Various voxel engine ramblings

I have outed myself previously as not a big Minecraft fan, so take everything in this post with a grain of salt (as I obviously don't really understand that genre).

Anyways... recently this sub-reddit for open-source games was pointed out in our forums, and while it isn't really as lively as others (for example the Linux gaming one) it pointed out an new project called Iceball:

Pre-alpha Iceball screenshot

Seemingly made by people not happy with the recent commercialization of Ace of Spades, it's an all FOSS remake, those early development you can follow here (or on their Github page).

Now maybe the graphics are lacking on purpose (see disclaimer above), but I couldn't help to think: why for f***'s sake did they have to reinvent the wheel with their own engine instead of using for example Terasology:



Or Minetest, or the Ardorcraft API for that matter???

Ahh well, at least it made me aware that Terasology is still very much under development, and with its focus on DungeonKeeper & Dwarf-Fortress elements, it might actually become a game I would play (and doesn't make my eyes bleed :p ).

Speaking of which... the guy behind AgentKeeper released yet another nice video and graphics are constantly further improved as seen here.

Ardorcraft AI

TeamTeapotCraft

Ardorcraft is now an API for Ardor3D.

Fortunately, they follow the philosophy of having biiig screenshots on the project's main page.

Unfortunately, as a non-Java-savy person I don't know how to quickly test it.

Fortunately, a video of its impressive AI/NPCs is available:

ArdorCraft - First NPC tests

ManicDigger & ArdorCraft - Open Source Minecraft-likes

 Manic building on a ManicDigger server

ManicDigger started as a third-party client for Minecraft Classic. According to the FAQ only Windows is supported but if you have Mono, you can do the following:

Get nightly binary (.zip: warning, it is a .rar), unpack.
mono GameModeFortress.exe

Thanks to gustavo for the instructions!

Must.. build.. house..

Unfortunately ManicDigger has the "most commonly used textures (grass and dirt) are ugly"-feature (just like Cube2/Sauerbraten for example).

ArdorCraft

ArdorCraft runs in Java (Ardor3d) and I got it running with its webstart file. I'm not entirely sure, but it seems that development halted four months ago.

ArdorCraft Dev [mute]

Even more ArdorCraft screens

By the way, Notch (Minecraft lead dev) just posted his first (technical) article about terrain generation. How is this open source related? Weeell.... not that much, except for the following scrap of text (from here):

Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.

So it's future open source, right? :D