Francesco Maresca's Blog

During the summer of 2024, I created a project inspired by Hiren’s Boot CD, called Maresca Tools. At the time, I was working in a Windows environment, so I included a mini bootable Windows 11 (at the beginning I was planning to include Windows 10, but since its support was going to end, I changed idea), along with Clonezilla to clone disks, a memory testing OS and Puppy Linux.
The goal was to build a lightweight yet powerful toolkit for data recovery, system maintenance, and general troubleshooting.

Miner Cave is an immersive 3D sandbox game built using the Ursina Engine. Players can explore, build, and save their worlds while enjoying dynamic terrain generation and custom gameplay mechanics. This project is in its alpha stage and is a work in progress.

Core Features

• Main menu with username insertion: Starting from Alpha 0.03, Game comes with a menu where you can choose your username.
• First-Person Exploration: Move through the world with an intuitive first-person controller.
• Customizable Terrain: Dynamically generated terrain with Perlin noise, including caves, grasslands, and underground layers.
• Block Interaction: Place and destroy blocks to modify your world in real-time.
• Skybox: A customizable skybox to enhance visual appeal.

Gameplay Features

• Block Types: Multiple block types including grass, dirt, stone, cobblestone, and more.
• Save and Load: Save your progress and reload worlds with the PyQt5 file dialog.
• Custom HUD: A block selection bar and a preview mini-block HUD for an enhanced user experience.
• Cave Generation: Procedurally generated caves with randomized layouts and block types.
• Audio Integration: Background music and sound effects using PyGame.

Developer Mode

• Adjustable camera clipping planes for testing.
• Visual debugging aids, such as near and far rendering tweaks.

Marescalc is a calculator made by me using Win32 APIs in C++

It is also runnable on Linux/ Mac OS systems thanks to Wine.

Marescalc is open source and its source can be found on GitHub, where you can find also the relases.