I'm Notch should sue. YOUTUBE - this game is the worst rip-off of all time they just took the best sandbox game of all time and made it look a little more realistic! Notch sold out and has no clame to the game rights anymore. Notch even stated during developement of MC he took the idea from InfiniMiner an open source game so others could build off of it.
In tribute to the maker of IM Notch kept his game open source as well so modders could build onto it and make mods for it. FortressCraft had started its developement before MC, the only difference is MC got off the ground quicker to become the mainstream IDEA of what voxel sandbox games are compaired too. Just saying someone should sue for taking an IDEA and building off of it is like saying the inventor the automobile's family should sue all the competing vehicle companies today for taking and building off of his idea.
I still think it's important that people are allowed and able to do things like that, but it's hardly graceful. Sawkins responded with an open letter , pointing out that Minecraft itself was, in turn, heavily influenced by Infiniminer, an open source sand box building game written by indie coder Zachary Barth in He also claimed that updates to FortressCraft were moving it ever further away from its origins as a 'me too' experiment.
But the attacks kept coming and Sawkins kept batting them away. Mojang business chief, Daniel Kaplan popped up on Kotaku stating, ""I'm really bored by the clones.
They don't bring anything new to the table which is really sad. Whenever FortressCraft got press coverage, the comments sections would be jammed with livid Minecraftians tossing insults; and Sawkins would be there chucking them right back.
His argument has always been that the construction sim is a genre and that FortressCraft brings enough of its own character to differentiate it from Notch's game.
Fans point out the more detailed visuals, as well as the growing list of updated features including multiplayer mini-games, teleporters, weapons, and But the key differentiation has always been the ability in FortressCraft to craft personalised animating custom blocks, allowing extremely intricate modelling.
For example, I built two horses using detail blocks in FortressCraft, and I was able to carve each 1m block to match the fine features of the animal.
If I had built them in Minecraft, I would have had to choose whether to build them the right size, but have them look like dinner tables, or include the detail, but build horses 78 feet tall. Such things are just not possible in Minecraft in meaningful detail, on a rational scale, and at a reasonable draw distance.
The whole argument takes us back to the early days of the arcade — how much was Galaxians a clone of Space Invaders, for example? The lines between replication and iteration are blurred, and sometimes major brands like Minecraft, Worms and Angry Birds, emerge from a primordial soup of very similar, earlier titles, not marketed or polished well enough to succeed.
Now there is an official version of Minecraft on the Xbox , which is, of course, selling incredibly well. But the thing is, FortressCraft is still doing well too. It is now among only a handful of Xbox digital downloads to shift over one million copies. The community has fluctuated, but it remains dedicated and creative. Every one of the builds in those videos amazed me. From massive cathedrals to dueling dragons that stretched to the height of the world Whatever the case, the titles will soon be competing again.
Sawkins and his small team of just three full-time staff and a handful of art freelancers, are working on a PC version of FortressCraft, using the popular indie middleware, Unity3D to re-write the world and rendering engine. You take an object, you drag it somewhere, you attach physics to it, you say, 'oh, if only it blurred', and in one click you have blur.
It does all of the boring grunt work for you. You don't have to worry about technology, you can just get on with the game. With the shadows, for example; we could have done a full cascaded shadow system in XNA but that would have been six months of my life. Here, I click the button marked 'cascaded shadows'. Now, if you build a tall tower, it will cast a shadow hundreds of metres across the landscape.
It looks amazing. The key aim of the new version is to add more flexibility and variety to the player's palette. Because it's not our purpose to judge on motive.
That's not why we blocked shopping advice. We blocked shopping advice to stop just telling people what to buy. Giving people information to make an educated decision, that's what we're capable of doing, and how we can approach these. Although these questions can be used as a basis for people to form an opinion on whether to play one game or another, the answers they elicit or receive don't actually suggest people which one game to get — unless one game is objectively worse than the other, at least in the answerer's mind.
The suggestion wrt shopping recommendation is to ask how to fish instead, but how can you do that without actually playing both games in the first place? Clearly the solution does not apply to these questions because they are not shopping recommendation questions in the first place.
