Voxelands,

[sdzen]

Hey Folks! I'm here to publicize this radical game based on Minetest, you guessed it! Voxelands! but before I give you the long drawn out explaination you can read on the voxelands website below I wanna ramble for abit about the cool things coming up in it such as the completely rewritten mesh generation thats going into the next release, as well as the beautifully epic sounds that the game surrounds you with, its lightning fast speed and basing off of Minetest-c55 0.3, which next to Minetest-c55 0.2.20110731 is my favorite version of Minetest-c55. The new character creation, while having ugly ass textures (which I'm still working on retexturing, hold tight) is pretty rad, and I like the new UI redesign and Mobs. Also theres an Adventure mode, which I've so far found useless for my purposes, but is still pretty neat.

Links are Here

http://www.voxelands.com/
http://forum.voxelands.com/
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities ... 6127991394

Voxelands is a sandbox construction game based on Minetest, which was inspired by earlier "voxel world" games such as Infiniminer. Gameplay puts players in a fully destructible 3D game world where they can place and dig numerous types of blocks, items and creatures using a variety of tools. Inside the game world players can build structures, artworks and anything else their creativity can think of on multiplayer servers and singleplayer worlds across multiple game modes.

Voxelands was originally forked from the Minetest-C55 0.3.x codebase as a result of several core developers becoming disillusioned with the direction of Minetest 0.4. We wanted to put the fun back into the game, and stop trying to make it into an engine.

"minetest_game's only purpose now is to serve as a base for people who like to mod the hell out of something". Celeron55 regarding updates to Minetest 0.4's default game.

With this in mind the aim was to start with the last stable public release of the 0.3 series, backport bugfixes and improvements from 0.4, and fix some other bugs that were never fixed. Then add in some new features and make a polished release.

Initial changes were a few extra block types and some anti-griefing measures, while primarily reworking the codebase into something usable. This was soon followed by larger changes to the game, including a snow biome, farming, electric circuits - with pistons, lamps, and logic gates - several new draw types - including diagonal fences, walls, fire, and proper sloped roofs - books that can be written in or display craft guides, 3D players and mobs, a newly designed game ui, and much much more.

Voxelands takes some inspiration from role-playing games, and therefore tries to keep in-game action in-game, rather than having special commands that occur outside of the world. This has lead to things such as home flags, incinerators, and throwable "teleport powder". In the same vain, a character creator has been added with several million variations built-in that allows players to customise how they look to others, while several hundred craftable clothing items allows the player's looks - and defense against creature attacks, cold weather, drowning, and the vacuum of space - to be easily changed inside the game world.


There's also several craftable books inside the game world, these are not only for writting in, but also offer crafting and cooking guides so that players don't need to break from the game to check external websites or wiki's.



In late 2014 the mob system was completely rewritten, and is regularly being improved upon to add many creatures to the game world, adding both additional sources of crafting items and food, and more survival elements from the more dangerous mobs that appear alongside their passive counterparts.


As it stands now, Voxelands has almost 500 types of blocks, plus several hundred craft items, tools, and clothes, along with dozens of mobs. Some are decorative, others structural, and more are interactive; allowing for a great variety of construction to take place, while players work with the natural world along with farmed and crafted items to defend themselves and their ever growing bases, cities, and empires.

So what's next? More mobs, more blocks, more options in the character creator, more improvements to the look and feel of the game, and most importantly; more fun!

[Calinou]

Monolithic architectures are, in my opinion, not a good thing. We should strive to make everything modular.

On top of that, the Voxelands sky colour is quite ugly.

By the way, there already was a Voxelands topic on this forum.

[jp]

Agree with Calinou. Freedom of building ought be naturally coupled with freedom of modding.

Featuring in Voxelands is monopolized by its developer and this harshly restricts the potential of creation/modification like any FOSS software aims to improve as master-principle (Linux universe is a quality example).

Other negative points (non-exhaustive list) :

- the mapgen is way slower compared to Minetest.
- the sounds, associated with everything, are sometimes "rough" and annoying.
- the textures and models... well, 'nuff said about it ;)

Voxelands has at least the merit to exist in going to a different way, which is basically criticizable but well-directed by darkrose.

[darkrose]

Agree with Calinou. Freedom of building ought be naturally coupled with freedom of modding.

