I know it’s late at night but I just wanted to let you be part of my latest projekt: the moebius engine.
It’s inspired by Minecraft but has some significant changes. First of all: there are no hard coded games (or worlds as I call them) in moebius - moebius is just an engine that supports sandbox games. You are free to create your own world by just taking some textures and mixing them with some simple javascript that defines things like block types, items, weapons and so forth … I’m already working on the first world: It’s called Solaris.
Currently the game is in development - but I think it’s now in a presentable state. Although there are still a lot of bugs to be fixed and a lot of features to be implemented.
Ah and I nearly forgot to mention it: it is of course based on the famous jMonkeyEngine
one question, what was the reason you decided to use javascript for the user generated content?
Why not lua, or even standart java? (I would bet functional it will be possible will all of those choices)
I tried LUA first as it was the logical choice - but the LUA integration (at least the library I used) was quite bad - it just let me call lua functions with only three arguments out of some strange reason. Javascript on the other hand is a faily well suppoted scripting language in Java (i use the Rhino library) that includes support for directly calling methods and instantiating java classes in js - but of course I put a sandbox around it - don't want the world designer to use all the classes ;)
And Java itself was not an option because it has a too steep learning curve for beginners - and also the hassle with the dynamic class loading - especially when it comes to class reloading on the fly, then a lot of problems can arise. Javascript has also the advantage that a lot of people are already familliar with it because of it's usage on websites.
Sorry no - it won't. By now I think I will go with the "notch" financing solution: the game will be available as alpha/beta version for a small fee as soon as it is stable enough (including the solaris world).
I also plan a kind of store for the worlds where one can download more worlds created by the community. The world creator can then choose wether to sell the world or give it away for free.
@nehon said:
The first shot looks great, nice work.
Do you use vertex coloring to shade the cubes?
I created a special shader that uses a 3D shadow map. And yes the process is similar to vertex coloring but a bit more complicated as the shadow value must be an interpolation of the shadows of the sourrounding cubes.
@enum said:
Nice work :)
I especially like that block harvesting tool.
Yeah - that's the digging laser. You can specify its power, energy conversion efficiency and distance as well as its mesh. In the video it is set to a quite high power output and energy conversion efficiency obviously - so it cuts through the blocks easily ;)
@enum said:
As I'm working on a blocky RPG, too, I know that it's not as easy as many think ;)
That's true - at first I thought that minecraft must have been really easy to develop - but now I know it's not nearly as easy as I thought. My first experiments were with real cubes - lots of them - but as you surely already know that doesn't work - it's all about a huge mesh that has just the shape of a lot of cubes.
Do you happen to have some screenshots of the game you are developing?
By the way - the NVIDIA Article you posted a week ago is really interesting :) - too bad that macs don't support geometry shader yet ...
I guess I will do a show off thread for my game too. Maybe today or tomorrow and include screens with it (But it’s still very early concerning the visible stuff)
By the way: You can use marching cubes nevertheless. Just create the mesh on the CPU. I will post a screen of that, too.
@enum said:
I guess I will do a show off thread for my game too. Maybe today or tomorrow and include screens with it ;) (But it's still very early concerning the visible stuff)
I'm looking forward to see some screenshots then :)
I imagine you noticed the LASER texture is mirrored? :)
Yes I noticed it - that's just because the laser is a 2D graphic that is extruded - so it has the same texture on both sides - one correctly and one mirrored. Because the protagonist is right-handed you just see the mirrored texture ;)
Really like the Gun idea. I am tired to building get-up-close-to-the-block-to-work-on-it system. Hope paul implements something similar like this in Mythruna’s PvP arena
