Mythruna

I talk to Paul then I turn around and there is a pre-release of Minecraft 1.9 with the  very ideas that Paul had mentioned to me that he has been working on and his videos are proof of it. I go and look at the Minecraft forums and they mention it but they don't mention they are doing it. Well any way Paul keep up the awesome work. It just makes you think someone hanging out here is not here for the assist, they here for the ideas.

it is always possible that they just came up with the same idea. its always possible

Notch is having his eyes everywhere.  :o

Are you speaking of something specific in this case?

It is a little disconcerting that Minecraft seems to be knocking off many features from my roadmap.  As far as I know, many of these weren't even on their radar when I started Mythruna back in February... but oh, well.  All I can do is make the game that I want to play and hope others do, too.

Nothing specific at the moment, just what you had told me all the sudden shows up over there. This was released today..............

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UyxjF9ceMk

Ah, ok... the "his videos are proof of it" part scared me a little.  There aren't too many unique features highlighted in the videos and the ones that are I still thought were unique, e.g.: objects and physics.

...though I do find it interesting that their lighting is done more like mine now.

Also when the world got griefed the tower took a big hit again. I can't fix it. I check it out.

I need to give myself an admin tool to move properties.  Someone else squatted on the tower and I'd like to give it back to you.  I may do that tonight.

Note: you have a PM from me.

It's hard to say someome is stealing ideas. And in fact I don't have a problem with the villages and stuff MC adds now.
Villages are atm ugly and useless, the wired looking villagers have no use at all. No way MC competes Mythruna's goals at this point. The added features in the releases seem to be rushed, buggy villages without inhabitants, griefing npcs etc.
No idea where MC is going, the variety of new features makes it difficult to identify the final goal and does not fix the big MC problem that it gets boring after some time playing it and tired out most features.

Mythruna has a final goal Paul wants to reach. MC added some things that were on the list of Mythruna but added loads of other stuff, too. So I personally don't think MC is stealing Pauls ideas but the lack of a concept makes it look like stealing. On the other hand I'm sure Mojang is buisy on the internet and will be inspired of other new games and concepts.

I'm not worried at all. Paul aims for a goal MC will never reach or is wanted to reach.

Minecraft is just a game with no goals. You can do anything in it as you like.

But Mythruna is better, it has specific goals and it makes it easier to follow a set of rules especially for new players.

But, of course same ideas can pop up in minds, so its totally a coincidence or a suggestion from someone else by seeing Mythruna i guess.

We shoudn't be worried so much though.  :P

Yeah, I sort of agree... a good idea is a good idea.  And as such it's likely that many people will think of it.  I believe my good idea bullet points are strikingly different in their details but only time will tell.

I will alter one of your points slightly, though...  Minecraft does not define goals but as it stands nearly all of the goals are of the "I'm going to build X" variety.  The entire game is setup to support that in one way or another but at the end of the day it's pretty much all about what you've built and how hard it was to do.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with that... it's a heck of a lot of fun.

What I want to accomplish with Mythruna is a more varied set of potential goals... but it's ultimately still your choice as to which path you will take.  Will you accumulate wealth, will you run your own town, will you build your own dungeon and populate it, will you trying to come up with some new magic or mechanical device, or will you continue to improve your character until you can potentially go toe-to-toe with dragons.... or will you just mine and build a giant castle shaped like a fist.  Your story is up to you and you can change your mind.

If I create an overall set quest in the initial version it will probably be something overarching like "kill the seven elemental dragons" or something like that.  But really, if I have my way, you will feel pretty well accomplished if you manage to kill just one.

But, you know... we'll see. :)

Hmm only a Building stuff game?
Well MC alpha was that kind of game but Mojang is adding loads of features that aim for another goal:

- XP - not needed at all for just building stuff
- Survival mode, building mode and with 1.9 hardcore mode where you can only die once
- random mines - nothing sepecial for building stuff but explore!
- potions with 1.9 - increase strength/speed, poison someone else

In my opinion MC first added features to make it harder to build stuff, health bar, sleeping, harvesting to get food and so on. But now they add RPG elements, XP, random villages with npcs and options to increase your stats for some time and decrease your enemy's stats. You will even need to get a certain level to use a book wich tells you some stats of you gear.