Featuring in Voxelands is monopolized by its developer and this harshly restricts the potential of creation/modification like any FOSS software aims to improve as master-principle (Linux universe is a quality example).

It's not monopolised by anyone, plenty of things are done by other people, the list of contributers in the credits has been steadily growing to attest to that fact. Additionally, rather than external mods so that some people can use an improvement with a particular version, improvements are directly coded into the game so that everyone gets the benefit of it; with the added advantage of ongoing maintenance and improvement by the core dev team. This way we get to keep balanced gameplay so it's fun to play.

- the mapgen is way slower compared to Minetest.

Apparently the profiler lies? Or are you just confusing your network lag with mapgen?

- the sounds, associated with everything, are sometimes "rough" and annoying.

If you're referring to the bug with ambient sounds, that's being worked on. If you're referring to some of the old minetest sounds we haven't replaced yet, that's also being worked on.

- the textures and models... well, 'nuff said about it ;)

Textures? Someone not liking a colour or texture is to be expected really, but they're all our textures, and they all fit in a similar style; rather than dozens of different styles that don't mesh well together, which happens with mods. But yes, the models we borrowed from minetest mods are crap, we're working on replacing them with our own. ;)

Voxelands has at least the merit to exist in going to a different way, which is basically criticizable but well-directed by darkrose.

Fun and balance, that's our way. :)

[sdzen]

By the way, there already was a Voxelands topic on this forum.

The only thread I found was voxelands inspiration, and the minetest-classic search term no longer works on this forum, ergo unless you search and search for a forum topic thats both out of date and not fully relevant, ergo theres two forum posts that directly reference it, darkroses server post, which isn't under minetest related projects, voxelands inspiration, which is a picture of how cool frankenstein is followed by abit of talking, and then theres a topic called minetest-classic fans, which calls it a rip off and is written rather poorly and was not received with the greatest of honors on anyones "side" (we are all friends here) so I figured it would be nice to post a topic in the proper section with a decent degree of information from voxelands website itself, links and abit of personal enjoyment on my end for people who don't like reading long posts. Either way there far worse topics I could duplicate that get duplicated every day.

[jp]

plenty of things are done by other people

And who are those contributors, necessarily ? Hint : a small minority of eggheaded C++ devs rather than a vast community of average tinkers. The low-knowledged people are forced to beg and pray rather than acting, that's the problem.

Minetest is smartly organized by several strata of skills and functions, like the Linux kernel surrounded by specific softwares, that are devotedly maintained and satisfy the widest range of tastes and needs.

Apparently the profiler lies? Or are you just confusing your network lag with mapgen?

No, I was testing in singleplayer, waiting for mapblocks taking ages at loading...

[sdzen]

a small minority of eggheaded C++ devs rather than a vast community of average tinkers. The low-knowledged people are forced to beg and pray rather than acting, that's the problem..

That's sort of demeaning to the players and modders of Minetest, when I saw Minetest modders make beautiful works of passion and enjoyment to improve the game in their eyes, I always see this glimmer of intellectual pride. This isn't subtracted when going from Lua to modification through C++, which honestly is quite easy once you get the hang of it, and yes there are eggheads, the large majority of big changes that happen to Minetest are by a small minority of eggheads. I like eggheads, they do very good and dedicated work, and remember, Voxelands has a much smaller following than Minetest, so you're going to see less people actively working on it. but I wouldn't say that begging and praying is what is done, if people have the presence of mind, they will act, and low knowledge is an opportunity to learn so much.

[Krock]

Thanks for posting all important points into one single post, well, the screenshots could be about 4x larger.

I agree with Calinou, the sky should have a texture or at least a brigter/more sky-like color.

[darkrose]

Thanks for posting all important points into one single post, well, the screenshots could be about 4x larger.

Here's a big one for you then:
http://sandbox.ltmnet.com/images/vl/landscape.png

[sdzen]

I personally thought it was a skylike texture when I made it, abit cartoony but thats how the sky looks around my part of the woods, does it need to be lighter or? thanks for the input though, it was my first time in awhile doing skyboxes and I tried to make it something vibrant, I'd love to have bigger screenshots, I just haven't taken any recently, ill fish around for some better ones Kronk 8)

PS: I need to compile a windows specific client because I think I'm having a renderering error on the one from the website, stay tuned.