Cubelands - MMO Building game - Private beta starting

Allright, after playing about 6 hours I wanna give you part II of my feedback.

But first:

Thanks again, man!

Even though my pc is pretty old and my internet connection usually is quite slow the games runes smooth for me all the time. So my guess is, that this problem is server-only? (Probably I'm talking bullshit here, I actually don't have any idea of online game structures.)

Defiantely!

I'm actually not too sure about this one. I really like this kind of super-non-violent-gameplay. It just feels like being a kid again and playing with legos. Though some kind of player interaction would be nice nevertheless but I'll get to that later.

Especially the physic cubes would be a big improvement. For instance some kind of wind Block that pushes you away from his position, blocks that fade from passable to non-passable, etc.
These things would add a nice gameplay touch to the game.


Hosts should be able to forbid building for all other players on that server with the effect that someone could make actually jump'n run levels, and then invite people to play that.

One of my biggest wishes for the game are selfmade blocks. I don't talk about changing material settings, but just give the player the opportunity to make his own textures and then upload them so that every player can use them. That would be awesome.

Why can't I see my achievements ingame?

The current face impression depends on smilies you are using in game. Example: You write a  and the player character makes a sad face, etc. This would defiantly add some atmosphere and is not that hard to implement. Also a non commercial method of changing the flag on the players belly would be nice and help the social aspect allot.

I don’t think that weapons would fit into the game, but some kind of throwing cubes at other players when they F*** something up or just look in the wrong direction would be a funny touch.

The friends list is a nice idea, but could use some tweaking. For instance, the possibility to write stuff that just your friends can see, or be able to see directly at the server list on which servers your friends are, are missing totally.

The last crit is super simple, but yet effective. A fotocam sound when you make a photo would make it easier for the people being photographed to know when they can move again

Oh, yea, and I meant “skip” in the last feedback post

 

TBH, this looks like a complete rip-off of Minecraft. Is there some unique features, or are you just trying to cash in on Minecraft's success by asking a lower price?

 

Inkognito, TwiiK:
Thanks for the big feedback lists, I love the majority of the ideas! The photo camera sound is indeed a very funny little improvement I'm adding today.

 

Nope, It's already different than Minecraft (community, screnshot uploading). Minecraft is an RPG game, and atm Cubelands is only a pure building game. When properly finished, Cubelands is an entirely different game with unique game modes. Furthermore Minecraft wasn't and isn't the one and only block building game. There've been games like 3D dot heroes, Second life, Roblox, Blockland, Infiniminer, Dungeon Keeper. All of these are years older.

 

@Inkognito, the weapons / non weapons part can easily be solved by different server setups. Just join a friendly server or a non friendly server if you see what I mean.

It could go as far as having all out Player vs Player combat with health, weapons etc. or just the possibility of shooting or throwing something that doesn't even deal damage, just for fun.

But eitherway it would be entirely up to the host what config he would go with.

@Veil, I don't understand where you're coming from. If someone, Leepo in this case, can take a concept, i.e. Minecraft, and make it so good that people will actually pay for Cubelands instead of Minecraft then all power to him. It's called competition. If the Minecraft creator feels he's losing too many customers to Cubelands then he would have to improve his product, wouldn't he?

 

Ye it isn't the only one but from what I've seen from the pictures so far it looks like you've copied the Minecraft's design pretty much completely. Even down to the way your active block is positioned on the screen.


Game ideas aren't pretty original usually and there is always elements borrowed. But this just looked a bit like "Zyngaing" Minecraft.

Anyways, good luck Hopefully you can create something awesome!

 

I might have come off a bit aggressively. What I mean is that is there any real differences in the games. If no, then the competition is about who sets the lower price and that kind of competition hurts the game industry as a whole.

But like I said in my earlier post, all good wishes and stuff to Leepo and co

EDIT: oh and on a another note, GIEF ME BETA CODE

 

I think there's still some codes left on the previous page.