So you have 3 choices to play it:

- building mode - let the blocks speak
- survival mode - kind of RPG
- hardcore mode - survival at its hardest, one creep can kill you, kind of voxel survival horror ^^

I think the new features are cool but I don't think they've really taken them far enough to be a separate game on their own yet.  It will be interesting to see where they end up.

Because as it seems to me now, the only point of all of that other stuff is to give you more ways to build or to make the grind more interesting. 

Survival itself is not the end or you'd just build a dirt tower and stand on it forever (or have they added hunger?).

So it comes down to building your "fort" or finding a camp and then going out into the world to get more stuff... either to build the armor you need or to make your fort better... or to explore farther away from your fort or survive long enough to build a new one (though the farther away you get from spawn the dumber that idea seems... unless they've also moved the respawn point somehow).

What they've added could add a lot of variety to that.  It remains to be seen what that variety will be exactly but I think that it's all an improvement.  You'll probably never get away from digging, though... after all is it "mine" craft. 

(And I think it's a really fun game... don't get me wrong.  I obsessed over it for weeks before they even added the new stuff... though I'm reasonably sure the new stuff wouldn't have made me play longer either, yet.)

In Mythruna, you will never have to mine if you don't want to... it's not a mining game.  In fact, two of the designed playable races will never mine on their own (player characters can at a penalty when playing those races).  I just hope I get my merchants in before Minecraft decides to gut their whole premise and add them. ;)

You are compeletly correct, its the competition that drives the soul of the developers and shapes the world of gaming.

So i think Mythruna is going strong and it dosen't need to worry about others copying its idea, because the idea first would be implemented here, which people can clearly see the original source.

And yes, copying ideas generally helps at some extent, but copying everything makes it more dumber.

Its the minds of the gamers to decide with they like to play and why. I'm sure they have their own reasons.

So we all should allow competition to pop up now and then, its for the better of everyone.

I'm satisfied on pspeed's view on this.   I havent played Mythruna yet, sadly due to my Opengl version lol.

rofl paul soon in survival u wont be able to stand on a piller of dirt and win coz there adding a dragon that will eat yo head of u cheater :p

They made the enderdragon sound more like a boss... so I suspect they aren't just wandering the world freely... but maybe.

the dragon flys in one strait diagonal line and waves to the side and up and down but stays going one way and shoots tnt like things if its going to hit a mountain and puts a hole in a mountain rofl we spanwed one underground and it freeked out and made a huge tunnel going in one direction

Hi,

I think that Notch takes the ideas almost everywhere to evolve new ideas. On Fridays, the Mojang team plays to look for new gameplay, new ideas, new items etc..
The Mojang team takes another road than previously. Minecraft was a construction game and it's a role play game at present.
The Minecraft players run away today. This game is more and more disappointing.
I have created a team on Minecraft and we play League Of Leagend since 3 week because 9/18players are freeze, bug etc..  ;D

Mythruna it's a game and Minecraft is a another game..
There are so ideas in the world of games..
Mythruna is inspired by Paul and Minecraft is inspired by Notch..

Sorry for my bad english..

So forgive me for possibly (and unintentionally, I assure you) being impudent, but I am actually a quite avid MineCraft player (I enjoy piston/redstone circuitry and logic) and I was browing the internet looking for a good Java graphics engine when I stumbled upon the jMonkeyEngine, and thusly found Mythruna.

I am always open to new games (especially free or open source ones.  My laptop runs Linux, so I take what I can get...) and so I am currently downloading the linux distrubutuion of Mythruna... (Darn you Netflix for taking all my bandwidth!)

I guess what I'm trying to say is... or really what I'm trying to ask is this:
What are/is the major difference(s) between MineCraft and Mythruna?  A read something about Mythruna being more of an RPG... and obviously not everything's square here, I've seen the sloped roofs and stuff... but are they really all that similar anyways?  They look the same, but so do Go Fish and Casino Poker (to a certain degree).

