FortressCraft

FortressCraft has fought accusations of plagiarism to become the most successful title on the Xbox Live indie games portal. Now it is coming to PC where the rivalry with Minecraft is really set to explode.

FortressCraft: coming soon to PC, complete with worlds that are a thousand light years across

Like many success stories of the digital era, FortressCraft started out because someone on the internet said it couldn't be done. Three years ago, while Adam Sawkins was working at Activision's Freestyle Games studio, he had the idea for a 3D version of the brilliant but visually inaccessible fantasy simulation, Dwarf Fortress. He spent his evenings tinkering on the project, naming it DiggersWorld and slowly building an engine. But there was a problem: he just couldn't get it to render the graphics quickly enough.

Then something important happened. "I was playing Minecraft with a friend of mine, and he asked how the game's rendering worked," he recalls. "I explained about voxels, the lighting, the optimal way that facets are culled, and a little light went on in my head; I realised I could use voxels to make DiggersWorld run faster." Voxels, or volumetric pixels, are essentially building blocks from which 3D models can be calculated and displayed – they have been used for years in games, especially to create large terrains, and since the arrival of Minecraft they are back in vogue.

So back in 2011, Sawkins was reminded about voxels, opening a new avenue for his DiggersWorld project. "I didn't think much further on that until I came across a thread on the Minecraft forum with the header, 'BRING MINECRAFT TO THE XBOX360'," says Sawkins. "It was full of people saying that it wasn't possible to get a Minecraft-style game working on the console. I posted saying that it was, but you'd have to do it all multi-threaded, and take advantage of the unified memory architecture on the Xbox. But I was rebutted with the phrase, 'Lol noob, you know nothing'".

To him this wasn't a casual putdown, it was a challenge. Sawkins is an industry veteran, a self-taught coder who's worked at a series of studios, from Codemasters to Criterion. Like most programming geeks, he says, he's fascinated by maths-based tasks that involve stuff like ray-tracing and six-degrees-of-freedom movement. To him, bringing a Minecraft game to the Xbox seemed like an intriguing puzzle. So instead of just shrugging off the abuse, he spent the next three days working on a prototype construction sim, written using XNA, a set of tools designed by Microsoft to help indie coders create games for the Xbox 360. His project had basic voxel rendering, avatar rendering, networking… but when he posted some screenshots on the thread, he was immediately confronted with a predictable response: "FAKE AND GAY".

"I had to make a video on my phone," says Sawkins. "And then I uploaded it – just to get people to believe that I actually had it running. So to sum up; I wrote FortressCraft to prove someone wrong."

The Clone wars

This combative edge has stayed with the project throughout its lifespan. As a construction game that spreads out over a procedurally generated landscape, the influence of Minecraft is obvious – it's there in the title after all. And it's there in the very DNA of the game code: both FortressCraft and Minecraft use 3D Perlin noise techniques (invented by Ken Perlin for the movie Tron) to construct their vast randomised worlds.

But the exact extent of this creative debt has been furiously debated ever since. Released on the Xbox 360's Indie Games portal in April 2011, FortressCraft was an immediate and unprecedented hit, shifting over 30,000 downloads in the space of 24 hours. Very quickly, however, there were claims that FortressCraft only sold well because it was effectively Minecraft on a console before you could actually buy Minecraft on a console. Until the release of an Xbox 360 version in May 2012, Mojang's cult smash was available only on PC, Mac and mobile. Console gamers knew about it – they just couldn't play it. FortressCraft got in at the right time, with a solid feature set and a name that signaled its inspiration.

The backlash, however, was furious and sustained. As FortressCraft gained in popularity its website and forums began to attract legions of Minecraft fans who accused Sawkins of effectively ripping off Mojang's game. Eventually, even Markus "Notch" Persson, the affable creator of Minecraft got involved. In a July 2011 interview with tech site Ars Technica, he said, "FortressCraft is an obvious attempt to just take something popular and clone it as closely as possible. 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 2009. He also claimed that updates to FortressCraft were moving it ever further away from its origins as a 'me too' experiment. "Whereas the vast majority of Minecraft clones out there begin by emulating Minecraft's blocky, retro style, I tried as hard as possible to bring the Voxgame kicking and screaming into the modern, shader-driven era," he wrote. "With parallax mapping, thick vegetation, multiple coloured light sources, refraction and reflection, as well as beautiful, highly-detailed tools; I find the phrase 'as closely as possible' extremely hard to swallow."

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." Sawkins replied via Eurogamer, listing the differences between the games, with the help of charts and comparative screenshots. 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.

Block-rocking treats

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... trampolines. But the key differentiation has always been the ability in FortressCraft to craft personalised animating custom blocks, allowing extremely intricate modelling. "It's by far my favorite creative feature," says veteran fan, Laura Hatton. "These blocks greatly multiply the level of visual detail that I can achieve, without having to resort to an absurd scale. 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.

"I also enjoy seeing the amazing ways people employ these mechanics in their own builds. There is a special kind of joy to be had in joining a world created by someone named 'xXx_BloodNGuts93_xXx' and finding a train of teddy bears careening through gently swaying palm trees as a flock of hungry halibut circles menacingly overhead. Such things are just not possible in Minecraft in meaningful detail, on a rational scale, and at a reasonable draw distance."

