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He is not alone. I have followed several projects that try to create Minecraft-like Voxel engines. Thanks for the article. Minecraft was originally inspired by

by frik 12y ago

He is not alone. I have followed several projects that try to create Minecraft-like Voxel engines. Thanks for the article. Minecraft was originally inspired by Infiniminer: http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=713 http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=7... It was coded in C# (.Net 2) and XNA 3.0 runtime. The code was not obfuscated and someone published the code. As Infiniminer was a multiplayer game, hacks and bots destroyed the game community as well as several knock-off clients. That everyone had to download dotNet 2 and XNA 3 didn't help either. So Minecraft with its original Java browser applet won the audience by storm. The rest is history and Notch just bought the most expensive house in L.A. The history of DirectX support on non C/C++ is a sad story of deprecated APIs: * Visual Basic 6 with DirectX 7 support: Direct3D retained mode (COM-based scene graph API), Direct3D immediate mode and DirectDraw (2D) * Visual Basic 6 with DirectX 8 Direct3D immediate mode (different API), no DirectDraw (2D) * C# with managed Direct3D (Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D), supports only DirectX 9: http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series1/tut1.php http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series1/... * C# with XNA 1-4 (DreamSpark/MSDNAA license), supports only DirectX 9: Released in December 2006, XNA is intended to push the ease of game programming to the extreme. XNA is new wrapper around native DirectX. As development on a new version of Managed DirectX has been cancelled, XNA can be thought of as the new version of Managed DirectX. Although the code is not 100% the same, it is VERY similar. No windows event handling, built-in update and drawing loops and XBOX360 compatibility are just some of the some of the reasons why XNA will become the future of DirectX game programming. XNA is built on top of DirectX 9 -- http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php Windows comes with OpenGL 1.1 (from 1996) and one has to init its context to load a third party OpenGL 4 context: http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/opengl/moving-beyond-opengl-11-for-windows-r1929 http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/opengl/mov... Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL 0.9 (almost no extensions, current would be WebGL 2): http://webglstats.com/ http://webglstats.com/

jarcane 12y ago
And of course, XNA itself is essentially deprecated now, and isn't capable of targeting Metro either. A number of devs have started switching to MonoGame, but the support there isn't quite complete yet.
dietrichepp 12y ago
> Windows comes with OpenGL 1.1 (from 1996) and one has to init its context to load a third party OpenGL 4 context To expand on this: when you create an OpenGL context on Windows, you get a context provided by your vendor's drivers, with OpenGL 1.0-1.1 functions provided by Microsoft's DLL, and all the remaining entry points must be retrieved manually, by supplying your own headers and fetching the function pointers. But if you want anything special like a core context, you have to call a special function provided by one of those pointers... which you can't get without a context. So you have to create an OpenGL window, then use it to get a function pointer to create the window you actually want, then close the first window. This is why we use GLFW or SDL.
_almosnow 12y ago
Wow, so money actually doesn't buy taste...
dreen 12y ago
> http://webglstats.com http://webglstats.com Neat. What happened in the summer of 2013?
- ferongr 12y ago
  It's probably Chrome that enabled the software renderer for users with unsupported GPU configurations. Note that the software renderer is extremely slow (it barely manages to and unsupported systems are more likely than not to have a weak CPU that further lowers performance. We're talking performance at a level barely enough to animate the cube at https://get.webgl.org/ https://get.webgl.org/ . I don't know the value of that software renderer, other than making Chrome look better on statistics.

by frik 12y ago

jarcane 12y ago

And of course, XNA itself is essentially deprecated now, and isn't capable of targeting Metro either. A number of devs have started switching to MonoGame, but the support there isn't quite complete yet.

dietrichepp 12y ago

> Windows comes with OpenGL 1.1 (from 1996) and one has to init its context to load a third party OpenGL 4 context To expand on this: when you create an OpenGL context on Windows, you get a context provided by your vendor's drivers, with OpenGL 1.0-1.1 functions provided by Microsoft's DLL, and all the remaining entry points must be retrieved manually, by supplying your own headers and fetching the function pointers. But if you want anything special like a core context, you have to call a special function provided by one of those pointers... which you can't get without a context. So you have to create an OpenGL window, then use it to get a function pointer to create the window you actually want, then close the first window. This is why we use GLFW or SDL.

_almosnow 12y ago

Wow, so money actually doesn't buy taste...

dreen 12y ago

> http://webglstats.com http://webglstats.com Neat. What happened in the summer of 2013?

ferongr 12y ago
It's probably Chrome that enabled the software renderer for users with unsupported GPU configurations. Note that the software renderer is extremely slow (it barely manages to and unsupported systems are more likely than not to have a weak CPU that further lowers performance. We're talking performance at a level barely enough to animate the cube at https://get.webgl.org/ https://get.webgl.org/ . I don't know the value of that software renderer, other than making Chrome look better on statistics.