PND3D…

The Successor To Voxlap… After the Break…

PND3D…

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned a voxel-based game that was based upon the little-known voxel engine called “Voxlap.”

Today, I thought it would only be fair to at least briefly mention that it has a successor, “PND3D.” I have no idea what the “PND” in “PND3D” stands for… I’m guessing that the “3D’ in “PND3D” stands for “3-dimensional,” although I could be wrong. Up until around yesterday, I didn’t even know that “Voxlap” had a successor.

If I dropped everything in my life and studied to be a hardcore level designer, game coder, texture mapper and all of the other positions that I would need in order to make a halfway-decent game until the day that I died… I would still probably be fairly lousy at it. Some people aren’t good at bowling, others can’t hack it at knot-tying, and others still will never be good at fishing. For me, it just seems that the knack for computer game making just wasn’t meant to be… Which is kind of ironic, considering how influential computer games have been in my life.

I would like to think that I knew about “Voxlap” almost from the start because, back in the day, I seemed to have had endless amounts of time to troll the Internet looking for websites just to claim that I had visited them. As far as I know, only one game was ever really made with Voxlap (the one featured yesterday) and the demo that came with Voxlap.

Those days of having near-infinite amounts of time to troll the Internet have long since ended and, today, I find myself constantly surprised of all of the items on the Internet that have been there for who-knows-how-long. “What? Half-Life 3 came out? When? 12 years ago?”

There’s a part of me that enjoys the fact that there are still tiny, almost undisturbed sections of the Internet that are still around. Tiny pockets of the Internet left undisturbed to develop in their own weird and eccentric ways. Primitive tribes left untouched by the hands of modern men. Closed-off valleys where dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals never went extinct but only thrived.

“Voxlap” grew from such a condition and, apparently, so has “PND3D.” While PND3D may never gain much of a developer fanbase, just the fact that it is out on the Internet at all tells of the exciting breadth, width and depth of the Internet to deliver all sorts of neat, undiscovered treasures. It pains me that I will never have the technical expertise to toy around with PND3D but it excites me to know that, somewhere on the Internet, is a programming toy that I can. I just have to search in the uncharted regions of the Internet to find it.