Best Rip-off of Minecraft?

Look:

Wow, that looks great! How do they have so many fractions of blocks and still run so smoothly with that good of a texture? Or am I just showing my ignorance here?

Make FC on that instead of Minecrap

Bloody heck. That looks better than Minecraft itself.

It's thoughtful engine design. Can't tell for sure without playing it, but it's probably sharing vertices on parallel faces, and taking full advantage of being able to do so on those slope blocks. I would be interested in how they handle occlusion culling but my guess is they just don't have an extensive cave network.

Also note that the UV texture spans more than a one block. It breaks up the repeating patterns and goes a long way towards selling the scene to our eyes.
And the soft shadows look amazing, though I don't think they are dynamic.

How have I not heard of this? I would buy it just to look at.

...bye bye minecraft, 20$ well spent.

:O

It's 9.99 Euros, or about 14$ USD. Looking at their dev page it seems they have but one sprawling cave network, but it's huge.

Not to mention- 256 player multiplayer.

It looks like Blockland and Minecraft finally hooked up and had this fella. All they need is a Survival mode and I'm totally getting this.

Also'd like to know what this 'Minececraft' is, unless you're referring to that 'rip-off' of infiniminer?

looked at the site, phase 2 has actual game modes.

Got a chance to look a bit closer at the game. Probably going to buy it soon, too.

Anyway, I was mistaken in how it works. Still not positive about the details, but it appears to be rendering at least partially using Marching Cubes on the surface. It's a very efficient technique for converting true voxel information into surface meshes by testing which combination of voxels in a 2x2x2 grid are occupied and converting the pattern directly into triangles. Because a true voxel structure is usually stored as an oct-tree (progressively smaller versions of the model, each voxel represents a 2x2x2 set of voxels from the previous octave), marching cubes can easily change octaves to model distant surfaces at a lower resolution.

You can always recognize a marching cubes algorithm by the fact that edges are always rounded and faces are consistently sized and the angles are always increments of 45 degrees. That's what threw me off here, because there were 90 degree edges on artificial structures, but there's nothing stopping you from going back and forcing 90 degree angles on certain materials after the initial generation, which is probably what the developer did.

Bordering faces of the same texture share a single vertex, which helps a ton. Minecraft makes 4 unique vertices for every visible face regardless of neighboring blocks. Though wasteful, this gives you full control over what textures appear on what faces. The UV texture map is much larger than a single block, which helps make the texture look less repetitive.

It's all about trade-offs. Blockscape is a much more traditional voxel engine, with decades of research and refinements behind it, and it shows.
Minecraft, on the other hand, is a pseudo-voxel engine, with a single octave of voxels and rendering is done with polygons rather than raytracing. And Minecraft in particular has the restriction that all surface faces must be aligned to axial planes. Before Minecraft, no one had ever done that before on a large scale (Infiniminer was quite tiny, relatively speaking). It's much more difficult because you can't generalize anything without compromising the look, but on the other hand that look is the game's trademark.

The shader-based engine I am working on should fix the problem of wasteful geometry, but still can't scale to significantly larger areas. What I would like to do once blocks start getting down to the <10 pixel level is make a shader which can add fake light patterns onto smooth slopes to make it appear terraced. Then you could put a marching cubes renderer on the back end and solve the scalability issue. No idea yet how to pull that one off, though.

In the meantime, I'll let you know if I find anything else interesting about this game. Personally, I am quite curious about the shadows.

Just a quick update, looks like I was giving blockscape too much credit. Got a chance to play with a test build, which I'm assuming is pretty close to the current version.

While I can't tell exactly how it work on the underside because my Direct3D profiler doesn't like it for some reason, I can say that it doesn't work the way I thought. The world is does not have volumetric rendering, or at least not the way I thought it did. It seems to be block based, but instead of just cubes, there are an assortment of shapes. The world loads in cubic chunks, and draws everything to a single render, just like minecraft. And it's kinda choppy.

Overall, once the initial wow factor wears off, it feels really sloppy and unfinished. Which it is, of course, but it was surprising to see just how different it felt to play compared to the videos. Also it uses the XNA framework and relies heavily on .Net to do stuff. Performance-wise, it's close to java, and while it is really easy to draft programs quickly, it's hard to control in terms of performance and fine tuning.

Aw, nuts. Good thing I didn't buy it yet.

Keep an eye on it, at least.
Used to be a time you couldn't mine during the day-night transition in Minecraft because the lighting update was too slow to let you see what you were doing. Minecraft's come a long way since then, and Blockscape is still in its infancy.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

Keep an eye on it, at least.
Used to be a time you couldn't mine during the day-night transition in Minecraft because the lighting update was too slow to let you see what you were doing. Minecraft's come a long way since then, and Blockscape is still in its infancy.

Only problem Minecraft didn't have was a larger more finished, well loved, doing well, older sibling attracting all the attention and producing opinions on how a game, even in its infancy, should look and play.