As Drake mentioned , they can solve the practical problem of transitioning from one game to the other with the right mindset. Approaching a game, especially a DOTA-alike game, with the right mindset can make or break it. I see tremendous value in such questions. The third point is really my only worry. I do not want to encourage more "X vs Y" questions than the community can adequately provide answers to.
In a way, they would be perhaps more appropriate as blog posts: you should only bring the question to the table if you actually have enough of an answer for it. At least show you've tasted one of the games you're asking about — or both, if they're free! I think that's a reasonable burden on the asker given the ask once, read many principle , but I'm not so sure about how practical it is to close a question while allowing another that's essentially the same, only better worded.
I only argued against closing because, at the time, the only close vote was "this question will likely solicit opinion, debate, arguments". Sure, those are issues questions must deal with, but I maintain that there are non-opinion answers to the question. The question has other problems. I agree that the question needs work before if! This question is ambiguous, vague, incomplete, overly broad , or rhetorical and cannot be reasonably answered in its current form.
I assume that would be more credible, since it is not comparing competing franchises, but the question has the same value and relevance as any of the ones listed here. Judging the intent of people who are asking questions is impossible, and I can think of many reasons why these comparison questions have value other than asking for a recommendation. Not to mention the fact that what these are actually asking for is information about both, presumably, so they can make an informed decision on their own.
That seems to be in the spirit of SE. Looking at the League of Legends tag, for instance, I found the following questions that share the same issues, but are not closed, I guess because the people voting to close find them interesting, or asked the questions: First thing to learn when beginning League of Legends How do I ward properly in League of Legends?
What are the pros and cons of flat vs. What makes a champion squishy? I would have flagged it for closure if it had been open when I saw it. Aside from it actually needing to read "What are the differences between FortressCraft and Minecraft?
What I would want to see from it is what your excerpts suggest: some effort to set up a meaningful question, and a problem to be resolved that is not "Tell me why I should play one instead of the other.
Since this question has gotten new life in trying to come up with a general policy about comparison questions, I wanted to clarify I'm not suggesting that every single question that hopes to compare two games is bad. If the question about FortressCraft and Minecraft was something like:. I'm familiar with Minecraft's crafting system, where the most used tools have durability to prevent resource inflation: how does FortressCraft incorporate scarcity when it comes to resource allocation?
That'd be fine: it asks something specific and reasonably scoped about two games, solves a specific problem, and can be definitively answered.
What makes a comparison question not constructive is when it's asking for a broad comparison between two games without any context:. While one can argue that they may be shopping recommendations or game recommendations, I think that characterization can be avoided: they're too broad, and they invite low quality tack-on answers and copy-cat questions.
While Jeff makes a good point that they can sometimes lead to stellar answers, I think that's mostly accidental, and most don't. Basic background and contextual information like that can make a broad, non-constructive comparison question into one that can elucidate the subtle differences between similar games and demonstrate real expertise. But if a question fails to provide that, it's a Gorilla vs. Shark problem and should be closed unless there's something incredibly noteworthy about the answers.
We have several identical questions on this site, which I shall post below. Either they should be closed which I think they should be , or Difference between Minecraft and FortressCraft? As far as I'm concerned they should be closed, since the only value these questions have is to help a user decide between which two games to buy, which is a game recommendation, something which is not allowed on the site.
What are the biggest gameplay differences between Lips and Singstar? What are the similarities and differences between Sim City and CityVille? Rift vs World of Warcraft. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What's the difference between FortressCraft and Minecraft? Who cares? Ask Question. Asked 10 years, 1 month ago. Active 9 years, 7 months ago.
Viewed times. To save you the trouble of having to click on the link, I'll copy the entire question here: What is the difference between FortressCraft and Minecraft?
Yet it's still open, with the reasons being: I disagree - there are real, demonstrable answers to this question.
That way lies madness it opens the door for equally absurd questions like: What's the difference between Super Mario Land and Sonic the Hedgehog? What's the difference between Half-Life and Quake? What's the difference between Dragon Age and Final Fantasy? As "Gorilla vs. Shark" concludes: The asker must contribute a bit more work beyond the title, too. Community Bot 1. I think the onus is on the asker to scope it down and explain what they want in some detail, but there's still the "amazing answer turns lead question into gold" possibility, as you see above.
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