I don't agree however with the price issue. Two games will never be so similar that price is the only thing separating them. Even in their current forms Minecraft and Cubelands are plenty different and they're both in alpha/beta and branching off in different directions.

It will always be about quality and/or what features you're after. For example I've seen a billion very similar games on the appstore. I buy the one that is the most polished, the best supported, the most played, the most talked about etc. etc. I never buy the cheapest.

 

looks like a cool game, who cares if its similar to minecraft, theres also a lot of puzzle games with very similar elements and still it doesnt prevent them to stand out from each other

 

@Leepo, there's a bug which makes the standalone version unplayable. You run at 1/3 - 1/4 of the speed you do in the webplayer.

 

Dunno with a game like Dungeon Keeper you're taking it a bit too far as then you could include a ton of other games as well which in my opinion all don't share what Minecraft is mainly about.

Generally i think there is nothing to say against implementing your own block-sandbox-Minecrafty-game or taking it to the next level. I always was and i am a big fan of clear simple geometric shapes, like cubes.

However the world somehow also would be a better place if you do it because you're more excited about the game-design and less because you have Minecraft's sale stats and your slice of it in mind. Another tons of blocky sandbox clones like with the Match-Three-Armada doesn't sound this exciting.

 

Interesting, I recently started working on a block-building style game myself - primarily to see if I could do something similar to Minecraft and random map generation. Yours looks much prettier than mine, though mine seems to run with much better performance (so far) and has infinite random maps (with caves, whee!).

Are you combining meshes, or generating your own meshes? How do you handle mipmapping of the combined textures? Mine shows ugly lines in the distance if I leave mipmapping on.

Anyway, looks awesome and I look forward to seeing where you go with it.

EDIT: For the record, I think being inspired by a success story like Minecraft is great. I have some vague ideas of where I want to go with mine that would be different than Minecraft and I'd love to see different people's takes on the idea. I don't want a million Minecrafts, since the original does what it does well, but I would love to see an exploration of different ideas inspired by Minecraft. For the record, Minecraft was also inspired by other games that came before it, particularly Infiniminer. He took that concept and made his own unique world out of it.

 

@Beezir, how can you tell yours runs with much better performance? And by infinite random maps do you mean they are infinitely large or just an infinite number of maps (isn't that pretty much given by the fact that it's random? ).

I'm curious because I have some performance issues in Cubelands and they're mostly connected with the increased ram usage from playing for extended periods of time.

I was also exploring the mesh combine / mesh generation path myself and non stop ram usage was one of the walls I hit and couldn't get over. :?

As an example from Cubelands (In my test projects this is exactly the same):

- If I start a world with no blocks I use 100mb ram.
- After playing for 3 hours I have placed 10000 blocks and now my memory usage is 600mb
- If I restart Cubelands and load my map, with the 10000 blocks, my memory usage is 100mb again.

So I obviously clear out 500mb of garbage not related to the map itself if I restart the game, but I still haven't found a way for Unity to do that without me having to restart it.

 

Beezir:

Why do you think/know your game is running faster? What difference could it be?

"Are you combining meshes, or generating your own meshes?"
Generating own meshes in 4x4 chunks.

"How do you handle mipmapping of the combined textures? Mine shows ugly lines in the distance if I leave mipmapping on."
Even with mipmapping disabled it leaks (it seems to still use some mipmapping internally?). Thats why I forced using mipmap untill a certain level to reduce leaking unwanted colors.

 

That's a fairly small chunk size. My calculations and experiments suggest 16x16x16 is possible with a single mesh, assuming worst case (based on vertex limit per mesh). Given the worse case is not that likely (3D checkerboard basically), you could even have larger chunks and generate multiple mesh per chunk only where necessary). There is some trade offs involved in chunk size selection of course.

There does seem to be some sort of garbage collection issue when doing procedural meshes with Unity - see http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=62594

As for copying Minecraft... I personally don't have any issues with usage of a similar block geo-mod technology, but I would hope there are gameplay differences between any such game and Minecraft itself. I myself have some ideas for variants on the Minecraft theme, but am happy to wait for Minecraft to support modding.

