Cubelands - MMO Building game - Private beta starting

Cubelands is an online multiplayer building game set in the universe of cubes. Work together with your friends to create your own amazing world and show it off to the entire community.

Tags: Multiplayer, Building, Community, Social.
Website: http://www.Cubelands.com

We've just opened the private beta of our brand new game Cubelands. I'm hereby inviting all fellow (indie) game developers to check out our latest development. Your feedback about the game/marketing/etc is very welcome!

Questions, comments? Fire away!

 

Cubelands is currently in a private beta, you need a key to register play:

-beta keys removed, these were all taken-
See new posts for new keys

 

Grabbed Second Last
Last was Taken

For those who are looking for keys

Will give feedback once I get home from work, but a quick play makes me think of Minecraft, which is an awesome game.

 

I've taken 82BZSBR60GRY47C , 3rd from last. Gonna give this a go.

 

RQVG3AMIYGQCIO5

 

This looks fantastic. I'm very impressed and can't wait to try out the beta.

 

This looked too interesting to pass...took

6ZYRI8ZMBFNNHCT

 

Amazingly enough, this runs WAY faster on my work computer (GMA 950) than Minecraft does even though yours looks much nicer. Well done.

 

Ahh, just spent about 20 minutes on this game. Good fun.

 

N08EIS6YDYN4FBH

 

. all the keys seem to be taken

 

Am I not doing something right? I tried them all and it says I need a valid private beta key...

 

Can't get any of the keys to work.

 

Me too - none of the codes work

 

Yep all the keys are already taken. To be honest i have played a very similar game before. It had cubes too and you build a world with it

I would really want to try out this one.

 

I removed the invalid keys, here are 20 fresh keys:

Please use the keys top to bottom (i'll mark the rest as taken).
ALL TAKEN

Feedback is very welcome

 

Took third, first and second seem to be taken already. 8)

 

Took the last one (KTWWV2BQ5MPB8DE) .

Very nice ! Hopefully there will be great buildings and stuff all over I really enjoyed it .

Btw, how do you handle drawcalls ? :roll:

--
oxl

 

I've taken : GW3EV38JRIEUG77

 

Groups of cubes are combined, furthermore the entire terrain uses just one material. So there are Min 50 max +/- 300 drawcalls.

The game can handle over 4 million cubes in a level..I haven't decided what the max is, but it can handle more than what fits on the screen(frustum) here.

 

i took BMVPSRN5M63P6T2

 

This looks very cool. Great job to the team behind it!

 

All right, I tested it out for about 15 minutes, here is some feedback:

What I like:
First of all, I love the music, a really catchy theme. Also the Controls are pretty intuitive and work well. You really did an awesome job with the system requirements. My computer is really old and almost no unity web player runs on my pc without any lag. Your game runs super smooth.
Also the idea of an achievement system kinda got me

What I don't like:
Well, I really see this as a Beta, therefore my “Don’t like” list will be a bit longer then the “Like” one. But don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed playing your game, I just see room for improvement. Also the similarities to Minecraft are obvious, so you have to stand the comparison.
And the first thing that bugs me is simply the price for the full game. You see, Minecraft costs about 10,00 Euros, that means buying Minecraft is even cheaper then yours but has tons of more features. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t sell your game, but in my opinion the current price is neither realistic nor fair.
But get to the game:
-The jump height could be a bit increased, so that I can at least jump two blocks high.
-You can’t build blocks under you. That’s not a big deal, but it would make building way more comfortable.
-I’m not quite sure about that, but I think you can’t skill the tutorial.
-You can’t move the windows on screen. In my opinion a rather big problem.
-Some kind of Map randomisation is missing. Again, I’m referring to Minecraft, I’m sorry about that. But one of the coolest features there was the fact that a whole world gets created for you, and you can explore that. I know that’s a HUGE feature, but some kind of randomisation would be nice, and if it’s just placing random trees over the map.


Suggestions:
I think, that you should find a way to make your game unique and distance the game a bit more from Minecraft. Here are 2 examples of what I mean:
-Logic bricks: For instance, you place two “Waypoint Cube” in some distance to each other. Now if you assign a wood brick to those waypoints it starts moving between them. I know that concept is very fragmentary but I guess you get my point. Therefore you could make moving platforms or elevators(specially elevators would be a damn nice thing )
-NPCs: the more you play in your map the more NPCs walk around and give it some life. Probably the have even some kind of requirement system or… I don’t know, it’s just an input.
-Special cubes: Cubes that have special effects on the environment or the player like… springboards!

