OMG! Das ist einfach nur verdammt geiler scheiß!

Sigh.. How do you know you're in gamedev forum?

Every new game that is awesome is either replicated or the main point of discussion is HOW it's done.

There are't many games that have this impact though.

Its like looking in the fresh start of a new gengre,
thats pretty wicked.

Must have been similar when Quake, Halflife or Diablo cam out.

(or Bejeweld, Zuma, Diner Dash in the casual sector )

Why is nobody opening a new server?

I can't, windows always says in cmd that java is unknown, even after reinstalling all this shit....

Give me the needed 10€ and I will host one 24/7

I've "dug a little deeper" into the rendering method of minecraft and it seems to be very simple. It uses OpenGL. Here is a screenshot where I made the grass texture transparent. Simply change the alpha channel of parts of the terrain.png in the minecraft.jar archive.



There seems to be no advanced occlusion culling. The Game seems to render every block face that is potentially visible, meaning that the "grid place" (aka voxel) it is facing is empty or is glass.
Its pretty similar to Superkus meinkraft, except that meinkraft renders the whole block, not only the face that is possibly visible. The lightning system is said to be a little more complex, don't know much about it yet. I'd like to hear how Superku did his, although his is currently block based, not face based likes minecrafts.

The game world is divided into 16 x 16 (x128 depth) chunks, the nearest are rendered, depending on your view range setting. I don't see why it is not possible to do this with Gamestudio, you'd only need some clever coding. I'm very temped to try something similar multiplayer-only with better griefer-protection mechanisms. Not sure about this yet...

FYI: It's not possible to achieve same FPS and featureset as in MineCraft, as Acknex is generic engine

I don't know much about rendering actually, so i am always wondering how you can prevent objects to render behind other meshes.

BTW i actually have a 24/7 server running but i don't wanna share it right now, i'm still building up stuff and writing some tools to help me with my server (like a backup script but i've already finished that).

I'll probably make the server public soon, just don't wanna do it right now to keep griefers away.

i didn't know that java applets can use opengl. i guess that's why you have to accept this security certificate.

i think it's possible.

the rendering really is quite simple like schokokeks said. there is no advanced occlusion culling or visibility calculation going on. there is no need for it. you just can't use an entity per block but have to use bigger chunks and create your own meshes (for example 16x16x16 blocks are one entity like in my experiment). that's how minecraft does it. in the debug display you even always can see "mesh of 4 chunks updated" or something like that.

edit:
the disadvantage of superku's method is that you never know how many entities you will need. the entity handling would get quite complicated if you want to achieve big worlds and in worst case too many entities could be required.

What if you make presets of 16x16x16 blocks, as a single model, and turn on and off different blocks using vmasks?
You would technically render less models, but can have 16 times bigger area's... (or optimize your area 16 times faster?)

hmmm..