 

Yeah per default I use 16x16 chuncks..however as soon as (any!) player updates that chunk it gets divided to 8x8, and finally to 4x4. Otherwise updates take too long.

I'm not yet re-merging the 4x4 Cubes to bigger ones or batching cube updates from players that are far away. This'll greatly improve performance in multiplayer games.

 

Ah, k. That seems sensible.

 

Fixed the memory leak problem:
When creating custom meshes you need to manually call destroy on the mesh object. Simply destroying its meshrenderer and meshfilter (and gameobject) doesn't work. This seems to be by design.

 

You should seriously get out of that private beta thing and make it free for everybody, so that this thing can start to spread. Just saying.

Would like to test it!

 

My problem usually was that I was so excited about new games that I'd open it up right away; That leaves no room to build up momentum for the press. So I'm using the private beta to be able to build up some PR. However, we also really want to have most of our plans in there (extra game modes, objects). So we'll add some big content before we launch the public beta. This shouldn't take too long though.
Plus, being able to do some proper testing is a plus as well .

 

Boo Hoo my Pyramid has been demolished

 

The performance claim is based only off of observation - when I entered the Cubelands world with lots of structures, I was getting quite a bit of client slow-down. Performance in my current code is more or less constant regardless of the actual placement of the blocks themselves.

Part of that may have been the screen effects, I'll have to get back in and try with everything disabled. I also don't have lighting in mine yet, but that shouldn't be a significant performance impact since the lighting will be based on custom vertex colors and not a real lighting pass.

As far as memory, mesh generation, and infinite maps:

1.) Each generated map is literally infinite. You can walk in any direction (or dig downward) forever. It would probably start to get messed up if you made it significantly far from the origin, but that would take you way too long. At the moment there are two passes on the random noise - one to generate the basic density of a given block, and the other to carve out random caves. In the future there will be several more passes to add various randomized features, but the noise algorithm is a tiny fraction of the overall processing time and so should not affect performance.

2.) The meshes are generated in 10x10x10 chunks. The terrain data is cached in a very small array that simply stores the "density" per individual block. The meshes generate only the surfaces adjacent to the empty sections. Each chunk is a single draw call, and the total number of polygons even in a detailed chunk is miniscule - the densest arrangement of a 3d checkerboard pattern would result in something like 1500 polygons total if I'm calculating that correctly. If there were 125 chunks on screen at once and they were all checkerboard patterned, you're still only really pushing 185k polygons total. In reality, that pattern is very difficult to create and most chunks have a scant few polygons at any given time. Additionally, several of these may be completely empty (air) or completely full (dirt/rock) and therefore not result in any polygons whatsoever.

When you remove a block, the chunk (and potentially any neighboring chunks) are regenerated. The initial load takes a few seconds, but afterwards I do a per-frame chunk load as you move around the map. So far the result is very smooth and chunks regenerate very quickly, but I admittedly have not tested it on a much slower computer. There is no safety mechanism yet, so theoretically on a slow enough computer, you could catch up with the border of the tiles being drawn... on my development computer, it loads fast enough that this is impossible to ever run into. Once you can add blocks back in and create towers that you can jump off of, however, it will become an important issue. With a proper loading sequence, it may still be possible to make this appear smooth. I will note that upgrading to the Unity 3 beta improved the performance significantly. Draw Calls for a view distance of +/- 4 chunks (45 blocks in any direction from the player) stays under 100 - there are only 125 total meshes for terrain data, and most are not in view at the same time.

3.) The memory usage is more or less constant. This is because I reuse the same mesh instantiations over and over. When it starts up, it creates an array to cache the used meshes based on your set draw distance. As you walk around, it will reuse the meshes that move out of range to generate the new meshes. I do not create or destroy anything after the initial map generation around the player, I just do a mesh.Clear() and rebuild as necessary. The only data that continually increases is the raw map data cache (which is 1k per 10x10x10 block at the moment). The map data may contain a lot more info in the future, so I will likely use a structure similar to that in #2 above, but for now it just keeps it all in memory once loaded. Since the map is random, but constant for a given seed, the map data only caches chunks that have actually been loaded.