If you could help me out with this, I think both are respectable games (well I haven't played Mythruna yet--Darn that bandwidth--but I'm sure it'll be good).  I'd just like to get my mind around the purposes and differences of each.

The distinctions used to be somewhat clearer but recently Minecraft has been scrambling to add all kinds of last minute role playing elements.

Ultimately, the difference will be down to that Minecraft is at its core a mining and crafting game... where the crafting tree is extremely specific.

Mythruna is a role playing game that will take advantage of the flexibility of a block world to _allow_ mining or crafting but really that's not the focus.  If I reach my goals, players can have fun without ever mining a single block or without building a single thing.  Those things will be available to them if they want but that's more of a side effect of the engine choice and because it would be mean not to allow it given that I could.

When I started trying to write my own RPG many years ago, I wanted something that was visually beautiful, randomly generated, and that the world could be modified.  Originally this was because I wanted rivers to carve through the world and because I wanted NPCs to be able to build houses, fences, etc... and to ultimately let the players do similar.  If a bomb went off in a castle then the castle should blow up and so on.  Down that path, I started trying to make an engine more like Oblivion.  My terrain generation was all geared towards realistic terrain, etc..  The problem was that I was spending all of my time trying to allow things like roads and rivers to be added and there are issues trying to combine height-map style terrain with fixed structures while still being flexible.  I had several failed attempts that never made it to anything usable.

Fast forward to many years later and I played Minecraft.  It struck me that a block world was simple enough to write that I could get it done pretty quickly and have almost all of my original requirements met.  And I hoped that I could tweak it into something that could still be visually stunning.  Within two weeks, I had the basic engine done and could start on the rest of the game elements.  The rest has taken me much longer than I had hoped... but it moves forward.

Do not harshly judge the current version.  Right now the game is just a test engine.  In order to test things, I give the players infinite resources and let them place whatever blocks anywhere they want because it really works the heck out of the engine.  And I will always try to support this mode as a nerfed version of the game because it's fun and some players will like that better than role playing.

But the real game will be more.  There will be real monsters to fight, gold to earn, rare materials or magic items to collect, NPCs to build relationships that will ultimately help your place in the world.  If I reach all of my goals, there will be no fixed crafting tree.  Items will be whatever you make and will behave like they should.  You can see the beginnings of this with the current object builder but I have designed much more for the usable items.  (Some of which may be impossible but I hope I can make it work.)

You can see some of where the custom objects are going here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX-MOerwQSk (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX-MOerwQSk)

There will also be sailing ships, air ships, etc. that the players can build themselves or just ride on the ones run by NPCs.  And if you imagine being able to link things together with hinges, ropes, and pulleys, you start to see some flexibility for creation of just about anything.  I'd like every object, item, weapon, armor, clothing, etc. to be buildable in-game.

I also pull a lot of influence from the Neverwinter Nights community.  That was a great game on its own but had an extensive modding community.  There were servers you could log into for basically any style of role playing you wanted to do.  There was even a Lord of the Rings mod that was nearly a total customization.  I want to support modding out of the box so that modders can add their own creatures, building types, quests, items, etc..  Maybe someday I will be able to login to someone else's Mythruna Lord of the Rings server. :)

In conclusion, I'm trying to make an extensible role playing game that just happens to be in a block world (and I will happily drop the block part if I ever figure out how).  I'm not trying to make a mining/crafting game with some role playing elements.  There are already games like that.

Note: just in case... as this has confused others for some reason... Mythruna is not open source.

...though ultimately 85% of the game will be built-in add-ons that could be extended or turned off by modders.  The game itself is not open source and I hope to someday try to earn a living off of it.  The game suffers a lot right now because I constantly get distracted by paying work.  I'd be three times as far along right now if it weren't for my day job. :)

Well said.  I didn't see anything about the source, so because I could download the current build I just assumed it was open source (I've been in the Linux community too long...).

I hope you don't drop the block part of the game.  It's got a very nice appeal to it.  I like the idea of a flexible item/crafting tree, and I hope you succeed in that too.

