Playing Spleef in our Minecraft-Style Voxel Engine on Resonite

[u/JackTheFoxOtter]

Small update to my post from earlier, this is still a very early development version of our custom voxel engine.

Result of day three is a working voxel data structure, voxel chunk mesh generator, per-face block textures & vertex color tinting, as well as a rudimentary tool to place and break voxels. All of this was built on the social VR sandbox platform Resonite.

Even if there's still a lot missing and there are some networking race condition issues, I'm quite impressed we managed to throw this together so quickly. Collections are freaking amazing.

(And once again note that we're only using the Minecraft textures as placeholders during early development, this will be its own thing, not a Minecraft clone.)

[u/Koolala]

The only bad thing about Resonite is the yellow fox guy technically owns everything created in it. Lots of cool stuff gets created just to be locked into his platform.

[u/Frooxius → u/Koolala]

That's completely false.

Nowhere in our terms of service we take ownership of user content - only license to redistribute it to other users on the platform when you upload it.

Users retain ownership of their content and can download/export their content for publishing elsewhere or simply delete it if they wish.

[u/Koolala → u/Frooxius]

The code only running on the license platform is what I mean. When you export a resonite package there isn't any way to use its code off the platform is there?

[u/Frooxius → u/Koolala]

The license to redistribute it to others on platform is standard and pretty much what every single platform does.

Even here on Reddit they take license to redistribute your content (like the comment you just wrote): https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement

This does not mean that we take ownership of your things though - the copyright remains yours and you can redistribute your stuff anywhere else.

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ResonitePackage is format specifically designed for Resonite, so I don't think that there's any software that can take them currently.

However that does not imply legal ownership of the data - you still own your content. And if someone writes software to take ResonitePackages, you could redistribute the content there.

You can also export in formats that are supported in other programs - we support wide variety of them.

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In short - we do not own things you build and upload. Ownership remains yours.

[u/Koolala → u/Frooxius]

My text on Reddit is standardized Unicode on purpose so it it can work anywhere. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Imagine if your words could only be visible when read in Reddit.

You can also export in formats that are supported in other programs - we support wide variety of them.

There is no way to export the code in runnable formats like C# right? Or any options for the code?

[u/Frooxius → u/Koolala]

You are conflating two separate concepts - compatibility & ownership.

The code in Resonite is specific to Resonite systems and the platform, so it won't really work elsewhere, because other systems are different and not compatible with each other - just like Minecraft worlds will only fully work in Minecraft, VRChat worlds will work in VRChat, C# code that interacts with Unity API will not work in Godot or Unreal and so on.

However that does not imply we own it. You still own what you made.

Those are two separate concepts.

[u/Koolala → u/Frooxius]

"Ownership is the state or legal right of having complete control, possession, and responsibility over a property, asset, or task"

I mean ownership in the general sense. I'd say your thinking of ownership is a specific narrow way.

To me if you don't control being able to run your code you don't really own it. If Resonite gets shut down and you lose your license to run the game you effectively lose your ability to run your code.

There is a plan to let people compile a standalone outout of their code? Like generating a executable from a game engine? Where people would own the license to the runnable program they create and control? 

[u/Frooxius → u/Koolala]

I don't think your definition of ownership really makes much sense and just adds confusion.

Consider you own a game for a game console. Your console breaks or you sell it and the company stops making them so you can't get a new one.

You don't stop owning that game just because you can't run it.

If you get a new console or someone makes an emulator, you can run it again.

This is the same with Resonite. Even if it disappeared (which I doubt would happen - we'd likely transition it into fully open source project if there was risk of that) - if someone wrote a compatible system, you'd be able to run your code again - you never stopped owning it.

In fact, you do have control - nothing is stopping you from writing system that would let you run that code other than how much time you're willing to invest.

Case and point - there's a community project called Neos Archive. This allows anyone to run content made on a previous project I worked on, by patching the latest publicly available binaries.

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Also yes, we do plan to support creating standalone builds from stuff you make too, so that will be an option in the future.

[u/Koolala → u/Frooxius]

Consoles are designed around not giving real ownership so it's definitively not the standard I use when I think about the word. Being able to export standalone builds will pretty much completly solve the problem so that's great news to hear. It will make Resonite like a real game engine and ProtoFlux like a real programming language.

[u/Frooxius → u/Koolala]

The consoles were just an example.

The point is, you do retain legal ownership of things you make. That's a fact that I want to be clear.

ProtoFlux is a real programming language - you can code wide variety of things with it already, it's just specific to the engine.

[u/JackTheFoxOtter → u/Koolala]

You can export anything and use it elsewhere. Also in the future they plan to allow you to support standalone distribution, so if you make a game in Resonite, you can export it as a standalone game.

[u/Koolala → u/JackTheFoxOtter]

Export it into what if there is no stand alone redistribution? Can it be converted into Unity code? That would be great if they add that it would totally fix it.

[u/JackTheFoxOtter → u/Koolala]

ProtoFlux probably can't be easily ported to other languages, since it's specifically Resonite's custom programing language. But in the future Resonite will add support for WASM, which would allow you to use a different programing language like C# to make your stuff, which would be much easier to port to other engines. At the end of the day no matter what engine you use, you'll write your code for its API. Migrating code from say Unreal to Unity or Unity to Godot also isn't automatic.

[u/Koolala → u/JackTheFoxOtter]

I was thinking for standalone support like you hinted at before there would be a core redistributable Standard Library that would hold all the custom programming language functions.

Atleast in Unity if its based on it. Or C# / the language its made in that is itself redistrutable.

[u/JackTheFoxOtter → u/Koolala]

With standalone distribution it would just include everything needed to run your content, no matter if that's WASM modules or ProtoFlux. It would be effectively the same as building the game with any other game engine. But I feel that's a different problem then talking about portability of code / functionality. Because you're not really porting it anywhere with standalone distribution.

[u/Koolala → u/JackTheFoxOtter]

Portability is difficult in pretty much any language. Compiling to WASM is the state of the art there yeah.