Once I fix up the user movement and add in the feature to add blocks (you can only remove them at the moment) I'd be happy to send out a demo and see how the performance compares on other computers and see whether or not any of these techniques would be useful in Cubelands.

 

Allright, part 3. You probably have noticed: I love your game and really enjoy playing it. Therefore I really spend some time IN the game which makes me find more and more bugs. Here is my Update.
Oh yea, I’m using the webplayer with Firefox, and a pretty slow internet connection.

-Servers with one player limitation gets shown in server list
-While connecting pressing the back button doesn’t quit the connecting, so as soon as you press the “Multiplayer Button” again you are back at the connection screen.
-You can unfocus the Main Screen GUI(clicking on the background makes the window transparent) which really doesn’t hurt anyone but it’s simply a bit weird.
-One you are in the pause screen and use another program or only another tag something very strange happens to the pause GUI. I can’t press any button except the Option Button. Once I go back from the option menu to the normal pause screen everything works fine again.
-There is no list of all the users, not even a full list of all the users online.
-I can’t see a full archive of the photos.
-A comment section or even a simple form on your site would be useful.
-I can’t delete my photos
-The counter that tells you how many players are currently playing is pretty much always wrong
-You can’t chat with friends privately.
-Sometimes my cube selection is messing up, and it selects no blocks at all or the wrong ones.
-Again, rather a community feature, than actually about the game. A list of all the committed bugs, so that the testers can see what problems other users have. Would be useful for a lot of things though.
-The join random Button seems totally broken, because it simply doesn’t load a level, but switches all few secends from server to server before loading is finished.
-Every time someone enters the server I get one of two weired glitches: I can move and build regularly, but all the other players stand still. After some time they jump to their actual position and all the stuff they build pops up in one. 2(this only happend twice): I see the other players moving but can’t see the stuff they're building, and also the other way around(they don’t see my stuff either) This bug could only be fixed by resetting the webplayer.
-Sometimes(twice now) I get an error that makes my browser to crash. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make a screenshot of that. You’ll get the screen as soon as I get that error again.
When I try to connect to a game by the friend list feature of your site(not that ingame) I get a weird bug. Not just I’m not able to connect, none of the servers gets shown anymore till I reset the webplayer.
-When I can’t connect to a server I get two kinds of messages, one: “Connection failed: ConnectionFaild Connection Faild” and two: Nat…something something(I can’t find that error right now, sorry).
While the first one is just ridiculous, the second one is probably understandable for someone who has proper knowledge of server structure. It would be nice though if these errors would be understandable for everybody.

By the way, I’m really interested in getting into this whole unity network thing, therefore I would love if you take the time to tell me, why exactly players can connect to some servers, but can’t to others. This is just a question of my interest though

keep it up, man!

 

Looks a lot like Blockland (http://www.blockland.us/)
I wish you luck in your endeavors!

 

Wow, the phsyics in Blocklands were just mind blowing.

Never seen such good destruction physics in a game before. Puts Bad Company 2 to shame.

Edit: Playing it though, was another stroy. Worst interface and controls I've ever seen in a game before. Just horrible.

 

Yeah, terrible interface... I have high hopes for this game, though... I'll buy it when it comes out, just to see how I is...

 

Has something changed recently as I cant connect to any server not even my own one anymore, all worked fine yesterday, but today nothing works.

 

SpookyCat; I'll soon add a Cubelands forum for problems like this. Have you tried restarting the game yet? I did not change any code..but it could be the masterserver is acting up temporarily.
I think retrying again will help. But I will be adding some improvements to this soon.

 

For the Cubelands guys:

Here's that brief demo I promised. As you can see, not nearly as pretty (texturing is arbitrary and lighting is horrible/nonexistant). The fog is to mask the terrain loading and mipmapping problems.

