Comments - Praetor57

I tried the beta and wrote a ginormous comment but moddb said it was too long :/ so here's the gist of my ramble-age (still turned out sorta long...):

I have to agree that this feels very minecraft clone ish, but minecraft was itself a clone of infiniminer and the whole "block world building" idea is cool and has room for more than one interpretation.

BUT having played around with the free minecraft demo thing a couple times, I'd say you have a ways to go before this is at all competitive with minecraft, my main concerns being:
-Art Style: Minecraft's pixel art textures mesh very well with the blocky look, while your style seems a bit mismatched (big blocks for everything but with normal mapping and stuff...), not saying you should copy minecraft, and I don't have a lot of ideas for alternative art style-age, but as is it doesn't quite feel right (but maybe it's just me).
-Performance: Performance felt rather poor, it seemed like it had a lot of unnecessary shaders and was a little stutter-y all around (and it looked like you're literally using a big stack of cubes to render it, which probably means hellacious batching/overdraw as maps get larger).
-Physics/Smoothness: The physics and everything just felt less "smooth" than minecraft, I can't quite put my finger on it, but primarily I think this is thanks to the the character controller not being very precise and being too "floaty".

This sounds a little harsh I guess, but as an indie dev myself this is the sort of feedback I prefer. I do think your web/community stuff look excellent, and this has plenty of potential if you can polish the heck out of it and sufficiently set it apart from minecraft, but as I said, I think it has a ways to go.

Good Luck!

If you're in Vista or 7, try running the game as administrator, or try installing it to somewhere other than program files (program files seems to want to be read-only).

EDIT: Haha, beat me to it.

Thanks! It wouldn't be too hard, I've done a good amount of shader work in the past, so something like that is a pretty likely addition.

That would be cool indeed, too bad I know nothing about multiplayer stuff... something like that in a later version might be a good opportunity to learn though.

I thought I fixed that one... guess not though, the local scoreboard files are under "[wherever you installed it]/media/local_scores/" there's a folder for each difficulty and a text file for each scoring category in those. Editing the files strangely may cause problems, so be careful to keep the exact same formatting.

That's strange, I guess the input system (I used OIS) looks suspicious to whatever security software you have... I can assure you it isn't a keylogger though (it doesn't do anything more than any other game's input stuff).

Those random bonuses are easter eggs related to the 48 hour game competition this was made for... this game wasn't originally planned to be released to anyone more than the other people participating in the compo, so those probably won't make much sense to most people...

Thanks! Good luck to you too!

Yeah, I agree with grinnock. In general, I use a few bright-ish point lights and some fairly bright ambient occlusion, and then I tweak random material settings (specular, reflection etc...) and such from there until I'm happy with the image.

Thanks for the comments!

And yeah blender is awesome (a lot better than the price tag (or lack thereof) might lead you to believe...).

I haven't logged into my msn in ages (it's my moddb username at live.com), if you've got something to ask me, you're probably best off messaging me through moddb... since I'm not sure I even remember my msn password anymore...

haha, ummm... thanks...?

^What Mistermoo said

Here's a (sort of long) video that explains it pretty thoroughly:
Blendernewbies.blogspot.com

Thanks! and... well, among other things, it is missing a texture...

Thanks!

Thanks!