haeric

About the "clone of someone elses work" part, I find myself repeating this, but I think it is worth repeating:

Do not most games get inspiration from earlier games? Aren't quite a few FPS-games quite similar to the ones preceding them? Or RTS-games? Aren't most games iterations, improvements and variations upon an existing foundation that we collectively build on to create ever greater games? :)

About all your points of hatred: I'll note the wish for a "creative mode"! :) And Skycraft will definitely explain more ingame when starting than Minecraft did. Although there was a charm to go online to understand Minecraft, it's not very user-friendly.

Thank you for your great words and great feedback! :)

A game? :)

Do not most games get inspiration from earlier games? Aren't quite a few FPS-games quite similar to the ones preceding them? Or RTS-games? Aren't most games iterations, improvements and variations upon an existing foundation that we collectively build on to create ever greater games? :)

There are games that take entirely new paths. But most games, actually most GREAT games are built on foundations of many, many other games, while introducing something new. And that's what I hope Skycraft will do.

Even if Skycraft were just a Minecraft clone there would be a ton of cool things you could do because it's WebGL: Giving your friends a link they can click to join or spectate your world. Embed your world in your blog. Crossplatform... But Skycraft won't be just a Minecraft clone. Hopefully I'll get to show you that later this summer! :)

The *craft name might be temporary, I haven't really decided yet. But at this point, it just gives people the right association, because the gameplay is so similar to Minecraft :)

As for my scummyness: Didn't Notch do a somewhat similar thing with Infiniminer? Didn't he build on it, make it better/different, and charge for it early? Just because it isn't much more than Minecraft right now, doesn't mean it won't be in the future. And there are some big differences already, like the theme of the world, the block size, and the technology. Hopefully, in time I'll get to show how big an impact all three can have on a game! :)

As for Notch, I couldn't agree more with you: He is a very valuable member of the dev community, and someone I have an incredible respect for.

Hi, the creator here! :) You have many good points, and the main point I want to address is: why let people buy it already? I have thought quite a lot about that, so here are some of my reasons for releasing early:

- Why not sell it? What do I lose? :) Many people might not buy it now, but some actually have, and that's great! I think this post might also have been an inspiration: https://garrickvanburen.com/archive/your-minimum-viable-prod...

- I had been working on it as a side project for quite some time, and the feedback of friends can only go so far. Getting honest feedback from strangers, both good and bad, is a great motivator to spend even more time on Skycraft. But even more so, the best feedback and motivator is having people actually buy your game. It is incredibly motivating to have someone else than your mom buy your product because they like what they're seeing, and it pushes me to spend more time, knowing I have customers I cannot let down.

- The possibility of doing Skycraft as my summer job. By releasing before summer I could check to see if there was enough interest that I could possibly spend my summer working on Skycraft instead of my usual tech consultancy internship. And there was definitely enough interest! It's not like I've even made enough money to cover even one week of consultancy pay, but the response I have gotten on Skycraft has made this two of the coolest weeks I have ever had, so it was a no-brainer to spend my summer on it.

As for the point about Minecraft's progress vs Skycraft: Notch is a very experienced game programmer, and he has a lot of "tricks up his sleeves". If I remember correctly from his blog, he already had some NPC's from an unfinished game that he could sort of dump in there. And the same is might be true for a lot of other stuff, like collision detection and networking.

As for me: I'm first and foremost a web developer, who has a passion for games, and recently started making them :) So there should really be no surprise Notch was faster, in fact, it would be a real shame if he wasn't!

Oh, and I've had exams for the last two weeks, with the last one finishing today. Expect a lot more coming in the following weeks! :)

You found the "Gravity crystal"... which currently does very little except glow, but that will change! ;) Thanks for the kind words! I tested several different illumination techniques, including having shadows depend more on the direction of the sun, but the "Minecraft-radiance" lighting just looked the best in this kind of world, in my opinion :)

World generation is definitely one of the most time-consuming bits, and Skycraft is nowhere near where I want it to be at this point. It'll get much better, and I'll keep experimenting with new ways to store the blocks instead of as pure voxels. But I think the chunks will be there in some form or another, as it's a very natural way to not have to send ALL the vertices of the world to the GPU each time you build a new block :)

Thank you! Seeing people buy it this early is a great motivation for me, and is the reason I can quit my summer internship this summer to work on Skycraft instead :)

Coming very soon! :)

It's actually in the game, there just isn't any GUI for it yet, so the only way to trigger it is to press F4 :)

Do you see the cube loading in the beginning? Have you tried restarting your browser? I have seen some random crashes a very few times, where I've had to do that, some times because there has been too many tabs open. There's still a ways to go before WebGL gaming is 100% stable.. but that's also some of the point of doing this project :)

Thanks for the encouragement! :)

But about that originality.. Aren't most games really inspired by previous games, iterating on them, remixing in stuff from other games and making them better? Didn't Transport Tycoon get a lot of inspiration from Railroad Tycoon, but still end up a truly great game?

