Minecraft Is Using A Spatial Simulation Engine To Make ‘larger And More Immersive Experiences’
Last year, across multiple tests, thousands of human players and AI pilots duked it out in an EVE Online tech demo, Aether Wars. The first battle saw around 14,000 pilots trying to blow each other up, and thanks to some wizardry, it didn’t become an intolerable slide show. Hadean’s Aether Engine was responsible, and today the company announced it’s being made available to more developers, starting with Minecraft’s Mojang.
MMOs and online games usually impose player limits, separate them into instances or use tricks like EVE Online’s time dilationwhich slows things down to give the server time to work through its massive queue of tasksto keep lag under control. Using distributed computing, however, the Aether Engine spreads the load and is able to dynamically scale to stop performance from tanking.
In places where there are lots of players, physics or other things that might put a strain on the gamelike a busy starting area in a new MMO or a mindbogglingly huge space battlethe engine allocates more servers to keep up with the demands of the simulation, while servers are taken down for quieter areas, keeping things consistent across the game world.
The applications for the Aether Engine seem to be quite broad, with it also being used to help model protein interactions to improve drug design modelling, as well as simulate the spread of the coronavirus, but gaming is Hadean’s focus at the moment. It’s a good place to test and prove new technology, says CEO Craig Beddis.
Is C# Better Than Visual Basic
Even though there is less prominence of VB.NET community, but still we can say VB.NET is better than C#. 1. VB.NET uses implicit casting and makes it easier to code whereas in C# there are lot of casting and conversions needs to be done for the same lines of code. It is easier to Re-dimension arrays in VB than in C#.
Benefits Of Making Your Own Engine
Now, I wouldnt say that all this work was a waste of time in fact, I believe that there were many benefits to this endeavour:
If youve ever wanted to know what happens behind the scenes of a game engine, this is a great way to do it. We learned about the rendering pipeline, CPU to GPU bottleneck, multi-threading and how graphics are rendered on the GPU.
We learned a number of tips & tricks on how to optimize graphics systems for high frame rates. For example, how it is best to render all objects with the same model at once or even combine many objects into one and render only sub sections of the larger model techniques that are usually already implemented in most game engines and behind the scenes.
We learned some fundamental limitations with 3D rendering with real-time graphics pipelines like OpenGL and DirectX. For example, you must render transparent models from back to front and it is literally impossible to render intersecting transparent faces without subdividing them. .
Lastly, we learned which features were most important for us in a game engine these requirements would later influence our decision to use the Unity Engine.
Heres some screenshots of games that we started in our game engine, but were abandoned:
Minecart Game
A puzzle game for mobile requiring the user to solve puzzles before the mine cart reached them. Failing to solve the puzzle in time would cause the mine cart to crash as it travelled down each level.
Recommended Reading: What Is The Bad Omen Effect In Minecraft
Is Minecraft A Good Coding Introduction For Kids
The real key to teaching a child coding is finding the right motivation. Minecraft offers that as it combines a fun game they love, with a gentle introduction to coding functionality.
The way Minecraft engrosses kids can be used to help engage them to learn about something useful in a fun way that doesnt feel like work.
Minecraft can be enhanced by modifications that are outside strings of code that changes the game from the inside, such as generating monsters, giving players increased health or items and even telling the non-playable characters to do specific things.
These mods are usually downloaded through a third-party website, with players sharing their own mods among the online community for everyone to use, but you can easily create your own mods to enhance your own gaming experience exactly how you want it.
Because of the relative simplicity of Minecraft as a game, learning how to modify it is a good steppingstone to learning to manipulate and create code for other games and programs.
Minecraft: Dungeons Is Made In The Unreal Engine
Minecraft: Dungeons has been developed in a different engine to many of the other games in the franchise. In an interview with Mojang at E3 2019, creative director Mans Olsen confirmed to PCGamesN that the upcoming Minecraft RPG set to release in Spring 2020 uses the Unreal Engine.
The original block builder was developed in Java, but with the arrival of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, Mojang introduced the new Bedrock Engine. That engine was later ported to non-mobile platforms for the new Windows 10 edition of the game, as well as the Apple and Fire TV editions, and the Gear VR Edition. All of those titles are now simply referred to by Minecraft, rather than their individual editions.
Perhaps its not surprising that Dungeons is moving away from Minecrafts more traditional haunts. After all, the game doesnt borrow much from the block-building of its iconic namesake, but from a number of other classic PC games.
According to Olsen, games like Diablo, Torchlight, and even Left 4 Dead are said to have helped inspire Minecraft: Dungeons. Those titles bear little resemblance to the game that gives the new game its name, which means that the decision to use a new engine might make more sense than we first thought.
Theres no set release date for the game just yet, but we can expect to learn more over the next few months.