Birth of a genre

The whole argument takes us back to the early days of the arcade – how much was Galaxians a clone of Space Invaders, for example? And more recently, what is the relationship of Street Fighter to Karate Champ, Unreal to Quake, or Saints Row to Grand Theft Auto? 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 360, 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. "The possibilities with the custom blocks are truly limitless and open the door for future gameplay unlike anything I've seen before," says FortressCraft community moderator Steve Biedrzycki. "A face-off was held about a year ago that featured duels between the best FortressCraft builders. Every one of the builds in those videos amazed me. From massive cathedrals to dueling dragons that stretched to the height of the world..."

Bringing unity

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. "We started using it in November," he says. "They released version four and I just thought, I'll have a look, a little play, and after a few hours I was like, I'm never going back to XNA! 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.

"That's always been one of the bugbears of XNA; if you wanted anything you had to do it yourself. 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. "We've learned what people want, they just want to make things," says Sawkins. "So now we're focusing almost entirely on the Creative Mode. It's not about challenges, it's not about making things difficult for the player,or requiring them to be particularly agile, it's just a box of Lego that you can play with forever."

Players can automatically create spheres, blocks and cylinders up to an 128 metres in size ("I'm aiming for larger," says Sawkins, "but the sheer volume of data becomes crazy!"). Those can be in any material, and either hollow or solid. He shows me how quick it is to generate a huge half-sphere that looms over the landscape like some alien bio-dome. "One experienced builder saw this and said it would have taken him two days to build it in the Xbox version of FortressCraft. You can do it in ten seconds here. It's about empowering the players, not getting in their way. A lot of the Minecraft worlds you've seen have taken thousands of hours; I don't think that's fair - especially when a lot of it is grunt work. This is about allowing people who only have a few hours each evening to do something incredible."

The old copy/paste system, which allows players to copy sections of the map and put them elsewhere has also been updated. It's possible to flip, rotate and scale the object, like a Photoshop image, or save it as a Schematic, which can then be used in subsequent worlds, or shared online with other players. These Schematics, as well as any of the randomly generated objects in the game world, including archways, towers and trees, can all be re-skinned en masse. "So if you're doing a Mario-themed world, you can replace all the trees with mushrooms and all the towers with pipes," says Sawkins. "Then, when you recreate the world, it will automatically theme itself to Mario. People can create unique worlds without plowing in a million hours to generate it all by hand."

Naturally, there has been a visual overhaul too. When I last saw the game it was running on Adam's beast of a PC at the EToo event in London and it looked wonderful. "We've got depth-of-field effects, we've got bloom, we've got proper shadows," he lists. "The draw distance should be around 2km, when it's done, Minecraft is about 300 metres. We have hundreds of textures, everything is high resolution, we also have smaller blocks so you can build nice smooth slopes; you can build tables and chairs out of your own sub-objects, and best of all, these can be shared online in a Detail Block store. The players can also control the weather to a substantial degree - we're using an amazing plugin off of the Unity Asset Store called UniStorm. $40 spent, a few tweaks, and we ended up with this:"

Size matters

There is also the question of scale. According to Sawkins, the worlds in the Unity version of FortressCraft will be 1000 light years in all directions. 1000 light years. It sort of sounds preposterous - the stuff of programming fantasy. I ask how this is possible. "We've indexed the world using unsigned 64bit integers," he explains. I nod knowledgeably. At least the game's fans can understand the potential this offers. "I'm not sure if I'm more excited about what I'll be able to do with a world on nearly unlimited height and depth or what massive projects that others will do with such scale," enthuses Biedrzycki. "The potential for a scale version of the Death Star has me excited, especially since it will probably end up looking better than I can even visualise!"

The plan is to allow massive online community worlds where each player will be given their own patch of land to do with what they please - but they'll also be able to visit all the others. Sawkins is currently talking to hosting companies about building a server network big enough for all of this. In the meantime, players will be able to set up their own servers for more modest co-operative projects. "There's also plans to allow scripted building via minions," says Sawkins. "But I've yet to find time to start on that!" At some point then, players will be able to command small armies of AI builders, toiling away on the landscape as digitised slave labourers. Unsurprisingly, the game is also set to support Oculus Rift, allowing modellers to make immersive visits to their worlds.

It will be fascinating to see FortressCraft competing directly against Minecraft on a whole new platform. Whatever you think about the game's status - as a clone or a variant on the construction game blueprint - it is a worthy opponent for Mojang. And this battle is unlikely to end on PC: one of the strengths of Unity is its cross-platform functionality and next-gen console versions of FortressCraft are likely. Sawkins is apparently talking to Sony right now – perhaps his game could become the PlayStation answer to Xbox One's forthcoming Minecraft update.

Is Sawkins ready for the next wave of fan rage? "It has never really stopped to be honest," he says. "It died down certainly, but I still get random abuse about how I'm stealing Minecraft's ideas. Oddly enough, they're almost always commenting on old YouTube videos; I quietly - and occasionally loudly - despair at anyone who says, 'this is stealing Notch's copyright and should be banned!' on a three year old video...

"Most of the flareups are brief these days. I just link to an image like this and they tend to quietly disappear. I do miss the enthusiasm of the Minecraft fans though - I think they themselves have lost a little of their vigour, which saddens me. The world needs more passion these days."