43
Backers
$958
pledged of $15,000 goal
0
seconds to go
Funding Unsuccessful This project reached the deadline without achieving its funding goal on May 15, 2012.
Funding period
Apr 7, 2012 -
May 15, 2012
- First created · 3 backed
- John Martin 274 friends
- Website: highdensitygames.com
Pledge $5 or more
14 backers
SUPPORTER : Thanks! You rock! You get your name in the credits of the released Chrome App!!! NOTE: Everyone gets the game for free once published in the Chrome Web Store.
Estimated delivery: Aug 2012Pledge $10 or more
4 backers
SUPER SUPPORTER: Awesome Socks! You get an "I kickstarted Mine Mars" sticker. You will also get your name in the game credits. (please add little more for international shipping)
Estimated delivery: Aug 2012Pledge $25 or more
18 backers Limited (705 of 723 left)
LAND OWNER : The economy stinks.. invest in land! You get to "own" one of the 20x20x20 voxel regions of the Mine Mars game. When users pass through your region in the game, your name and a message/link will be shown. (please add a few bucks for international shipping) You also get the sticker and optionally your name in the credits!
Estimated delivery: Aug 2012Pledge $50 or more
3 backers Limited (597 of 600 left)
PROUD LAND OWNER : Not only do get a piece of Mine Mars voxel land, but you will also get to show your pride with a "I OWN LAND ON MARS" t-shirt. Your name and message/link will show up when a user passes through your region. You also get the sweet sticker. (please add a few bucks for international shipping).
Estimated delivery: Nov 2012Pledge $100 or more
2 backers Limited (18 of 20 left)
TEXAS LAND HOG & BETA TESTER : Yeehaw! You get 5 regions and get extra props when your name and message/link pops up when players walk through your space!! You will get extra umph in the credits for your extreme generosity. You also get the t-shirt, the sticker, and additionally..... you get a copy Mine Mars beta app and can provide final feedback before release!! (please add a few bucks for international shipping).
Estimated delivery: Nov 2012Pledge $1,000 or more
0 backers Limited (4 of 4 left)
CREATOR : MAD PROPS! Yes, you get 10 regions in the game. Your name and message/link will show up when users pass through your region. BUT YOU ALSO GET THE OPPORTUNITY TO ACTUALLY CREATE THE WORLD WITH ME!! Can you feel the power!! Mwa ha ha! If you would like to, I can send you a DEV version of the game and give you your own admin password so you can help build the world and finish the story! You will have unlimited access to the DEV tools to easily build out the rest of the world and collaborate online with me and the other 3 CREATORS to develop the rest of the story. You will get assigned (1/4) of the physical world (requires no technical tools except Chrome browser, good computer with good memory and graphics card, and an internet connection. You will get front page props on the game's menu screen, the t-shirt, the sticker, and a piece of HTML5 gaming history!! (please add a few bucks for international shipping).
Estimated delivery: Nov 2012
Creator Daniel Gonzalez on May 16, 2012
Wow, sorry to hear that this didn't push on. Please let me know if you are still looking for alpha/beta testers. Send me a message!
Creator John David Martin on May 16, 2012
Thanks Vasily! Yes, work pushes on :-)
Creator Vasily Kazantsev on May 16, 2012
Sad it was not funded. Hope you will no matter release it. Good luck!
Creator John David Martin on May 9, 2012
Woot! Thanks Arturo!
Creator Arturo J. Puentes Castellanos on May 9, 2012
LInux support, very interesting project you got me.
Creator Game Theory Labs on May 7, 2012
Interesting project John, I am a big supporter of HTML5 based games.... good luck!
Creator John David Martin on April 24, 2012
Yeah, the edges are still fairly sharp... It could get considerable smoother if the voxel density was increased, but currently this is about as dense as it gets with the performance of javascript.
The real bottleneck right now is the time it takes to load a region from memory. I have preprocessed all vertex data but it still takes considerable time to simply load that much data from the filesystem in chrome and then onto the vertex buffers. I am using webgl and shaders to do the heavy lifting of rendering on the GPU.
I guess the only way to smooth things out would be to increase voxel density (voxels per unit) with the technology currently available in the browser. With some refactoring and fine tuning I could probably increase the number of voxels per current unit by 4 (splitting), but I would probably save that for version 2.
I have seen example of advanced graphics cards and shaders that can add vertices dynamically in the GPU (for really realistic ocean waves etc..) but currently that just isn't a given in WebGL.
Once I max out the number of voxels using javascript, then it seems the next step would be move all rendering over to NACL... Chrome's Native Client to run C++ for calculating vertex updates and read/writing to the filesystem...
Great question!
Creator Alexei Barnes on April 24, 2012
I was thinking about the game and I had a couple questions, thanks for the response last time by the way:
The objects look quite rough still, probably a result of the low density of voxels plus marching cubes alg., do you think it will be possible to smooth the results? Perhaps it would be possible to smooth them as a pre-process during world loading and cache the information, then calculate a local smoothing for newly added blocks? Then again, maybe that's too complicated for what it would be worth...
