After spending countless hours on playing Minecraft, I decided to move on and try creating my own version of the game. If you ask me why, I am telling you: bugs

I'm not saying I stopped playing it because of bugs: in fact, I am still enjoying it, even on multiplayer wherever possible, but seeing how sometimes the game fails (redstone logic madness!), and how much difficult is for developers to add features without breaking anything else, makes me extremely curious about exploring the coding of a similar/clone game.
Yesterday I played a bit with SFML (it's like SDL but C++ oriented) and PolyVox: they coud be perfect starting points for any similar project.

Now, for the real question: who is working to a Minecraft "clone" and is willing to make it open source? Who is interested in building a shared "general block multiplayer engine" that would adapt to several different gameplays?

I am not intending to make a Minecraft clone game. I really just think Voxels have great potential and could be used for a variety of game types.

I am mostly interested in Tycoon type games. It's been so long since there's been a good one... (to my knowledge)

I think it would be interesting to hear what sorts of games the different forum members are aiming for in their projects?

Oh, my game ain't gonna be bulky! (or cubic)

kattle... I'm here for more or less the same reason. Rather than bugs I think minecraft is sort of "poor" as a game. Maybe it's awsome as a building-stuff-with-cubes tool, but honestly I think their idea of voxel-based world which players destroy and create has lot of potential and is not taken advantage of.

I'm checking right now the SFML and looks promising. My initial idea was to go for Ogre+Bullet+PolyBox+OIS+Networking+etc... but seems a little bit messy to put all these together.

To be honest, I think the game is a bit "poor" too... There is a lot of potential and with a pure sandbox game there's no way you are using it. I would really start a project joining several people: I might be good at logic and other stuff, but art and rendering is not my best field.
And mostly important, I want it to be open source. I myself bought a copy of MC and would never buy or install a commercial or freeware equivalent software.

What I am envisioning is some kind of "several teams can build, but what one team builds is more difficult for the others to destroy", so that you can effectively make some kind of Action/survival MORPG. But I am not completely sure about features yet. And what minecraft lacks, is a general gameplay idea: apart for the sandbox aspect of the game, there's nothing going on right now. Expecially on multiplayer (that should be the core gameplay) people just spawn tons of stuff and just build. I want something different from that.

Well, my project was open source (MIT), but recently I've gone into private mode because I'm trying to make do as a indie developer. I know it's an insane idea but I'm in between jobs right now I'm may as well try that for a bit. However, the plan has always been to release the source again in the future once the game is done.

The idea for my game is for single player, you are a monster. As this monster you can build bases etc, this part will have Dwarf Fortress like elements. Then there is the online multiplayer where it's just free-for-all using all the tools available from the single player. There can be different game modes, depends. Also, one major feature of my game will be the in-game editor. Using this, an server admin (or any user with the access) can use it to build a interactive online game world.

Then maybe I will ditch the monster idea and just go with the ORIGINAL game that I was making (along with another dude who had to move away for a bit), which shares a lot of elements with what I described above.

Lastly, I don't think I have time to do it all. So one piece at a time and I will try to get some funding.

how far the open source part went on? I ask because having even just some stuff to "study" would be appreciated just in case.
But I suppose you don't have "old snapshots" of your code. Am I right?

Well, bewarned, I divorce myself of all responsiblity for the code... there are barely any comments in the thing. I haven't done any unit-testing since the beginning of the project.

http://code.google.com/p/projectzombie/

The start is in a file called ZombieDriver.cpp

Also there is a bug in it which causes the gui to tick multiple times per frame. It's a small fix I will probably provide a patch.

Also, the VS solution file is messed up (by that I mean the repository doesn't have all the files for the VC solution). It does have a SCons script and it DOES compile and build on my Linux machine. But the SCons script was hacked together so some of the directories reflect directories on my own machine.

I think it's better for you to start from scratch. If you need info on how to do the SH Preetham sky lighting stuff I can provide some pointers.

I was workin on one (c++ client using the mc network protocol)
but I quickly found out that the protocol is absolutely unusable.
anyway, now I've written my own client and server for a custom protocol. (and I'm not doing cubic worlds anyway)

my goal is to create a gameplay mode similar to sourceforts, just with awesome voxels