I think an alternate mechanism is certainly in order, particularly, an option disembody oneself would be helpful, and would contribute to enforcing pre-DM base-building times (provided a DMZ was implemented to prevent cheating).

I know you are writing this review from a freebuilder's perspective, but honestly, reading it, it sounds like you're trying to sell freebuild to me.

I'm mostly trying to address people who might say "meh, Freebuild is just a ripoff of Minecraft" without having playing Freebuild or knowing that it was around in several forms many years before Minecraft. That said, if you play Minecraft, you should join us Cemetechians on Evocat.us.

For the record, the project and community that spawned FreeBuild have been playing Lego sandbox games for over half a decade. Minecraft has been around for about a year (and a half?).

After playing it, I have to say it is very different from minecraft, even classic.

Minecraft is all blocks, whereas freebuild is basically about having any shape you want. That's a big difference, since you can build much more intricate shapes. The scaling is also very different.

I just bought minecraft full version! awesome way better than the free version

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Come visit Evocat.us and join Arcadia, the Cemetech members' (and others) city. It's a lot of fun.

That would be because Freebuild processes objects according to their arbitrary position and orientation in a 3D space, Minecraft is voxel-based, which is a fancy way of saying that objects are stored as points on a 3D grid.

Just to offer my mini perspective - MineCraft is pretty darn fun, whether in single-player mode or multi-player mode (the latter being more fun)!
Only quirp is that it's written in Java, but who cares about the language? The concept is all that matters. (I still think it should be written in C++/OpenGL/SDL, but we'll have to wait until he feels like releasing source.)

By the way, Humble Bundle (3) is running a promotion - if you buy one, you can play Minecraft for FREE until Aug. 14th! (Rather than taking the lesser legal way of trying out Minecraft, that is... )

Wow, very well put, DShiznit. Freebuild is indeed about placing, rotating, and scaling arbitrarily, whereas Minecraft limits you to voxels. That lets you build bigger, faster, but less intricately with Minecraft, but create more detailed structures more slowly with Freebuild.

And, minecraft lets you build caves without modifying the base map.

I bought humble 3 for $5: I got 12 Games! (Humble 1 and 2, plus the 2 later added games. I don't count minecraft since it was just a trial and I already own it.)