Also related to the rough look, is javascript capable of GLSL? I know that'd slow the heck out of most GPU's, but for us blessed with the money for an expensive computer, GLSL would sure be fun to play with, I can't help it, I'm a GLSL addict. I really have no idea of how plausible this all is with javascript, the most I've ever done are some 2D physics engines.
Creator John David Martin on April 24, 2012
Alexei, Thanks for the support! I'll be pushing pretty hard in the last ten days... hoping my gamepad api wrapper will bring in some good attention... I think you are right, that modability would be highly appealing. With all the great modern features in todays browsers it should be very simple to provide in game tools for customization as well as like you said expose an api... Adding this to the list of todo's might not be a bad idea... I was hoping to get fully funded so the accountability of my backers would force me to finish it in short order, but if funding doesn't go through, I'm sure I'll finish it some day and I can promise to send out an alpha copy (although I might clean it up just a bit first). Thanks for taking the time to make some great suggestions!
Creator Alexei Barnes on April 24, 2012
Backer++;
It's sad to see this with such little funding, I've been working on mini projects revolving around this idea for years, but never had the initiative to put it into action. If by some chance this does get funded I'll love to playing with the beta/alpha app, gotta love that open source.
By the way, in my opinion the thing that really made minecraft take off was it's modding community, by the sounds of it you have multiple releases planned, so are you planning on modability in this or a future release? Javascript should be more than capable of having a modding system built into it, however I'm not sure exactly how it would work, it would probably mean making quite an extensive API and a large infrastructure around modding, which I can understand might be put off from the first launch.
Creator John David Martin on April 17, 2012
Vasily, that is a great idea and actually very doable for this release... since it is packaged as a Chrome app, it has permissions to talk to my server (so no cross site scripting errors)... so that would make it pretty easy to upload and share them / browse download them... May have to work that into the final version! Thanks Vasily!
Creator Vasily Kazantsev on April 17, 2012
Also would be great to be able to create and share templates and materials... I think this feature could be more interesting than sharing a whole world.
Creator Vasily Kazantsev on April 17, 2012
Great! Excited to see it.
Another question: as I understand, there will be some pre generated world at the start of the game, not just a plane landscape. Will there be a different biomes? If horizontal size of the world is limited only by available memory, will there be any vertical size limits?
Creator John David Martin on April 15, 2012
Great question! Originally, I had crafting built in where you had to find certain materials and combine them to create new ones and/or new templates.. I found the funnest part of the game was more of the sandbox-shaping as you put it... I then ripped out the crafting system and started putting more emphasis on the templating. The AI objects though I think would be a great addition to the game. For this release I don't plan on adding AI objects, although after I get this successfully released, I am considering refactoring the entire game with that in mind. I may use higher level framework like Three.js as well... not sure about it yet. Someone suggested sharing worlds that you created (not necessarily multiplayer) but simply downloading a friends world. I think that would be on the table. Additionally, this is all open so it would be cool to see someone else take in an entirely new direction using the game engine as it exists.!
Creator Vasily Kazantsev on April 15, 2012
Hi John, do you expect to add (may be in the future) some crafting or AI objects (like animals or monsters) or this will always be a pure sandbox-shaping-the-world-game? Not that I really want that features so hard, but just curious.
Creator John David Martin on April 12, 2012
Yeah, very exciting... hopefully this will flush out more bugs too!!
Creator Daniel Gonzalez on April 12, 2012
That is awesome! Sharing away!!!!
Creator John David Martin on April 12, 2012
Okay Daniel, your wish is my command... dropped it to a dollar to hopefully increase the likely hood of people sharing... so everyone who backs for a $1 or more gets an alpha cut un-obfuscated!!! Go forth and spread the great news!!!!
Creator John David Martin on April 12, 2012
Daniel, Ya know, that is not a terrible idea... what do you think about even $1 or more gets you an alpha copy? The goal of this kickstarter is really to fund the quality completion of the game and release my gamepad / keyboard / mouse action-mapping api so what you are saying makes sense! Let me ponder. Thanks again for the feedback!
Creator Daniel Gonzalez on April 11, 2012
This would certainly kick off more if alpha/beta access was granted at $10+ pledges (maybe even $5?) especially if this is offered for free on browser. Any comments on this?
Creator Mega World Studios on April 9, 2012
Love Voxel Art and the possibilities for programatic gameplay and designer editing!!! This project can go to some REALLY fun places that others can only dream about.
Creator John David Martin on April 9, 2012
Hey Sebastian, that is a great idea. I'll work on that right away! I think I got a little carried away with my first experience with iMovie :-)
Creator Sebastian Wärnström on April 9, 2012
Looks cool, but I think the project would be better off with a video where you give a short and informative presentation of your game instead of random gameplay with music for 8 minutes.