Comments - Upvoid

Yes, we have plans for a fluid simulation, but there are many other features that have a higher priority for now. So we hope that we will be able to implement it at some point, but we have to do other stuff first.

SimpleMiner is only a small demonstration of the terrain capabilities of our engine. It was written over the course of one week, and won't be developed much further. The final game will have similar digging capabilities, but much more than that.

Yes, that's what we have in mind. Once the engine is ready, there will be the option for other developers to create new mods and games. It will be free for noncommercial use, and require some kind of revenue share if you want to make money with it.

You can also build things. Check out this video where we show the destructible terrain feature: Youtube.com

Later, we also want to implement Garry's Mod-like engineering features, so you can not only dig into the terrain and build mines, but you also could construct your own elevator systems, digging machines, or other cool stuff.

I guess that for static terrain an MMO would be possible, but the destructible terrain feature can create huge amounts of data that have to be processed and streamed very fast. We are currently aiming at a maximum player count of about 16 for the multiplayer mode.

Maybe this will be possible on future hardware, but for now, MMO is not our target genre.

Day/Night cycles and seasons, however, are absolutely on our todo-list.

The app sounds like a cool idea, but I think we will focus on the main features of the core engine first.

It is also a game. You will be able to create new mods and games from the basic sandbox game, thus the "Engine" in the name.

The data is stored as a grid with at most one material intersection in each grid cell. The world is generated on-the-fly as the player moves around. At the beginning, the world is generated procedurally, but you can also see the terrain modification as a "level editor" feature; one can edit the world and save the changes as a level for other players.

Currently, it is only a test of our engine. The first game we will release using this engine will be a free Minecraft-like sandbox game, which will in fact have no other objective than exploring and being creative.
However, we hope that there will eventually be many mods and games based on this technology, which will have very different kinds of gameplay.

We will release a free sandbox game with Minecraft-like gameplay. However, we are also working on a full game engine, which will allow other people to create mods and new games. So there will be other games based on this technology, which will probably not all be free.