Bugs:
-The achievement system was kinda F***ed up when I played. I didn’t get any achievement at all during play, but later when I stated the game again I got all at once… ?
-When you press two buttons at the same time and then press jump you lose the footstep sounds till you stop and start moving again ( yea, yea, just nitpicking)

I hope this helps, keep up the good work.

 

Thanks for taking the time for your feedback!

About the price: Minecraft is going to sell for 20 Euros actually. It's 10 Euros during the alpha, 15 during beta and finaly 20. I've seen a bunch of other (small) indie games selling for 20 euros.
Cubelands is 7.50 Euros for the early birds, 15€ after full launch. I might still decide to lower the final price if it's indeed to much. However there are still -way- more features planned.

-Fixed the jump height, you can now jump 2 blocks
-You can build blocks under you if you look down and jump, this is encouraged.
-"can’t skill the tutorial"? You mean skip? True, as it's really easy to quickly complete it once.
-Moving windows: hmm...noted.
-Some kind of Map randomisation: We're not yet planning on generating maps, we don't think we want to go this way, and we're not copying Minecraft. I'll fill in our feedback site with some future plans with multiple game modes (and how we add them to the game). Stuff like logic bricks/springboards come in handy in those game modes, even traps.

Bugs:
-I greatly improved the achievements system response time (Achievements are calculated server side)
-Checking out the footstep sounds...

 

i used 72QOAMVT24HDPAT

thanks!

 

Reminds me of minecraft. Simple yet effective.

So groups of cubes are merged/replaced with a prefab of a certain size?

How often does the server send back info on the map, is it per change, new player joined etc?

Could be a very interesting case study.

 

Used DZCGOHENRDB0Q7W. I'll try it out later today

 

I'm guessing he uses this: http://unity3d.com/support/documentation/ScriptReference/Mesh.CombineMeshes.html

The combinechildren script included with Unity can do this as well.

I've tried it with bullet casings in my own game and it works really well.

The game breaking problem I encountered was that the ram was never cleared so after playing for a long time my game would use multiple gigabytes of ram. The only way to clear it was to restart Unity. I never did solve that problem.

 

I took IOYQVXUM4UIZ0FN

 

I took 80NG7BJJ82N8MDM

 

Just tried registering and all the keys are taken. Any plans to post more?

 

zomg >.< I tried to register before when you posted the keys the first time. It seemed I had just missed out, And looks like I missed out AGAIN lol. C'mon people! Save me a key next time! lol.

 

Sooo basicly a nicer looking version of "minecraft"? (www.minecraft.net)

Looks great tho.

 

20 more, that gets us over 100 beta players .

EDIT: Last two left:
RO2TBKNKR0IJWVJ
F4QSCOCAWZTZ8ND

 

I took the second key: NOSQGPFGYV4ESGJ

The first was invalid.

 

I took the first one. PSI62G6UWNDJRY8



This is pretty awesome! Almost identical to minecraft but looks lots better! lol. Its amazing how smooth and nice this runs (on my laptop!). I thought making something like this would kill unity . Good Job!

 

I stress tested the game now and you seem to have the exact same memory issue (leak) I have when combining meshes. The memory usage will steadily increase and never decrease until the game, webplayer in this case, is restarted.

For example I started the game in a clean chrome browser with 20mb memory usage. With the game initialized I had 190mb memory usage. After building for a while I was up to 390mb. When I quit the game and restarted it in the exact same map my memory usage was 190mb again.

200mb increase with just one player in a rather small map can quickly escalate to several gigabytes in multiplayer with bigger maps.

In my game I have cylinders as bullet casing and spawn them way faster than the cubes in Cubelands and I quickly get up to 3-4gb of ram usage so its not feasable for my use until I can find a solution.

It's extremely annoying because performance otherwise is perfect. Like you say you can have millions of objects on screen at the same time without any drawcalls or performance reduction.

I'm currently trying to find a solution to this, but I'm not having much luck.

