THIS GAME IS IN BETA! you may find a few bugs... but its still awesome.

October 25, 2010 9:32 AM

N8* Neverdaunt is a dream like world of floating Islands and falling stars where nearly anything can happen. N8* is an online massively multiplayer virtual sandbox, A place to play, make friends, be creative and competitive.
Windows, .Net 2.0 required.
Tip of the hat to Jake. Hi, Jake!
posted by boo_radley (26 comments total)

that looks confusing.
posted by empath at 9:35 AM on October 25, 2010

The giant snowman sold me.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:37 AM on October 25, 2010

Minecraft + Second Life?
posted by OverlappingElvis at 9:39 AM on October 25, 2010

I flagged this as advertorial before looking at the poster's username. Sorry!
posted by LSK at 9:40 AM on October 25, 2010

Why was the flying man carrying a shark? And why did he blow up that tower?
posted by Joe Beese at 9:40 AM on October 25, 2010

Why was the flying man carrying a shark? And why did he blow up that tower?

Insurance scam.
posted by shakespeherian at 9:41 AM on October 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Natestrix? Why would you name a game that?
posted by TwelveTwo at 9:43 AM on October 25, 2010 [2 favorites]

OverlappingElvis: "Minecraft + Second Life?"

That's kind of the vibe I get from it. I love the minecraft, but I'm chafing waiting for the boo update. I like that there seems to be a bit more structure in the overview than what's in minecraft right now -- people own cells that can be upgraded and modified, there's a town center, the avatar mods are more robust, etc. The fact that there's a working wire system (redstone in minecraft) is just icing on the cake.

Joe Beese: "And why did he blow up that tower?"

How else would you rescue the princess? You don't rescue princesses by not blowing up towers. What kind of plumber are you?
posted by boo_radley at 9:49 AM on October 25, 2010

That looks like a lot of fun, but I'm running Mac OS X. Hmm. Perhaps I'll set up Parallels or Fusion.
posted by defenestration at 9:51 AM on October 25, 2010

I was happy to see the Adventure duck-dragons running amuck.
posted by swift at 9:54 AM on October 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Judging by the trailer, the draw distance looks atrocious. I may try this out; curious as to how well the contruction system is executed, especially in 3rd-person.
posted by Hargrimm at 10:13 AM on October 25, 2010

I wouldn't complain if this were just a game written for the PC - but this is a "massively" multiplayer game that's played over the internet and yet there isn't any recognition anywhere on site that non-Windows computers even exist - even the download page doesn't say, "Windows only" but mentions ".net" blah, which I assure you would not be understood by 80% of my smart but non-technical friends as "Windows only".

This is 2010. I'm a single-man shop and I yet do cross-platform development for delivery on Mac and PC (and it's DSP stuff, pretty CPU intensive) - it isn't rocket science! And looking at the screen shots, this is hardly state-of-the-art.

And if they can't get it together to make a Mac version, what are the chances that they can make a mobile app out of it? Since they're probably writing in C# and .net, I can tell you that the chances are zero you'll ever see this on anything other than Windows and (hahahaha!) Windows mobile.

(And if they're successful, they're going to have to do it all with .net servers - which have about ten times the total cost of ownership of open source servers...)
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 10:23 AM on October 25, 2010

You may be extrapolating desires that the developers aren't interested in.
posted by boo_radley at 10:31 AM on October 25, 2010 [3 favorites]

boo_radley: You may be extrapolating desires that the developers aren't interested in.

Like having me buy their Minecraft knock-off.
posted by paisley henosis at 10:49 AM on October 25, 2010

> You may be extrapolating desires that the developers aren't interested in.

Oh, I don't think they're interested in showing considering to people who don't run Windows, not that this speaks well of them, but it's hard to believe that one of their desires isn't "success" in some form or other.

Not clearly putting "For Windows only" on the download page is just foolish. God knows how many Mac people will download it and each of these is a waste of everyone's time and bandwidth.
posted by lupus_yonderboy at 12:01 PM on October 25, 2010

Like having me buy their Minecraft knock-off.

Yeah, I've been wondering how long it'd be before we saw this. Notch has made himself a decent little chunk of cash and I'm sure that other developers will be wanting a chunk of that.

Having said that, Neverdaunt certainly looks fully-featured.
posted by lekvar at 12:15 PM on October 25, 2010

I'm not sure you can say that neverdaunt is a minecraft knockoff - the UI is different, the models are different and most importantly the mechanics are different -- look through the video again and you won't find people stripmining mountainsides for dirt cubes. It seems like there's more goals and objectives built into the game than Minecraft.

On provenance: Minecraft came from zachtronic's excellent infiniminer (another .net project, I note in passing), which begat a few "I can't believe it's not infiniminer!" clones before notch hit paydirt with his particular iteration. Take a look at manic digger and cubelands to see games that really are clones of Minecraft/ infiniminer.
posted by boo_radley at 12:39 PM on October 25, 2010

I quite agree, and I meant to say as much in my original comment, but I think my mind got ahead of my fingers. I meant my comment to be more general.
posted by lekvar at 12:45 PM on October 25, 2010

The color picker is 3 separate RGB sliders. While quaint, this is not very user intuitive.

I'd like to play a bit more. Kind of reminds me of Second Life, without the insane amounts of hype.
posted by hellojed at 1:07 PM on October 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Not clearly putting "For Windows only" on the download page is just foolish.

Isn't the one installer and EXE file a pretty big clue?
posted by mrgrimm at 1:32 PM on October 25, 2010 [1 favorite]

Since they're probably writing in C# and .net, I can tell you that the chances are zero you'll ever see this on anything other than Windows and (hahahaha!) Windows mobile.

Not true; there's the Mono Project, a cross-platform implementation of C#, the .NET frameworks, and several other components of .NET, and cross-platform apps based on it like Tomboy which is installed by default in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based Linux distros.

Which makes it even worse that these guys aren't publicizing the Windows-only nature of the app.
posted by XMLicious at 1:35 PM on October 25, 2010

ATTENTION CERTAIN USERS: THIS GAME IS IN BETA. DO NOT PURCHASE IT IF YOU EXPECT PERFECTION.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:51 PM on October 25, 2010

It, well... it looks kind of like MS Paint in 3D, with multi-player and physics. By which I mean, I think the high concept is cool, but it looks really, really ugly. I can appreciate the MS Paint aesthetic, what with Hyperbole and a Half, but this is horrible. Minecraft has the visual advantage of having just a few block types that actually look good when used together. So, yeah, I guess if they can develop a palette that doesn't look like unicorn barf, I might have a go. On the Windows machine I never use. Right, nevermind.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:55 PM on October 25, 2010

I met the guy who created this at PAX East. He's been working on this long before MInecraft blew up across the internet, so any comparisons about it being a knock-off are superficial. Also, it's written in VB.NET, not C#. If I had a Windows machine I'd have tried it out by now, but I guess it's not meant to be. It sounded like the author had some novel ideas about putting programmability into the hands of the players, but I have no clue how much of this has been realized yet.
posted by papersnprayers at 9:13 PM on October 25, 2010

This makes me wish that Lego would build an MMO.
posted by vertigo25 at 9:37 AM on November 2, 2010

Wish granted.

Spoiler: It's terrible.
posted by empath at 9:40 AM on November 2, 2010