What we’ve got here is a “Minecraft-Like Infinite Voxel World” built in Unreal Engine 4. In layman’s terms, it’s a very pretty but limited Minecraft demo running in a triple-A game engine.
John Alcatraz, the creator, showcased his Infinite Voxel World on the UE forums last week, and shared it yesterday on r/minecraft. As he explains, the project didn’t start out as a Minecraft tribute:
While it’s looking similar to Minecraft, my intention was not to create a game similar to Minecraft, but just to see how easy it is to make a voxel based game with good performance using Blueprints only in Unreal Engine 4. The Minecraft look then later came when I searched for textures, and actually the whole internet is filled with public domain texture packs for Minecraft. So it was the best way for me to get textures for a voxel based project, since I am no artist. And let’s be honest, it does not look bad like this, having the graphical power of UE4 combined with the pixel look of textures which were intended to be used in Minecraft.
Essentially the demo behaves like a very basic version of Minecraft. You generate a world using a seed, and then, you can dig:
Mine:
Go down to bedrock level:
Build a crappy cobblestone fort:
Chop wood:
Build a crappy wooden hut:
And so on. You can collect a few types of blocks and build with them, but there isn’t any crafting involved, and there’s no biomes to explore, resources to gather, mobs to hunt, or treasure to loot.
Gameplay-wise you’d get a lot more out of proper Minecraft with shader modsinstalled, of course. Still, it’s a pretty impressive proof of concept, and a lot more interactive than your average UE4 demo. Check it out in motion:
Or, if you want, you can grab the demo through the link in the video’s description.
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