Just like Minecraft built on Infiniminer and gave a new experience, just like Terraria built on Minecraft and gave a new experience, I hope Skycraft will be able to give yet another experience. But until it gets more distinctive features than the technology itself I guess it feels quite unoriginal, yeah, I totally get what you're saying :)

tl;dr: Just wait, it'll get better!

Glad you see the potential! :)

I have only done a few tests yet with multiplayer, but as long as WebRTC doesn't stumble on any security hiccups (like Websockets did in its infancy), it will most likely be p2p multiplayer with a framework called peer.js (http://peerjs.com/), which uses WebRTC.

So for the actual multiplayer-part, there isn't really any reason to have servers, other than to negotiate the WebRTC connection. But blocks have to be saved somewhere, and thus, at least one (possibly all) of the players have to be connected to a server to send block changes. And of course you need a server to actually load the html, javascript and original blocks from.

So you need some kind of server for each world, as a place to save blocks. Initially, these servers will be on skycraft.io, where you can play with a certain number of friends for free. But in the future it would be really, really cool to allow players to mod the game, and let them host their servers on their own domains as well, to allow for modding. I haven't really thought through how to do this the best way though, there are many, many details that have to done correctly for it to work.

Customization/modding is still a bit into the future though, I have to make more of the actual game first! :) All I can really say is that it's definitely in the back of my head, even though I can't promise anything at this point.

Hum.. Does WebGL stuff otherwise work for you? For instance, does this work? http://threejs.org/examples/webgl_buffergeometry_particles.h... And what OS and browser are you using?

Hum, I'll think about it if I hear it from a few more people! :)

It doesn't? My 13" Macbook certainly fires up the song of its people, but I guess an iMac or 15" / 17" should do a lot better :)

Thank you! :) If I had started developing Skycraft in 2013, it might have been voxel.js, but it didn't exist at all a year ago. I could have converted to voxel.js, but chose not to, as I have some things voxel.js doesn't yet (lighting, ambient occlusion), and the whole floaty islands thing allows for some special optimizations that would be hard to generalize into voxel.js. So it's just "normal" Three.js., but I really like the voxel.js project!

Well, do you EVER actually need a library? No, mostly you can always do stuff manually. But South makes a lot of stuff easier/less brittle, especially when you have a) multiple servers, b) multiple developers, c) multiple environments, and/or d) volatile data structures. It is also useful to see what database changes a pull request introduces. And don't get me started on data migration, which is TRULY easier in South, if you are working with multiple branches/developers and/or have schema changes as well.

South certainly has it's warts, but that's why I'm happy to contribute to Andrew's project.

Oh, and rollback: Depending on what the data is, it might actually be possible to rollback. It might be an aggregate column of some sort, or moving of data from one table another. But it's mostly not superuseful, and it's not a big part of the awesomeness of South.

You did say your analogy was on the fritz, but still... the "training for the olympics" analogy has a huge flaw: When he gets his degree, it probably wouldn't change anything, the coolest thing he could possibly do would probably STILL be that same startup, or something equivalent.

So why go through college? He can probably learn just as much, if not more, doing what he is doing now. The only thing I see him missing out on is "the college experience", which is a lot of different things for different people.

What are you using Python for? There are plenty of occations where I have made lists of dictionaries, e.g. when I have have large amounts of data that have to be outputted in a certain way, or if it's just logical to store dictionaries instead of instances of some custom class. No performance critical stuff though, and I've almost never used dict(), but still, calling this irrelevant for optimization is a bit harsh...

The graph shows percentage of users having installed iOS6, one bar per day. The bars are very close to 1-2% in early september (beta testers), then around the release 19th of September, the bars quickly rise each day: 30%, 35%, 45%, 47%, 50%, and from there on a quite steady (but jumpy) rise towards about 60% today. There's one weird peak at about 1st of October at about 65%, but that's probably just happenstance.

Edit: The difference in the numbers me and the fellow who posted just at the same time shows how coarse the percentage-axis was ;)