Ali Jones Deputy News Editor
Recommended Reading: How To Make A Wither Banner In Minecraft
How Aether Engine Is Changing Online Gaming
Aether Engine enables developers to build games without compromising their original vision. Its distributed load balancing technology ensures a scale invariant simulation and enables unlimited player connections from around the world.
Currently the complexity, fidelity and realism of games is held back by the availability of resources. In online gaming where the experience is often heavily dependent on interaction with other players this limitation is felt particularly acutely. Each player added exponentially increases the interactions, placing intense strain on the network topography and the underlying infrastructure. In an industry where performance and smooth gameplay are of vital importance, optimising the tradeoff is a perennial burden for developers and designers.
Most studios address this issue by segmenting their gameworlds into shards and run multiple instances alongside one another, each with its own set of computing resources and a predefined player limit. Sharding safeguards performance and reliability of the simulation, but it is an imperfect solution that imposes a number of design constraints and inhibits the social and collaborative nature of games.
What The Aether Engine Does
What makes the Aether Engine unique is the fact that it can actively enhance to match larger loads or drop to free up resources during smaller loads. This means isolated regions in an online game will operate the same as much more populated areas, due to the face that the Aether Engine is able to scale in order to generate exactly what each area needs to run smoothly.
This also means new titles that cannot predict how popular theyll become after launch, such as Fall Guys, wont encounter the issue of not having the needed resources to support those players, leading to long load times, lag, and misconnections.
The Aether Engine is able to remediate all these surges in real-time, so the number of players should not mess with the performance of the game overall. It is possible that the near future could mean even more massive MMO experiences, as well as much more complex Minecraft servers for players to enjoy.
Read Also: Minecraft Dragon Banner Designs
What Is Different About The Minecraft Education Edition
Minecraft Education Edition is different to both the base game of Minecraft and other Minecraft education softwares because it is officially developed by Mojang specifically for use within a classroom or otherwise educational setting.
This version of the game allows up to 30 people to play in the same game, without any servers needing to be set up. The creator of the game, such as a teacher, can fully control which blocks are available to other players and where they can and cannot place them, meaning that no one can build with different blocks before they are permitted to.
You can also limit the players to staying in one specific area of the map, which means that you dont have to stop the class in order to fetch back wandering children.
Lesson plans are also available to be downloaded, with different ones available depending on the age range of the class and what subjects you wish to teach .
Lesson plans that you have created yourself can also be uploaded for other teachers to see and use.
What Is Game Engine
A game engine is a software development environment mainly for creating video games. Other variations for this industry term are game architecture, game framework, or simply, game frame.
The main functionalities for game engines often include 2D or 3D graphics rendering, physics engine, animation, artificial intelligence, sound, and streaming among others.
Don’t Miss: Minecraft How To Pose Armor Stands
Why We Didnt Use Our Own Engine To Create Our First Game
After all this work, you might wonder why we dropped it all and moved to a commercial game engine. Although its not entirely true that we dropped the engine all together , we have moved most of our development to the Unity Engine. This decision is primarily due to two main problems: high overheads& cross compatibility.
High overheads / development time It took us over a year to create our game engine, and even then, it had only a fraction of the features available in an existing engine such as Unity, Unreal or CryEngine. Each time we wanted to add a new feature for a game, we had to create that feature from scratch. This meant determining where best to factor this into our stack. Once this new feature was finished, it was likely the other prototypes would need to be updated depending on how much rearranging had to be done. We found it took an unreasonable amount of time to get anything done.
Cross compatibility Although by the end of the development of our engine, we had support for Windows, Linux, MacOS and Android. We still lacked iOS and console support which would require an enormous amount of work to implement and quite a lot of maintenance as Java isnt supported natively, we would have to use at least two languages and different OpenGL wrappers for each. You can imagine as just two devs, this would take a big chunk of our time – drawing out the budget for our games twofold or more.
Did anything come from the Game Engine?
Most Popular Game Engines
Another demand that this niche has created is effective development tools for game developers and companies to use. Some are platform exclusive, and some are not. Game engine companies have continued to evolve, considering the recommended updates for games.
We owe it to these game engine companies for creating tools for developers to use whatever games we desire. Here are some of the most popular game engines globally.
Recommended Reading: What Is Coarse Dirt In Minecraft
Which Game Engine Do You Prefer
So, Since schoolwork started, I wanted to talk about game engines.Three in particular.The reason?Well, school has started, and i do have an intereset in at least game dev and design, but prolly won’t release anything lol.
rbxl said:i think godot is really promising, it is really a shame that alot of people dont know about it tho, its 100% free, no fees from your game’s income, weighs only a few mb, supports most platforms, hard-working devs making it the best they can with limited budget, open-source, and it STILL doesn’t have a bigger game made on it!and its my 666th post, yay
AlphaCloud said:I’m assuming you’d be talking about the most recent unreal engine release? If so unreal engine 5 is 1000% the choice, it’s simply the best 3d engine on the market and can do absolutely crazy things. Unreal 5 also has support for real time raytracing and a ton of other things. Nothing really competes with it in graphic quality. I’m surprised however why unity has so much votes though, unless people are picking it because they heard of it more or associate unreal engine with fortnite so don’t vote for it, idk?
