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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

by k__ 6y ago

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.

DylanDmitri 6y ago
Minecraft via mods. As exemplified in this post, the Minecraft community makes good tools for map making and otherwise transforming the base Minecraft game into whatever you want.
hoten 6y ago
Not meaning to be dismissive, but why not just Minecraft? There is a large modding community. And there's something called Adventure mode which puts more constraints on the player (can't destroy blocks), which can be used to make goal-oriented maps.
- k__ 6y ago
  I guess, Minecraft has some kind of licence restrictions.
- johnisgood 6y ago
  Is modding officially supported by now?
  - imtringued 6y ago
    No, it isn't. Also, maintaining mod updates to newer minecraft versions is a huge hassle. I know a friend who stopped updating his mods in 2018 and now everyone is begging him to release a new update. First, because minecraft uses a different obfuscation pattern for each update requiring a recompile. Second, because the codebase is still changing significantly.
- Kiro 6y ago
  I always ask the opposite. Why mod when you can make your own game? For me, the latter is much more fun.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    You definitely should do whichever you find more fun. But for Minecraft there are two clear "why" answers which interact: 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.
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    But they're not asking how to make their own game, they want "a game engine for making games in Minecraft style". 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".
boogies 6y ago
Minetest: https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/. It’s a bit similar to “just use Minecraft” because it comes packaged with a barebones “game” — a mapgen algorithm and enough Lua to allow you to run around, mine, and craft, but stops short of adding non-player mobs (but you can find plenty of mods to add them, and adding mods — really just Lua scripts + packaging and optionally meshes, textures, etc. — is what it’s designed for). “Available for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android”.
- k__ 6y ago
  Sounds good, thanks!
  - boogies 6y ago
    My pleasure, you’re welcome!
adzm 6y ago
Well, there is Roblox. It has an... interesting community. Technologically it uses Lua for scripting! And has a great ide for editing worlds and script. And a giant user base. It's definitely limited though.
mdiesel 6y ago
If interested then search on github for "voxel" rendering engines. There are plenty of repos, including some with good clean code that are great for learning the techniques used (s-macke/VoxelSpace for example).
- k__ 6y ago
  Is Minecraft a voxel engine? I had the impression the blocks are just polygons. But thanks for the info!
  - superdisk 6y ago
    Yep, MC is just polygons. Classic ace of spades was made with a voxel engine (voxlap) from Ken Silverman which is pretty cool.
  - skocznymroczny 6y ago
    Since Minecraft got popular, people started using 'voxels' for any stylized game that builds objects out of cubes, even if it's still a 100% polygonal rendering and there aren't any algorithms like marching cubes or raytracing going on.
    - tripzilch 6y ago
      There's nothing about "voxels" that implies raytracing has to be used. 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.
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    > Is Minecraft a voxel engine? I had the impression the blocks are just polygons. No and yes. The minecraft engine is polygon-based, and the polygons are just making voxels.
fenomas 6y ago
If you want to target web browsers, you might check out this JS voxel engine (of which I am the author): https://github.com/andyhall/noa https://github.com/andyhall/noa
- k__ 6y ago
  How does it compare to VoxelJS? VoxelJS didn't have commits for 5 years now, but it seems to have a bit of tooling.
  - fenomas 6y ago
    AFAIK VoxelJS is dead. I started out trying to build a game on it, but nobody seemed to be working on it and it seemed to be more of a wiki than a engine, so that's how I wound up rolling my own project.

by k__ 6y ago

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.

DylanDmitri 6y ago

Minecraft via mods. As exemplified in this post, the Minecraft community makes good tools for map making and otherwise transforming the base Minecraft game into whatever you want.

hoten 6y ago

Not meaning to be dismissive, but why not just Minecraft? There is a large modding community. And there's something called Adventure mode which puts more constraints on the player (can't destroy blocks), which can be used to make goal-oriented maps.

k__ 6y ago
I guess, Minecraft has some kind of licence restrictions.
johnisgood 6y ago
Is modding officially supported by now?
- imtringued 6y ago
  No, it isn't. Also, maintaining mod updates to newer minecraft versions is a huge hassle. I know a friend who stopped updating his mods in 2018 and now everyone is begging him to release a new update. First, because minecraft uses a different obfuscation pattern for each update requiring a recompile. Second, because the codebase is still changing significantly.
Kiro 6y ago
I always ask the opposite. Why mod when you can make your own game? For me, the latter is much more fun.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  You definitely should do whichever you find more fun. But for Minecraft there are two clear "why" answers which interact: 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.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  But they're not asking how to make their own game, they want "a game engine for making games in Minecraft style". 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".

boogies 6y ago

Minetest: https://www.minetest.net/ https://www.minetest.net/. It’s a bit similar to “just use Minecraft” because it comes packaged with a barebones “game” — a mapgen algorithm and enough Lua to allow you to run around, mine, and craft, but stops short of adding non-player mobs (but you can find plenty of mods to add them, and adding mods — really just Lua scripts + packaging and optionally meshes, textures, etc. — is what it’s designed for). “Available for Windows, macOS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFly BSD, and Android”.

k__ 6y ago
Sounds good, thanks!
- boogies 6y ago
  My pleasure, you’re welcome!

adzm 6y ago

Well, there is Roblox. It has an... interesting community. Technologically it uses Lua for scripting! And has a great ide for editing worlds and script. And a giant user base. It's definitely limited though.

mdiesel 6y ago

If interested then search on github for "voxel" rendering engines. There are plenty of repos, including some with good clean code that are great for learning the techniques used (s-macke/VoxelSpace for example).

k__ 6y ago
Is Minecraft a voxel engine? I had the impression the blocks are just polygons. But thanks for the info!
- superdisk 6y ago
  Yep, MC is just polygons. Classic ace of spades was made with a voxel engine (voxlap) from Ken Silverman which is pretty cool.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  Since Minecraft got popular, people started using 'voxels' for any stylized game that builds objects out of cubes, even if it's still a 100% polygonal rendering and there aren't any algorithms like marching cubes or raytracing going on.
  - tripzilch 6y ago
    There's nothing about "voxels" that implies raytracing has to be used. 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.
- tripzilch 6y ago
  > Is Minecraft a voxel engine? I had the impression the blocks are just polygons. No and yes. The minecraft engine is polygon-based, and the polygons are just making voxels.

fenomas 6y ago

If you want to target web browsers, you might check out this JS voxel engine (of which I am the author): https://github.com/andyhall/noa https://github.com/andyhall/noa

k__ 6y ago
How does it compare to VoxelJS? VoxelJS didn't have commits for 5 years now, but it seems to have a bit of tooling.
- fenomas 6y ago
  AFAIK VoxelJS is dead. I started out trying to build a game on it, but nobody seemed to be working on it and it seemed to be more of a wiki than a engine, so that's how I wound up rolling my own project.