[fenomas]

Wow, as someone who's been maintaining a JS voxel engine ("noa") for some years now it's surprising to find a bunch of influences here I hadn't seen before. I also got started from the algorithms on Mikola Lysenko's blog, but I'd never come across VoxLords at all. Great stuff OP!

[EarthLaunch]

I just checked out noa - I'm shocked that Minecraft Classic just went and used it without much contact? That's a really huge feather in your hat. Would you have done anything differently about that? (I just switched from MIT to AGPL, so this has been on my mind.)

Babylon.js, cool. How did it do with voxels, or how did you work with it? If you feel like answering. I used it previously on my project.

I have to check out all the other games on that list [0].

0: https://github.com/fenomas/noa

[fenomas]

Thanks! I know basically nothing about the Minecraft thing - I didn't hear about it until a week after it launched, and by that time the multiplayer servers were dead and the game was abandoned. Apparently the Babylon.js folks had some backchannel dialog with Mojang about it, but they declined to include me or tell me what was discussed.

As for what I'd do differently - I should have ignored it. I invested a fair bit of emotional energy into trying get info, doing some work that the Babylon team asked for in hopes it would lead somewhere, etc. But nothing came of it and it was pretty depressing; I'd have been happier if I'd just tweeted once and moved on.

(I guess technically I should also have bugged Mojang to comply with the MIT license by adding my code's copyright notice, but... life is short.)

Re: Babylon.js, it doesn't have any voxel-related features, so to be honest all the babylon-specific code in my engine would probably look very similar if I'd gone with three.js. But Babylon's real killer feature is definitely its forum, which is extremely helpful and active. I'd probably never have been able to build my engine in three, just because I don't know any way of getting answers to thorny "oh you need to set mesh._dirty before calling that API" type questions for it.

[lloydatkinson]

Wow, that's really shitty of both of them. They should be ashamed.