The Poor Man's Voxel Engine
He is not alone. I have followed several projects that try to create Minecraft-like Voxel engines. Thanks for the article.<p>Minecraft was originally inspired by Infiniminer: <a href="http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=713" rel="nofollow">http://thesiteformerlyknownas.zachtronicsindustries.com/?p=7...</a><p>It was coded in C# (.Net 2) and XNA 3.0 runtime. The code was not obfuscated and someone published the code. As Infiniminer was a multiplayer game, hacks and bots destroyed the game community as well as several knock-off clients. That everyone had to download dotNet 2 and XNA 3 didn't help either. So Minecraft with its original Java browser applet won the audience by storm. The rest is history and Notch just bought the most expensive house in L.A.<p>The history of DirectX support on non C/C++ is a sad story of deprecated APIs:<p>* Visual Basic 6 with DirectX 7 support: <i>Direct3D retained mode</i> (COM-based scene graph API), <i>Direct3D immediate mode</i> and DirectDraw (2D)<p>* Visual Basic 6 with DirectX 8 <i>Direct3D immediate mode</i> (different API), no DirectDraw (2D)<p>* C# with managed Direct3D (Microsoft.DirectX.Direct3D), supports only DirectX 9: <a href="http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series1/tut1.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/DirectX/Csharp/Series1/...</a><p>* C# with XNA 1-4 (DreamSpark/MSDNAA license), supports only DirectX 9: <i>Released in December 2006, XNA is intended to push the ease of game programming to the extreme. XNA is new wrapper around native DirectX. As development on a new version of Managed DirectX has been cancelled, XNA can be thought of as the new version of Managed DirectX. Although the code is not 100% the same, it is VERY similar. No windows event handling, built-in update and drawing loops and XBOX360 compatibility are just some of the some of the reasons why XNA will become the future of DirectX game programming.
XNA is built on top of DirectX 9</i> -- <a href="http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/xnacsharp.php</a><p>Windows comes with OpenGL 1.1 (from 1996) and one has to init its context to load a third party OpenGL 4 context: <a href="http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/opengl/moving-beyond-opengl-11-for-windows-r1929" rel="nofollow">http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/opengl/mov...</a><p>Internet Explorer 11 supports WebGL 0.9 (almost no extensions, current would be WebGL 2): <a href="http://webglstats.com/" rel="nofollow">http://webglstats.com/</a>