Minecraft

[GasBandit]

Some pictures from this weekend... it's getting so that the png for the overhead map is as many MB as the actual level, maybe I should start hosting the world zipped up and you guys can just download it and have a look for yourself

Meantime.. pictures. Using spoiler tags cause they're ginormous.

Here's a picture of the outside of the pretty much finished castle.. outer wall is 6m high at the shortest point, inner wall starts at 10m and goes up from there. The pine trees in the background were created by a specialized evergreen tree generator called "map deleter and tree generator." I was using it to delete unused sections of my map so that the new biomes would start affecting the map closer to home.

Spoiler

Now, you might notice the snow is starting to go away - the new patch has removed the "snow world" dynamic apparently. Most of my snow world now is not regrowing snow, so as I clear it it doesn't come back most often.

Here's an internal shot of the great hall within my castle. It's ceiling is two stories high, and the balcony overlooking it from the second floor has guest rooms, I think I've been over all this before with you guys.

Spoiler

Outside the castle we've got quite the little community going.

Spoiler

Looking out at the town from on the castle outer wall, you can barely see the lava moat below, the wide path on the left leads up to the church, and on the right in the background you can see the Inn and behind that...

Spoiler

The ship - I had suggested the "Esprit" for the name for her, but the little woman insisted on the "S.S. FRIGGIN HUGE."

Spoiler

The view of the Inn and the castle from the bowsprit of the ship-

Spoiler

The deck of the SS FRIGGIN HUGE from the corner of the sterncastle -

Spoiler

aaaand on the opposite shore of the harbor, I did something a little "halloweeny."

Spoiler

 

[figmentPez]

That's a lot of work GasBandit. Some really nice stuff, though.

 

[GasBandit]

That's a lot of work GasBandit. Some really nice stuff, though.

It's a lot more fun with two people cooperating. Everything goes so much faster, and the shared experience blah blah warm fuzzies blah blah accomplishment blah hippie bullcrap you know how it goes.

 

[figmentPez]

It's a lot more fun with two people cooperating. Everything goes so much faster, and the shared experience blah blah warm fuzzies blah blah accomplishment blah hippie bullcrap you know how it goes.

I'd love to see what the whole of Halforums could accomplish.


Anyway, anyone checked their "farm" yet? Someone on the Penny Arcade forums was saying that crops won't grow in some biomes now, so existing farms may not grow new wheat anymore.

 

[drifter]

Damn, and I thought I put a lot of work into my world. Even with two people, that's kinda terrifying. How about a picture of the throne room?

Also, my farm seems to be working fine, but my farm is also ensconced within a mountain.

 

[figmentPez]

Ghasts invade a SMP server:


Posted mainly to show just how huge ghasts are. They look so small, since they're usually flying pretty high, but right next to players, they're giant.

 

[GasBandit]

Cartograph of my world: here

 

[GasBandit]

Noaxark of the IRC channel has agreed to let us all use his server (Which I also dabble on), if we want. Just try to keep the address to halforumites please - would like to not attract griefers. Address is in the image in the spoiler.

Spoiler

no

Just remember that on a multiplayer server, the blocks right around the spawn point are protected and will revert immediately if changed... you'll need to wander to the south a bit to get "into town" so to speak.

his latest cartograph here

 

[Silver Jelly]

Fuking Creepers appearing behind corners in my fucking mines

 

[Green_Lantern]

Cartograph of my world: here

why you map is "broken"?

 

[GasBandit]

Cartograph of my world: here

why you map is "broken"?[/QUOTE]

Because, as I noted in my post with all the spoilered pictures, I used "Map Deleter and Pine Tree Generator" to delete a lot of my undeveloped chunks so that the new biome code would regenerate them without me having to walk 90 miles to see it. Apparently it's a little glitchy.

 

[figmentPez]

Ahahahahahaha! The fishing rod is awesome! So much fun.

Fishing is boring.

Fishing for mobs, though...

Yes, that's a cow on top of a tree.

He started at the base of my tower, that tree is part of my rooftop garden. I'm not sure where the sheep ended up, that one flew so high I lost track of him. Apparently my home is just at the limit of the fishing rod's range. It can't cast very far out, but it can go all the way down to the ground. If a lucky strike his a mob, reeling in the fishing line sends them flying up into the air.



For more practical fishing, that doesn't take much water at all. I can fish in the little stream I made as part of my rooftop garden. I actually had more luck there than in the ocean.


On another note, I have set my world to peaceful. I had a skeleton in my rumpus room knocking my paintings off the wall, getting grave dust all over my carpeting. This will not stand! To quote Notch "....from playtesting, I agree that the monster spawning brightness torch thing stuff now totally sucks"

 

[figmentPez]

Oh, almost forgot. It's easier to take screenshots now. Hold down F1 to remove the HUD, then hit F2 to save a screenshot.

 

[GasBandit]

That'll come in handy. I was getting tired of printscreening and pasting into paint.

