
A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node - mariuz
http://badassjs.com/post/40691367335/voxel-js-a-minecraft-like-block-based-game-engine
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modeless
A friend of mine made something similar, plus multiplayer support (and minus
gravity): <http://benvanik.github.com/blk-game/>

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ferongr
To my knowledge Firefox has had support for IndexedDB for a long time without
a vendor-prefix. Why does the page claim that it doesn't? Is there a bug in
the implementation? A missing feature?

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noxa
Firefox doesn't support IndexedDB in web workers yet, unfortunately. See:
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=701634>

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ferongr
Thank you for info and bug number.

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jiggy2011
I'm always curious how much optimisation is required for these big voxel
engines.

I assume since all voxels are the same size you can just batch draw them but
even so there is going to be a lot within viewing distance that may be
invisible.

Are they all just assigned to an octtree and then culled against the view
frustum or do you really need some clever occlusion culling?

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whatshisface
Nobody draws voxels, graphics cards aren't good at them. I don't know about
these engines in particular, but in minecraft everything is converted to
polygon meshes.

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manveru
Nobody these days, but one of my all-time favorite games is Outcast[1], which
used voxels for the terrain and polygons for smaller details. All it needed
was a good CPU.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcast_%28video_game%29>

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buster
Haha, i had that too.. fun game.. i think the characters were polygons, though
:)

Also there was <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comanche_series> even before
Outcast. I don't think it used polygons. It was launched years before 3D
graphics cards, too..

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AJay17
Ogden and Halliday are both names from the book Ready Player One
(<http://goo.gl/f3OUa>). Is this just a coincidence?

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xhrpost
I'm really looking forward to seeing more gaming in the browser and hope it
catches on. Imagine writing a game and it works on all platforms, PC, Mac,
Tablet Android, iOS, etc. Also, TV manufacturers keep putting more powerful
chips in their TV's for HD decoding. Couple with this a good browser, could we
eventually see an end to console gaming because everyone's TV can play 3D
games? Not to mention a lot of the TV's already have network capability.
There's plenty of progress to make no doubt but it seems like a serious
possibility to me.

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daredevildave
This is exactly the reason we started PlayCanvas [<http://playcanvas.com>]. I
don't think it will be long before there is a modern browser in every TV,
phone and tablet, in addition to every desktop machine.

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xhrpost
I've seen you guys before, I'm gonna have to play around with this sometime. I
like how you've decided to also be the publisher/CDN for the games. Right now
it seems like everyone who launches some demo has to build and manage their
own web presence. Something a native game developer doesn't necessarily have
to do. This could help take that extra load off their back. I imagine you'll
eventually offer internal APIs of sorts like Steam does, achievements, cloud
storage for saved games, etc.

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daredevildave
Please do get in touch.

We love how easy it is to get a sample/demo/game published using PlayCanvas,
we use it _all_ the time. We offer the option to download your game export and
host it yourself but it's one button to publish to PlayCanvas so we're sure
most people will want to do that.

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exemd
Manic Digger, a C# open source clone of Minecraft and Ace of Spades, is also
getting a WebGL version.

<http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/> \- click "development news"

I make it with Script# (C# to JS converter), WebGL, and WebSockets. Both
desktop OpenTK version and WebGL version can be compiled from common source.

But it's missing 2 weeks of work to finish the port.

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substack
And another new voxeljs module for portals:
<https://github.com/substack/voxel-portal>
<http://substack.net/projects/voxel-portal/>

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geuis
I'm confused. How does one simply play in the world? I see lots of docs for
components and such, but no simple "Play here" button or link.

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jontwist
If only someone could turn this into a useful UI for dwarf fortress!

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pixie_
Can it handle rendering the star ship enterprise all at once?

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drivebyacct2
Is there a playable form of this somewhere? I spent a few minutes looking
around...

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substack
Click on any of these demos: <http://voxeljs.com/#gallery>