Minecraft Uses The Aether Engine To Create A 1024 Player Server
Minecraft has a plethora of servers players can enjoy, with different levels of popularity. The developers even allow players to rent private servers known as Realms for themselves, but, as pretty much any massive multiplayer game, performance and reliability start to drop the more players there are in a single place.
If you consider starting areas for titles like Destiny 2, World of Warcraft, and many others, you may get reduced framerates, enhanced latency, and other performance issues. The Aether Engine by Hadean has the goal to address this problem with a unique solution on server technology.
Using the Aether Engine, Mojang Studios was able to develop a server that can effortlessly support up to 1.024 unique players in only three days, and that was without any previous experience with the Aether Engine or knowledge on how to steadily optimize for it.
Also Check: How To Plant Cocoa Beans In Minecraft
Is A Voxel Engine Appropriate For A Minecraft
Why does Minecraft use polygons to draw the world terrain instead of voxels? Would a voxel based rendering engine be appropriate for a fully destructible game world built out of cubes like Minecraft? Would it be more efficient than using polygons?
- \$\begingroup\$What makes you think Minecraft doesn’t use what is essentially a voxel representation of its world? I mean, what is your source for that statement? I always assumed it did.\$\endgroup\$ user1430May 5 ’11 at 16:06
- \$\begingroup\$minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Map – Specifically: “Minecraft uses a voxel system which is an incremental 3D grid in which each grid point holds data for a single block.”\$\endgroup\$May 5 ’11 at 16:15
- 5\$\begingroup\$While Minecraft does use a voxel representation of the world, it is rendered using polygons. My question was why he didn’t write a voxel renderer.\$\endgroup\$May 5 ’11 at 16:32
- \$\begingroup\$My mistake, I misunderstood\$\endgroup\$May 5 ’11 at 16:35
- 1\$\begingroup\$voxel rendering using ray casting on the gpu is totally possible with today gpus. With clever acc structs and clever memory usage you should be able to render incredible huge scene in realtime.\$\endgroup\$
Why does Minecraft use polygons to draw the world terrain instead of voxels?
Would a voxel based rendering engine be appropriate for a fully destructible game world built out of cubes like Minecraft?
Yes.
Would it be more efficient than using polygons?
Components Of A Game Engine
As suggested, this is a platform that is used to create different types of video games with varying programming languages. Its just like any other IDE but equipped with settings and configurations to allow seamless game development. This, therefore, leads us to what these components are.
Rendering Engine
Rendering engines or the graphic engine is a subcomponent of a game engine. It focuses on the 2D or 3D rendering of the games graphics. A good game engine should have a rendering engine that is compatible with different import formats.
Whether its 2D or 3D, having a graphic component that blends the cosmetics of a game well is essential.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence yields a significant impact on a games overall performance and logic. When creating a game, the AI engine automatically provides recommendations based on the players behavior in-game.
For example, a hero in a multiplayer battle arena game gets close to an enemy tower. The tower attacks the hero as a reaction when it is within range. Consequently, the hero loses some life points from the towers attack.
These logics are implemented by creating scripts that have been written and designed by expert AI software engineers. We could say that the scripts respond based on the game behavior in an overall setup.
Physics Engine
Sound Engine
Networking
Don’t Miss: How To Craft Wings In Minecraft
Is Minecraft Coding Easy For Kids To Understand
Coding languages often involve a lot of strings of words, numbers and letters, meaning that more complex coding involves a lot of typing. This can often seem daunting to children and to people who arent very confident with typing very quickly.
However, programs such as Minecraft: Education Edition offers a far more visual and less wordy way of learning to code as a beginner by using visual block coding. This involves individual blocks of pre-written code that can be dragged and dropped into the script, just like a puzzle piece.
These pre-written sections of code slot together to create fully working scripts, meaning that you dont have to worry about misspelling or mistyping the wrong code and not having your program work when you want it to.
This visual programming can then be used as a stepping stone to having you write out your own simple strings of code, which will soon become longer and longer and more complex as you grow more confident in your ability.
Additionally, Minecraft allows for coding to be implemented immediately so you can see exactly what you are doing to the game in real-time. This is far more useful than other games, which you would have to continually close and reopen repeatedly every time you made a change just to see the results.
Minecraft: Education Edition allows for the program and the game to be run simultaneously within the same program, allowing for players to hop between playing the game and coding a new modification very quickly.