, but in the mean-time I'm having fun!
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