Hi, my name is Jonathan. I'm a senior at the University of New Hampshire, and am about a semester away from getting my four-year degree. In the past I've contributed to the
KDE project via maintenance (and also the creation of) the Muon Package Manager.
I like to know how things work, and having cursed Minecraft's ...technical shortfalls... plenty of times, I decided to try to "make my own" to justify my (cowardly anonymous and private) whining about Notch. The guy's a genius, of course, seeing as he's able to crank out ray tracing implementations from memory in less than an hour (something I'll probably never be able to do), but I feel that sometimes proper system architecture is sometimes the harder job.
As for my project, things are coming along. I have infinite terrain generation/paging implemented, and some rudimentary rendering code using OGRE. Texturing isn't quite working, though; still fighting those texture coords in the shader. :/ At this point my engine is pretty much a blank slate, and the code is decoupled enough that you could easily write both a Minecraft server and client, or a different game entirely. I have no desire to chase the coattails of the Minecraft network protocol each Minecraft release (especially since its use of TCP is one of its questionable design decisions in my view), so if this project ever goes anywhere, I expect it to become its own game in the Minecraft genre.
So anyways, that's who I am and what I'm doing.