The Dream Continues?

Hey all! I've been stumbling upon SOA once every while for the last year or two, though I guess you couldn't quite call me an active follower of the project. But anyhow!
I ended up watching most of the Bens update videos on youtube and was surprised by the similarities in the vision of how a voxel game could be done compared to my own.
The one thing I found severly lacking is a plan - in a video in spring 2013 he talked about adding crafting very soon, and it is still just a prototype of an engine.

Which brings me to a project that I have been working on - Vintage Story. It's not quite the direction SOA goes, but perhaps I can still spark your interest.



Implemented, working and immediately usable features that are Similar to the ones in SOA:

• Landform/Biome generation base on rainfall and temperature maps
• Large worlds with a double precision render engine
• Colored Lights! (As a matter of fact, it is heavily inspired by the SOA Colored Lights article, but I fixed the color attenuation problem)
• A few pretty shader effects (hdr basics, fxaa, bloom, god rays and color grading)
• Powerful tree generator using just a dozen of input variables fully configurable through external json files
• Beautiful terrain generation that is fully configurable through external json files
• All blocks available in the game are also fully configurable through external json files. Can freely add and remove blocks without programming anything.
• Multithreaded Engine

Some of the VS features that SOA does not have (to my knowledge):

• Multiplayer
• Basic Crafting and other survival basics (I'm currently working on survival)
• WorldEdit features (similar to the MC mods VoxelSniper and WorldEdit)
• Custom block models with a very easy to use model editor
• Items (i.e. Pickaxe) and blocks you can interact with
• An extensive Client and Server Mod API for modders who can write C#
  
• A lead developer that already has a part time job to pay the bills, 15+ years of experience in software engineering, 4 years experience in minecraft modding, a clear plan and still a lot of motivation ;-)

Some features Vintage Story does not have:

• LOD, so max view distance on a beast PC is probably limited to 2km
• High performance sand physics, though a basic system would be quick to implement
• Explosions (pretty high on my todolist though)
• High performance water physics. We have one but it is not (yet) optimized for speed.
• Planet / Star system rendering. Thats beyond the scope of our project right now.
• Extremly tall worlds. World height is configurable, but limited by the CPU. Still can go way higher than minecraft.

If you are interested, come check out some more clips and screenshots on www.vintagestory.at

Nice man. I'll check it out, pretty interesting.

Late reply, but better late than never (I hope ^_^)

I apologize, I've worded my post not in the most polite way. You do of course have your own set of plans and vision for the game. What I wanted to point out is your ever growing scope for the game that forces you to work on the engine instead of gameplay. This project is already 6 years old and the engine doesn't even seem half finished, if I understand that correctly. And building really good and polished gameplay is the majority of the work if you want to make a really good game. So even if you would manage to make it with 50% engine work, 50% gameplay, judging by the past speed of development, it would take you another 6 years to complete the game.

What I'm saying is, if you want to build a game as you described, you don't really need procedural star rendering, parallax displacement, eyelight adaption effects, or planet orbits to make a really good game. These features are all surely nice to have, but have little to no value to the player if there is no core gameplay loop. You are building a fancy game engine, but not much of a game.

Just my 2 cents. In the end its entirely up to you how you want to work, but focusing on gameplay first might get you to your goals faster

And yea, I'll be sticking with working on VS for the time being ^_^
Since my lost post we've added *a lot* of gameplay updates and we're now very close to having a gameplay experience comparable to the MC Mod TerraFirmaCraft and hell a lot of modding possibilities