PS: I received this when I logged in (with my correct username and password)

It logged me in successfully so that message was a bit confusing.

 

Also, not really important in such a game, but you move faster diagonally than forward and sideways so perhaps you should normalize the movement vector.

More importantly you lose the footstep sounds when you move diagonally.

Correction, you only lose it when moving diagonally left/forward or back/right, i.e. W+A or S+D.

Also, 3d audio on the remove block sound would be nice as the volume seems to be constant from any distance.

PS: I joined someones dedicated server now and the memory usage started at 700mb (this is in firefox with other tabs as well) and after spending about 10 minutes in the game it's now 1gb.

 

Great game, great fun. Really enjoyed messing around with it, I do get a bit of random movement of the camera now and then and I was a little grumpy when I couldn't finish my pyramid as I obviously reached the vertical limit of the game, but great fun, well done

Chris

 

Ahh that was you, awesome . I followed the making of the pyramid. Yeah my dedicated server is set to 256x256 x 64height. You can choose whatever map size you'd like though (but default is 128x128x64)

 

Arr missed that, splendid, Ill have to try again

 

How does one changed the map size?

 

At the moment you can only set it on dedicated servers:
Download the (windows) game. Use the StartDedicatedServer.bat to run the server once and quit it (to let it generate the default serversetting.txt file). The mac standalone game would work too, but I haven't fixed the .command file yet that should do the equivalent of the .bat (all it does is create a temporary .txt file so that the game knows its running batchmode..as we cannot detect this!)
Edit the serversettings.txt file, e.g.:

Code (csharp):

1. port=25010
2. players=8
3. PW=
4. MOTD=Welcome, please keep this level tidy!
5. serverDescription=Pyramid scene!
6. title=Mytitle
7. mapName=MyPyramid
8. emptyMapheight=256
9. emptyMapXWidth=256
10. emptyMapZWidth=256
11. emptyMapFillInHeight=1
12. targetFrameRate=30
13. modList=YourName
14. adminList=YourName
15. bannedList=
16.  

Save the changes, start the dedicated server again and connect to your own server in the game (via the webplayer for example).

 

taken 6V73HDKE2TIKDRC :wink:

 

Taken: UWXB4M2UKVCNY3K

Looks awesome! Playing now.

Taken: V7I7OZZZKM2P3TP (for someone else)

 

I took XYS5J6J2KQY33GB
tyvm

 

Great game!
And yes, this is a copy of another game which has the same idea to build, though i thinks it is diffrent, not sure.

Either way, great beta, loved it but a little un-happy to download the game only to say you need to purchase it to run it as a standalone application.

 

Ahh, i have an issue connecting to mikes dedicated server. It goes to downloading level, goes to 38-54% and then returns to menu...

 

Since it's Unity powered

 

Nice picture.

My server actually crashed a while after you left because my computer ran out of ram. Firefox was using 1,2gb then. When I restarted the browser and game with the exact same map Firefox only used 400mb. So in my mind it must be possible for Unity to clear those extra 800mb of ram while playing because they are not used by the map, but obviously unneeded garbage left over. Unless this is a problem related to all computer software and not to Unity at all.

Now I have to keep the game running because the other guys are building this huge castle in it and I don't want to take it away from them so obviously the sooner you can share or upload maps, the better.

As for the game itself I have a few wishes and thoughts, some which I already shared with you:

- The game starts running choppy for me after people have built a lot of stuff and none of the graphics settings make it run any better
- More air control when you jump would be nice so you can steer yourself onto a platform.
- Climbable blocks
- Blocks of different shapes, wedge shape at least.
- Blocks with different physics. Water you can swim in, slippery ice, sticky mud.
- See through blocks. Water, ice, glass.
- Something to do when you've built a cool castle. For example place cannons, throw blocks, shoot arrows
- Maybe add some Garry's mod (Half-life 2 mod) elements to it like the ability to create simple triggers, traps etc. Falling blocks, boulders. Make a dungeon and tell your friends to try and survive it, for example.
- Perhaps the ability to place blocks in thin air in a 3d grid so you can start building from nothing. Could be on a toggle so you could choose the method you liked. Great for building floating objects.
- Ability to turn off music, but not sound
- Reduce the range of the different sounds so you don't hear eachother all the time