Review other forks of Craft and integrate the good stuff

[satoshinm]

https://github.com/fogleman/Craft/network shows 612 forks, building on fogleman's original work, is there any which is the latest and greatest worth rebuilding on instead? Or are there forks or pull requests https://github.com/fogleman/Craft/pulls adding new features or fixes worth merging? Review all that is out there.

[satoshinm]

From fogleman/Craft#112 (comment), Konstructs looks to be the most developed fork, though it is no longer a fork, being rewritten in C++, still quite a full-featured client: https://github.com/konstructs/client - restart on top of it?

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Konstructs is intriguing, their approach is to make the client very thin and push as much game logic to the server as possible. Trying out their native binaries, this has some noticeable impacts: when I broke a block (they already have block hardness #17, nice), the breaking animation lagged because of slow Internet connection. A server is required to play. The advantage of being able to use the same client for many servers is not necessarily a strength when compiling to emscripten and targeting the web, since any server could ship its own custom client. So I'm not sure it is a good fit for this project (web-based client), at least as-is. Even though it has inventory #18 and other features, including a commendable plugin system: http://www.konstructs.org/plugins/ - 10 plugins listed, not bad. Start with it as a base, then add client-side performance enhancements on top? Could be a viable beginning.

Testing with similar changes against Craft for emscripten (fogleman/Craft@2d93dfd - but changing Konstructs and nanogui to use emscripten's glfw instead of its own), hits an error "Could NOT find ZLIB", required by lib/CMakeLists.txt. Requires zlib for deflate compression of block data, cross-compile with emcc. zlib port for emscripten? https://github.com/hachque-Emscripten/zlib-1.2.5 or newer: https://github.com/emscripten-ports/zlib - see http://kripken.github.io/emscripten-site/docs/compiling/Building-Projects.html#emscripten-ports

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Got konstructs to compile under emscripten, using port of zlib and modified nanogui submodule:

• https://github.com/satoshinm/konstructs-client/tree/emscripten
• https://github.com/satoshinm/nanogui/tree/emscripten

However now we run into a shader incompatibility. Compare with commit to Craft: fogleman/Craft@601a5c3 - but Konstructs uses #version 330, so under WebGL it fails:

Shader shader/vert error:
ERROR: 0:1: 'core' : unexpected token 
ERROR: 0:8: 'in' : storage qualifier supported in GLSL ES 3.00 and above only  
ERROR: 0:9: 'in' : storage qualifier supported in GLSL ES 3.00 and above only  
ERROR: 0:10: 'out' : storage qualifier supported in GLSL ES 3.00 and above only  
ERROR: 0:11: 'out' : storage qualifier supported in GLSL ES 3.00 and above only  

and under native, the #version directive is required. And cannot add #ifdef __EMSCRIPTEN__ since #version must be very first statement, according to the native error message. Started backporting but there is significant usage of new GLSL features not present in WebGL, such as bitmasks, significant effort would be needed to get it to a functional state. There is a lot of "cleverness"/modern features or abstracted programming in Konstructs and its major dependency Nanogui impeding porting, abandoning for now, Craft is a more tractable base. Revisit after WebGL 2 (OpenGL ES 3.0)?

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A brief comparison of https://github.com/fogleman/Craft vs https://github.com/konstructs/client:

Craft	Konstructs
C	C++
GLSL 120	GLSL 330
raw GL	Nanogui
Client/server	Client+server
Single/multiplayer	Multiplayer only
Thick client	Thin client
Small	Bigger

[satoshinm]

Back to Craft, forks:

