Buildat | About

What's this?

Buildat is a small engine and platform for networked 3D apps and games, on Windows, GNU/Linux and in the browser. It aims to be a home for new games and apps made on it: a server sends everything its game needs, so a player joins any server with the one client, whatever the genre.

The native games are early: voxel demos, a few small games, and Floorplanner. Growing them, and helping others make theirs, is Buildat's long-term goal.

Buildat also runs Luanti games, such as VoxeLibre from ContentDB, and plays on Luanti servers, so existing worlds and players have somewhere to start while the native games grow.

Buildat is developed by Perttu "celeron55" Ahola (the original author of Luanti). It is distributed under the very permissive Apache 2.0 License.

Operation

Once the Buildat client has connected to a server, the server has a blank canvas in its hands. A blank canvas, and a powerful API. Buildat works by allowing the server to define all aspects of the game it is running, letting players use the universal client on multiple unique servers, even of different game genres. The same client runs in a web browser, served by the game server itself.

Server-side logic is developed in C++; client-side in Lua. Modern graphics, sound, physics and other mundane but important things are handled by Urho3D, while Buildat takes care of networking, sandboxing, runtime-compiled C++, resource transfer, other kinds of logistics and the overall user experience.

The platform

Starport lists public servers and offers an optional login. Aitta distributes signed apps, and Hearth hosts forums, such as Buildat's own. They are apps on the same engine, which anyone can run.

Let's get Buildat's stance on AI out of the way

It's a hard line: "If you use it, it better be good."

Buildat considers AI to be a constructive tool. The builtin modules themselves are the product of very heavy AI use. However, the developer still is responsible for a quality contribution. This means: If you use AI to work on the engine, you must also utilize AI for quality control including testing and benchmarking, and for stripping out cruft, before you present your work. Use a competent AI model and methodology, do not ship slop. Tell others how you did it, so that they can do it too. Repeated slop incidents are a valid reason for a ban. Buildat also welcomes hand made, expertly designed code - it itself was originally made by hand a long time ago in 2014 and a lot of value came from this phase - but expect hand made code to be quickly scrutinized, extended and reshaped by AI. Buildat doesn't consider any code pure or perfect. The code is there only to serve the users and developers. Code is an idea, in an accurate and efficient form, which a computer can directly execute.

Get it? Get it!

Play in your browser, or get a pre-release package from GitHub.

To build it from source, go to Buildat's GitHub page and follow the instructions in README.md.

Buildat is very early in development - if you need a stable platform to build on, this may not be it yet!

Talk

Bugs, questions and ideas go to the forum. Security issues go to sec@buildat.org.

Like it?

Feel free to share www.buildat.org to your friends.

You can fund development by tipping some money to celeron55: celeron55 at Liberapay