My wife managed to get outside the terrain once, so there's obviously bugs in the loader still... though she is really good at breaking things. I don't have a lot of machines to test on, so slower computers are very likely to hit more trouble - just restart if you do. It's also VBL locked since my video card makes buzzy noises at full speed (~1400 fps). You can dig, but not build. There are plenty of caves though (and you may on occasion start inside one if there's an opening at the origin), so it can be fun to go spelunking for a little bit. Also, sorry to any mac users, I don't know how to properly package things... it's just dumped in a zip file.

I'm currently on other projects, but if you needed any additional coders your project I'd be happy to hop over for a bit and see if any of my work could help in Cubelands.

PC Version
Mac Version

 

Beezir, thanks. Indeed looks great! Feels infinite

At the moment we simply cant handle maps larger than 256x256x256 because we didn't implement level streaming yet. We will be doing so using the plans we had already written out plus your new hints&tips from the previous post. I'll let you know what our final solution is and how it works.

 

I am sad that I dont get to play yet it looks so awsome!

 

On the other hand, you're directly competing with Minecraft and Minecraft is free for all.

 

I've been looking around and noticed this game and was wondering if you still have keys to give out.

 

wow... That is impressive.

 

When will the forums be coming, seems very odd to beta test something but have no method of reporting an issue.

 

Yeah I've been busy (mainly with a HD error :S). But I'm up and running again.

Currently finishing the world streaming, then the forum is the first thing on the list. Expect it tonight/tomorrow/Saturday.

 

for half a second I was like.. "hey.. this guy is stealing minecraft's idea" but right after that I was like "hey.. this looks quite awesome!"
Hope to see more of this! Looking great!

 

Hehe thanks!

Alright; the forum is in place now. It's linked to your Cubelands account and does not require a registration/login. See: http://www.cubelands.com/?page=forum

I have also applied world streaming, with tips from this topic. See; http://cubelands.blogspot.com/. These changes are not live yet, I want to test the player some more.

 

Just for the record, Minecraft was also taken from an earlier game called Infiniminer. He took the block building/digging concept and added crafting to it. So the block-building games in themselves aren't really original to Minecraft.

 

Looks amazing, good work!

I've been working on my own style of mining/building game, but have been trying to determine the best way to generate the maps.

At first I thought of generating a height map file, and just building the map off that. But I don't see that being the most efficient solution. How did you accomplish this in your game?

 

how can I get a beta game key?

 

Man i just played Minecraft and somehow found the link to our project, didn't know someone made a similar game in Unity.

Wish there are more beta keys, would really love to try it out. I like the fact it has this nice graphics compared to Minecraft.

Going to subscribe this thread so i know when new keys are available

 

You can now add your email address at the frontpage and it'll mail out beta keys. Usually within 15 minutes (untill we put the maileron hold).
Don't worry about spam or other emails; we'll email just once.

 

Awesome, just received it, going to try it out now!

Thanks a lot!

 

Thanks for the extra keys. Got one from the front page and got in right away. In no way i was planning to spend almost all my free time yesterday on this. It seems that trying to build a three-floor pyramide house while listening to the music of your choice is pretty time consuming.

 

I like Cubelands. I got started building a replica of Stormwind City yesterday.

 

I've finally played it for a short time (have to test it more later).

But i already like it, especially that it has a nice graphic.

The only thing bothering me is that building and destroying should be faster in such a "build only" world. It makes sense in Minecraft's survival mode to make it slower, but if its just about building with an infinite amount of cube, it should be faster when holding down the mouse button.

Man i am still wondering how people achieve a good performance with so many "cubes". I really want to try that out too lol.
But is combine mesh/creating mesh really enough?

 

Hi!
Im very interested (I bought Minecraft too), and if it's possible, send me a key at vancete07@gmail.com
If you send more than once (like 5 or 6 keys), I will give the keys at very populated spanish gaming forum...
Greetings!
P.D: Sorry for my english, I'm from Spain :razz:

 

I'm removed the beta key requirement and opened the game as public beta. Everyone is welcome to give it a try now!

 

now gonna try it out