Ogden and Halliday are both names from the book Ready Player One (http://goo.gl/f3OUa). Is this just a coincidence?
A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#12I'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…
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.
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#13I'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…
If you can deal with downloading a Java plugin there's some pretty advanced games that run in a browser.
Example: http://www.drakensang.com
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed. Someone please make an AOE2 clone for the browser. It's the perfect environment for multiplayer RTS.
I think the big barrier for building a multiplayer RTS in the browser would be the lack of UDP sockets. You could certainly do something with websockets but it may involve making substantial compromises. With TVs you have the added issue that people probably don't want to replace their whole TV every couple of years just to upgrade the graphics or whatever.
Hopefully WebRTC data channels will enable UDP-like comms from the browser.
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#15I'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…
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.
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.
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#16I'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?
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.
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
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.
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#18I'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?
Every "voxel engine" I've ever seen just draws polygons. One of my co-conspirators on a side project[1] used surface nets over voxels with density bits to create slope-friendly meshes that are also used for physics calculations. Each mesh is pretty large and there are some economies of scale for drawing larger meshes like these.
Minecraft for a long time just batched each visible side, I think even ignoring occlusion, and drew it; I don't know if they precompute larger meshes now.
[1] - http://static.largerussiangames.com/voxels/videos/rigidbodie... (Each 'companion cube' is really attached to a spherical physics body, the physics aren't mapped to the mesh.)
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#19I'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…
If you can deal with downloading a Java plugin there's some pretty advanced games that run in a browser. Example: http://www.drakensang.com
not really, its just a native code wrapper and most games still require Windows
Re: A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
#20I'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?
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.
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.