Manic Digger – A multiplayer block-building voxel game, Minecraft clone | Hacker News Reader

Manic Digger – A multiplayer block-building voxel game, Minecraft clone

github.com

131 pointsmynameislegion28 comments

If you like this, check out minetest too. (minetest.net)

Its got rendering improved over Mojang's Minecraft (with built-in shader support,) infinite world size in all directions (not just horizontally), and a very high-performance C++ implementation.

It also has a very well-supported and well documented mod API, and an active community. You should check it out.

>very high-performance C++

C++ does not automatically mean "very high-performance". A lot of users get worse framerates than with Minecraft (not everyone, though!), and the entity/"mob" code used to be insanely slow, at least a year ago.

While I find your second sentence quite insightful, the first sentence seems to fight a straw man.

(GP stated that this software is high-performance, and that it is written in C++. They didn't claim it to be high-performance because of C++.)

My apologies. Way too often I hear people in the Minecraft community say everything would be magically fixed if the game had simply used C++ in place of Java. I guess I'm too quick to jump on people using "C++", "high performance" and "Minecraft-like thing" in one comment nowadays.

Well, tbh that is somewhat grounded in reality: lots of minecraft's early performance problems were caused by the GC, which wouldn't have been a problem if writing "idiomatic" C++.

Lots of those problems have since been fixed though. I believe a rewrite in C++ today would bring more problem than it solves (which, BTW, Mojang is kind-of doing with Minecraft PE).

I don't believe that this person means to imply that C++ is inherently performant -- only that the software is written in C++ and it is highly performant.

When I played with it 3 years ago, the entity/mob stuff was implemented in a Lua plugin instead of C++. If they did not change that it certainly explains the performance problems.

A second on minetest. It's quite impressive.

> infinite in all direction

Homepage says supports up to 62000blocks per dimension, which, conrary to their claim, is quite small.

62,000 blocks may not sound like a lot, but that would be 11.5 hours of walking continuously without any obstructions or stopping. I'm pretty sure not many people are going to run out of space.

11.5 hours != infinite

Improvement? Sure. 64k is more than anyone will ever need? er... 62k? Sure.

Infinite? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

> Homepage says supports up to 62000blocks per dimension, which, conrary to their claim, is quite small.

Indeed. Minecraft only gets ~256 in the Y-direction, but allows you to go ~30,000,000 in the X/Z-directions.

Note from the sf.net git repo:

Moved to https://github.com/manicdigger/manicdigger

Also, the author's web site: http://croxxx.tk/

Thank you! This should be the actual link. I saw Sourceforge and closed it immediately.

Hi.

Some info:

- Client is written in Ć programming language and can be transcompiled to many languages. Yet it's still a C# project that runs in Visual Studio. See https://github.com/marioclone/Mario and http://smb.neocities.org/game.html for example how it works.

- Game is currently being made into a commercial product by a big company. It looks beautiful. There is a whole team working on it, including many artists.

What is Ć (C with an accent mark) ?

http://cito.sourceforge.net/

Will the commercial version be open source?

No. Maybe the server.

Out of interest, is Sourceforge any better under the new management?

There are still a lot of ads. The company that now owns SF buys up Websites for the sole purpose of making money through ad revenue. I don't think they are interested in anything but milking the cow they bought. No judgment. I just believe those are the facts.

They got rid of the most obnoxious things and added SSL:

https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_... https://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-acquisition-and-fut...

So this is written in c# and can be transcompiled to JavaScript... Is there any public servers that will host your world?

My daughters play minetest and love it. However, they each have an old reconditioned laptop, and their shared world is hosted on one of them, so that laptop has to be on and running minetest even if only the other wants to play and create.

A browser-based world would be so much easier.

Why not host it on an always online raspberry pi ?

Ah that name, [hopefully] an homage to one of the first platformers ever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Miner

Manic Digger can actually use the old Minecraft Classic protocol and hence act as a comparible Minecraft Classic clone, or at least it could in the past (maybe it was eventually removed). It's a secret feature, I think it was hidden behind some sort of flag.

The correct link is http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/

thanks for making public domain!

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