• https://github.com/libretro/Craft - 216 commits ahead, libretro is "A crossplatform application API", see also RetroArch "program with which you can play many emulators and games" ported to libretro API - how are they using Craft?
• https://github.com/zeliard/Craft/ - 7 ahead but 204 behind?
• https://github.com/DanielOaks/Craft - 71 ahead, 6 behind, adds Lua and SGLib deps, using Lua for scripting - interesting for sure, but for the web extending with JavaScript In-game extensibility at runtime using JavaScript and/or TypeScript #24 may be a better match
• https://github.com/cjdell/Craft/ - 1 ahead, 4 behind "Works in Emscripten" - wow, ahead of me I didn't see this (2015). Review the differences see how their approach compares, at first glance they have a custom Makefile instead of cmake, and separate glsl's for webgl instead of running on both, and lots of commenting-out; similar
• https://github.com/nathanial/VGK - 24 commits ahead, C++, looks like some good changes, what is VGK?
• https://github.com/Pugduddly/Mine/ - just a rename to "Mine"
• https://github.com/lowagner/home - 66 ahead, called a "complicated fork", adds some nice enhancements, change colors, stair fixes
• https://github.com/louisstow/EmCraft/commits/master - tweaks + also adds Emscripten! (2015) albeit a bigger commit, compare and contrast it
• https://github.com/zerotri/Craft/commits/master - reorganization, but before that, adds "cvars", seems good for configurability
• https://github.com/crazy2be/Craft/commits/master - moved meshing code to new file, cleaner
• https://github.com/wetstreet/Craft - 2 commits, added a Visual Studio project
• https://github.com/twetzel59/CraftNG - 30 commits ahead as of 2017/05/07, worldgen, biomes, inventory
  ... can I get the list of forks by most number of commits?

[satoshinm]

Merged all open Craft pull requests at https://github.com/fogleman/Craft/pulls - except for fogleman/Craft#146 "Implement a lua scripting api", which the contributor says is not ready to merge, and Lua may not necessarily be the best scripting language choice for a game embedded in the web browser (JavaScript? #24 In-game extensibility at runtime using JavaScript )

[satoshinm]

fogleman/Craft#112 has some discussion..
fogleman/Craft#138 especially fogleman/Craft#138 (comment) should be considered. DanielOaks fork, not to keen on Lua but investigate other changes:

• https://github.com/Seegras/Craft - 810 commits, even with DanielOaks:dynamic_stuff.
• https://github.com/DanielOaks/Craft - 71 commits ahead, 10 behind fogleman:master

[DanielOaks]

Yo, on my fork the main commits you're interested in if you're not keen for the Lua are probably:

• f5a663...580ce7 - merging dynamic moving clouds, some other random changes
• 268cd - better whitespace for clouds
• 35174 - "fixing an off-by-one error"
• 0d65a - fixing a compilation error with the clouds
• b2e20 - "fixing another off-by-one error"

I dunno whether those off-by-one error commits were just due to API stuff I changed or bugs upstream as well but yeah, hopefully that pulls out the more-useful stuff. Particularly for that first range, keep an eye on the list of commits since there's a bunch of dynamic-clouds stuff, and some other various changes merged too. Didn't keep up with Seegras' changes further than that so ye definitely good to take a look on theirs as well.

If I remember correctly, the world generation change commit in that first linked set of differences was pretty interesting.

Honestly, my fork was mostly merging a bunch of existing relatively-sane-looking extensions in various forks and then doing the API stuff on top of that, so I'm not sure how much of what's in mine you'd have already picked up otherwise. If I remember correctly, the dynamic clouds looked really nice but might've also been a bit heavier on CPU/GPU than I'd like.

[DanielOaks]

Another interesting thing I was playing with was allowing the API to add blocks dynamically (i.e. you load a plugin and it makes a new type of block). I don't remember exactly how it went but it might be good to take a quick look at this branch if you're interested in doing something similar. iirc this is mostly changes in the db and such to help allow this sort of feature: DanielOaks:dynamic-db-blocks

[satoshinm]

Dynamic clouds would be pretty cool to differentiate the clouds from static blocks. Adding blocks dynamically would be sweet for #24 In-game extensibility at runtime using JavaScript and/or TypeScript

[satoshinm]

Just saw this other recent fork, CraftNG: https://github.com/twetzel59/CraftNG - 30 commits ahead, lots of cool stuff planned, already has worldgen improvements, biomes with sky tint, and expanded hud for inventory:

[satoshinm]

Not a fork of Craft, but in a similar vein: ThinkMap, https://www.spigotmc.org/resources/thinkmap.413/ https://github.com/thinkofname/ThinkMap. Required some changes to update, pushed here: https://github.com/satoshinm/ThinkMap - also a Bukkit plugin, with a WebGL frontend, except it is written in Java compiled using GWT down to JavaScript. In my testing it seemed to be a lot slower than WebAssembly/asm.js NetCraft although there may be some other issues causing it (not known, asked on https://www.spigotmc.org/threads/thinkmap.13782/page-7#post-2442256). Good news is that it supports a ton of blocks, including with sophisticated models. And compact chunk updates: #136 - could be useful for reference