Minecraft de facto standard of virtual worlds?

Yesterday Linden Lab announced the upcoming launch of their new online platform ‘Patterns‘.  I may have written this too often lately in my post but here I go again: ‘does this look familiar?’

According to New World Note‘s Wagner James Au, Notch approves.

To me this is the prove that even Linden Lab feels that Minecraft’s approach of ‘crafting’ things from simple patterns (pun intended) is superior to their uber-complicated client which they never really were able to boil down to the few elements you need to build virtual worlds.

Granted, SL and MC don’t really compare if you look at the details and the overall purpose is different. But in the end of the day it is way easier to simply experience and build in Minecraft.

Also, you can roll your own server which is largely detailed in the Minecraft Wiki. For my own experiments, I wrote a script that starts an Amazon EC2 instance, installs all components required for Minecraft, pulls the latest backup of our favorite world from my Dropbox, and starts – all of this unattended, in one line. I can even start it from a train (I just did). When we don’t need it anymore, we backup the world, save it to the DropBox and terminate the instance. Total cost – a couple of cents. If we only craft at home we can deploy the same thing to our kitchen server at no cost.

So to me Minecraft delivers most aspects that I missed from SL and then some. The few things that I miss in Minecraft to be a virtual world platform are slowly but surely added by Mojang and especially by the community one plugin after another, due to the openness of the server code base.

I really wonder if LindenLab with their current claim (‘Makers of Shared Creative Spaces’) will be achieving the same ease of use at such a competitive pricing plan with Patterns. Since they also ripped the ‘buy beta for less’ business model that Notch established, I’d say there is reason to hope LindenLab will be doing it right this time. Looking at the decline of Second Life – they better be.

BananaBread – Cube 2 engine in the browser

After BrowserQuest (I described the merits and the installation over here) the Mozilla Foundation didn’t stop by bringing top-down 2D multiplayer to the web. A couple of days ago they released Bananabread. From the description:

“BananaBread is a 3D first person shooter that runs on the web. It takes the Cube 2: Sauerbraten engine, which is written in C++ and OpenGL, and compiles it using Emscripten into JavaScript and WebGL so that it can run in modern browsers using standards-based web APIs and without the need for plugins.”

This is important in a couple of ways.

1. This is a full-fledged first person shooter running completely in the browser  in JavaScript and WebGL – smoothly.
2. The described development way – compilation of a C/C++ with Emscripten – could be one way to go to develop games or virtual world environments in the browser (as opposed to written in JS directly).
3. I learned in the Google Creative Sandbox in Berlin that Google sees the Chrome browser more and more as a multimedia engine to run creative applications – like games. That’s why they are incorporating things like WebGL and the Mouse Lock API. Obviously Mozilla/Firefox agrees.
4. Sauerbraten.

I’ll go into more detail for this last bullet.

The Sauerbraten engine – luckely renamed Cube afterwards – was written by Wouter van Oortmerssen back in 2002 with Cube 2 following two years later as a re-design. The major features that makes Cube 2 stand out from the rest of the pack are:

1. It is lightening fast on current hardware and runs great even on older hardware because it uses a cube based, oct-tree approach to render the world.
2. It’s a multiplayer game with real-time editing abilities.
3. It’s open source.

Now let’s look at the first issue: the cube based approach. If that sounds familiar – that’s right. That’s the same approach that Mojangs Minecraft uses. Also the second bullet – multiplayer editing – is a feature of Minecraft: in fact the multiplayer editing feature is what makes most of the fun (according to personal observations and some relatives ;-) ).

I am not stressing this to tell somebody ripped the concept of somebody else, rather the opposite: we can learn from both concepts to create better virtual worlds.

To me, Minecraft today seems to be as close to virtual world immersion as it gets, with its incredibly easy user interface and the fantastic crafting notion. Sauerbraten, on the other hand, features more realistic graphics, although using the same blocky approach. Also it’s open source. Both have clients for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux  using a completely different approach (Java vs. C++).

With virtual worlds being at an all time low (see the Gartner Hype Cycle 2012 discussed in Wagner James Aus NWN ) we need to learn from these concepts to do it better next time – and there will be a next time.

With the WebGL translation of Sauerbraten, I can’t help but stress there are ways to create a multi-plattform, multi-device approach for games and virtual worlds – even within the browser.

If I had too much time and/or money on my hands, I’d propably start with the Cube 2 engine, de-militarizing it (a bit) and slowly but surely adding features like external user authentification, multi-screening abilities, DropBox integration – maybe even crafting features. The Sandbox Game Makers did a Cube 2 conversion towards a somewhat more peaceful, educational game play:

There’s tons of ressources and mods out there. I’d like to point out the excellent (albeit german) ressources at Natenoms Blog with a very friendly user community, explaining important more advanced features like mumble integration (i.e. VoIP support in Cube 2).

Lyon’s Saint Jean Cathedral in WebGL

This is actually quite impressive.