// the find
Hopson97/open-builder
Open "Minecraft-like" game with multiplayer support and Lua scripting support for the both client and server
A from-scratch C++ voxel sandbox (Minecraft-style) with a client-server architecture and Lua scripting exposed on both sides, built as the codebase for a YouTube 'build a multiplayer voxel game' series. Useful if you want to study chunk meshing, ENet networking, and embedding Lua into a C++ engine, not useful if you want a game to actually play.
Lua is wired into real gameplay, not just config - biome and tree/cactus generation, menus, and HUD are all driven from assets/game/*.lua via sol2, so you get a concrete example of where to draw the C++/scripting boundary. Client, server, and common code are split into their own CMake targets with a dedicated network layer (client_session/pending_client_session over ENet) worth reading if you've never implemented connection handshaking yourself. It has actual Catch2 unit tests for chunk management, coordinate math, the custom OBD data format parser, and the script engine - most solo voxel-engine repos ship zero tests. The docs folder has specific technical write-ups (adding network events, the Lua voxel API, the OBD format) instead of a generic wiki stub.
The author states in the README that the project has been abandoned since April 2020 and that the architecture became over-engineered - trying to be an engine rather than a game - to the point it was hard to extend, so you're inheriting acknowledged architectural regret, not a stable base to build on. Dependency management is vcpkg-only with manual VCPKG_ROOT exports and no CMakePresets or pinned toolchain, so getting a clean build on a modern compiler is unverified work the maintainer isn't doing anymore. There's a bespoke GUI widget system (button/checkbox/textbox widgets) sitting alongside a vendored imgui-SFML integration in deps/, suggesting two parallel UI approaches that never got unified. No releases or packaged binaries exist, so evaluating it means building from source with no guarantee it still compiles against current vcpkg package versions.