I will probably still play MineCraft (In fact that's the way I'd prefer it to be, two games, not one beating out the other) because I love programming/inventing with Redstone and Pistons, but I like the sound of ropes, hinges, and pulleys.  Thank you for that nice summation on the differences in purpose and in play-experiences, I hope that I can get back on later and try out Mythruna sometime tomorrow (I've got last-second programming homework to finish right now, sorry).

Note: I fully agree with the "two games living together" part.  I don't want to replace the other game as it will always fill a need for people who really do want a mining+crafting game of that variety.

I did think I'd mention, though...

Mythruna will have something similar to this in the form of "magic electronics" which is the best way I can describe it.  There will be something like 10 or so elemental magic energies that can be manipulated in crystal circuits similar to the way light would work.  So you can combine different magic energies, split them, convert them, etc. to make everything from locks to magic devices that enhance your players' abilities.  These would be more like the item crafting, though... not giant rooms of blocks but small components that could be plugged into your body, weapons, other objects, etc..

Some example energies that can be manipulated: life force, spirit energy, electricity, light, heat/fire, gravity, etc..  I've designed some simple circuits on paper to do some simple magic devices but I haven't fully vetted the design against more complicated things.  Things like "magic missile" are pretty easy to design as are "water breathing" and simple things like that.  Teleportation, bio-keyed locks, etc. are trickier and I have to do some more paper design before I know if the system will work.

...and I need to make sure it doesn't eat all CPU though there are plans to mitigate that as well.

I'll post more on this if I get something real to show instead of just waving my hands in the air.

Regardless of whether or not MC is stealing Mythruna's ideas, I am always going to prefer the smaller, more innovative projects like Paul's fantastic brainchild.

I don't mean to provoke, but why?  Do you actually have a reason, or do you just want to support the "underdogs"?

For me theres a decent storyline by the sounds of what paul's told me, its not-wakeup-dig-mine-build-sleep-and do it all over again. i also love the different shapes for the blocks which minecraft doesn't suport unless u get mods which i dislike using :]

We dont want to hate MC.
I personally play and love MC to a certain point: It gets boring over the time.
Mojang gave me lots of enjoyable moments and many hours of innovative gameplay for 10 bucks. Try to find another game giving you that joy for that tiny amount of money.

Mythruna aims for an RPG, setted in a blocky world (well known by the giant Minecraft) as long as Paul finds another way to give the players the opportunities he wants us to have (what will possibly be forever ;) ).
I will continue to play both games as they get more and more different. MC is no RPG even Mojang throws atm RPGish features in it. But playing it is nothing like an RPG.
Mythruna will become a RPG as thats the goal to reach.

To draw a line, I personally will occasionally play MC but will try to support Mythruna as I love Pauls ideas and am freaking curious where Mythruna will go.

I just want to say... I love reading these posts.  So thanks a lot.  It really keeps me going.

Sometimes I have a bad week or day and I just want to shut everything down and go waste time.  Then I see some thoughtful post or question from one of you guys and it gets me inspired again.

Do not underestimate your contributions to my momentum. :)

As I'm sure most everyone would say as well: You're welcome.

Thank you for doing such an awesome job.

Amen!

I love how people here have there minds against Minecraft. I love both games. And they are both fun. I just don't get why people HATE minecraft. It's a Freeroam, Sandbox. Mythruna is currently... Awesome  :3... Num num... Anyway, I have nothing against both games.  ;D

I'm hoping for a "What would happen if Dwarf Fortress and Morrowind had a baby". But with modding atleast as simple and fun as NWN, or Wc3, or Dwarf fortress. So I can make the game better ...finally have the same amount of enjoyment as I have before in the past.

I completely agree with your last statement. :)

Hey guys... Have you ever heard of a "Suggestion box"? Minecraft has it. Players suggest there. If it's a good suggestion, IMPLEMENTED. So if you think Mojang is stealing ideas they probably are but... THE PLAYERS ARE xD. Anyway I love sandbox games so I hope you will get started on another one after this one :D. I especially like sandbox physics games. I'm in love with physics  :P .