not to be a parade-rainer (because this is really cool!), but it's not really a 'clone'. it's really just a cube rendering engine with a handful of textures and a barebones python socket server.
in my very humble opinion, a minecraft clone would have (at least stubbed out):
- ui. if you've never made a game, you'd be amazed at the amount of code ui takes up. even ugly ui. good lord.
- mobs. while you can data-drive a lots of your mobs, something like minecraft still has vast swaths of business logic to drive interactions with everything from creepers to mating wolves to the ender dragon.
- crafting. again, you can get a long way with data-driving your crafting system, but you've still got to build in all the mechanics that control your crafted items behavior among all the other various items in the game.
and none of that counts any of the polish that publishing a game requires. as a guy who's shipped games, it's really (even more so than traditional enterprise software) a case of the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time allotted to the entire project.
in my experience, that's where "indie devs" fall down. they solve the hard, interesting problems (look! i've got an environment rendering! boom! the combat code works!), but then lose interest and chase other shiny things when it comes to the rote, painful tasks (wait... i've got to data-bind the hud? and handle socket disconnects without crashing? and the camera behavior? the animation has to blend? what about handling a network timeout on the dynamically loaded textures? you want to deliver "news and updates" to the client? from what server? and you want a cms with that? oh, and write the checkbox code for options screen? and qa insists we can apply and skip the first 30 levels so they can test 31 without playing the entire game? but, but, but... look! the environment loads on my machine! what kind of video card do you have?)
anyway.
sorry about the rant.
this really is super-cool. just more of render-plumbing and not really a clone.
I found a similar project that fits also your definition of "clone". The guy coded it in C++ and created a cross platform framework with render path for OpenGL and DirectX. He even compiled it to JavaScript and WebGL via Emscripten. And it has some initial multiplayer support and he also wrote his own GUI framework. Interesting read:
in my very humble opinion, a minecraft clone would have (at least stubbed out):
- ui. if you've never made a game, you'd be amazed at the amount of code ui takes up. even ugly ui. good lord.
- mobs. while you can data-drive a lots of your mobs, something like minecraft still has vast swaths of business logic to drive interactions with everything from creepers to mating wolves to the ender dragon.
- crafting. again, you can get a long way with data-driving your crafting system, but you've still got to build in all the mechanics that control your crafted items behavior among all the other various items in the game.
and none of that counts any of the polish that publishing a game requires. as a guy who's shipped games, it's really (even more so than traditional enterprise software) a case of the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time allotted to the entire project.
in my experience, that's where "indie devs" fall down. they solve the hard, interesting problems (look! i've got an environment rendering! boom! the combat code works!), but then lose interest and chase other shiny things when it comes to the rote, painful tasks (wait... i've got to data-bind the hud? and handle socket disconnects without crashing? and the camera behavior? the animation has to blend? what about handling a network timeout on the dynamically loaded textures? you want to deliver "news and updates" to the client? from what server? and you want a cms with that? oh, and write the checkbox code for options screen? and qa insists we can apply and skip the first 30 levels so they can test 31 without playing the entire game? but, but, but... look! the environment loads on my machine! what kind of video card do you have?)
anyway.
sorry about the rant.
this really is super-cool. just more of render-plumbing and not really a clone.