A Minecraft-like Block Based Game Engine Using Three.js, WebGL and Node
badassjs.com
badassjs.com
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?
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..
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.)
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.
This is brought up often but it appears some basic multiplayer is possible over websockets (I've written a very simple game using them). If UDP is that necessary, people will push for it and we'll eventually see it (or something equivalent) in the browser.
> 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.
This is turning out to be less of the case though as older PC hardware can still run newer games. The need for graphics is no longer growing faster than the resources to power them. This is especially noticable in the indie game market where rather simple graphics games have become very popular. Even high-end games don't "need" new power as much as they once did, the PS3 is what, 7 years old now?
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.
Example: http://www.drakensang.com
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.