 

[Rubicon]

I wish the game didn't take a beast of a machine to run.. in SMP, it crawls to a halt of 1-3 FPS. Thats with fast graphics selected, draw distance as "tiny" etc. If I stand in one place for a minute, everything loads ok and I can get lik 60+ FPS.. but as soon as I move any direction just a few squares it drops back to 1-3 FPS as new chunks load ;\ I love Notch's work but jesus.. for such a simplistic game (graphically) you'd think something ancient could run it smoothly. I can nail out a solid 30+ fps in mmos like WoW but this? Back to single player for me..

 

[GasBandit]

I wish the game didn't take a beast of a machine to run.. in SMP, it crawls to a halt of 1-3 FPS. Thats with fast graphics selected, draw distance as "tiny" etc. If I stand in one place for a minute, everything loads ok and I can get lik 60+ FPS.. but as soon as I move any direction just a few squares it drops back to 1-3 FPS as new chunks load ;\ I love Notch's work but jesus.. for such a simplistic game (graphically) you'd think something ancient could run it smoothly. I can nail out a solid 30+ fps in mmos like WoW but this? Back to single player for me..

That's because WoW isn't generating the world on the fly. That "move any direction a few squares" means it's having to generate those new cubic meters you're coming into visual range of. It's not the graphics card, it's your processor and ram that are slowing you down.

That, and WoW was actually written in a native executable. Minecraft is a glorified Java app, which means your computer is having to emulate a java virtual machine to play it. Like all things Java, it is inherently bloated, slow and clunky. But that's life in modern computing, unfortunately.

Oh, also I found that for some reason, if you're running the server on the same machine that is running VOIP software, it makes minecraft_server even more laggy and such, undoing what you just did 3 seconds later, then re-doing it 10 seconds later. So, no skyping on your minecraft server.

 

[strawman]

I wish the game didn't take a beast of a machine to run.. in SMP, it crawls to a halt of 1-3 FPS. Thats with fast graphics selected, draw distance as "tiny" etc. If I stand in one place for a minute, everything loads ok and I can get lik 60+ FPS.. but as soon as I move any direction just a few squares it drops back to 1-3 FPS as new chunks load ;\ I love Notch's work but jesus.. for such a simplistic game (graphically) you'd think something ancient could run it smoothly. I can nail out a solid 30+ fps in mmos like WoW but this? Back to single player for me..

That's because WoW isn't generating the world on the fly. That "move any direction a few squares" means it's having to generate those new cubic meters you're coming into visual range of. It's not the graphics card, it's your processor and ram that are slowing you down.

That, and WoW was actually written in a native executable. Minecraft is a glorified Java app, which means your computer is having to emulate a java virtual machine to play it. Like all things Java, it is inherently bloated, slow and clunky. But that's life in modern computing, unfortunately.

Oh, also I found that for some reason, if you're running the server on the same machine that is running VOIP software, it makes minecraft_server even more laggy and such, undoing what you just did 3 seconds later, then re-doing it 10 seconds later. So, no skyping on your minecraft server.[/QUOTE]

Yes, it would be nice if "generating terrain" could be done in the background when it's not needed, rather than waiting until it is needed. Just make sure the world is a few percent bigger than the user has explored...

 

[Azurephoenix]

It would be really nice if Notch would code this thing properly and not be using Java... like GasBandit said... it's horribly inefficient.

 

[GasBandit]

It would be really nice if Notch would code this thing properly and not be using Java... like GasBandit said... it's horribly inefficient.

Notch is horrified at the prospect of even touching assembly language.

like checking registry and stack dumps? nah, I'll stick to my Java..

 

[Azurephoenix]

like checking registry and stack dumps? nah, I'll stick to my Java..

*facepalm*

I think I'd settle for a compromise like C# or something... lol.

 

[PatrThom]

Heh. I just read that same tweet (this is more impressive when you realize I am only following one person in the year I've subscribed...and it isn't Notch).

--Patrick

 

[strawman]

It would be really nice if Notch would code this thing properly and not be using Java... like GasBandit said... it's horribly inefficient.

You guys might be surprised at how efficient java is these days. It's not perfect, and a good java programmer can do better than a bad one if they understand how the JVM works, but it's not the snail it used to be considered.

The reality is that the engine has to use various optimizations to manage billions of vector points per second. It's not like a regular game where a complex terrain includes thousands of vectors and a dozen textures and bump maps. It can't simply feed all the blocks to the graphics card, because the graphics card would then need to render billions of triangles per second just to keep up. He's using java to cull the vectors prior to showing them, and he's obviously using some pretty inefficient algorithms.

However, the game would not be as popular as it is if he didn't have the mac and linux userbase, so doing C or assembly is not going to happen anytime soon.

Creating a block world type rendering engine on the iPhone turns out to be much harder than I anticipated, and I'm only pumping 30 million triangles per second for a block world that's only 128x128x32. It's actually quite an interesting problem...

---------- Post added at 12:31 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:29 PM ----------

But the reality is that notch is leaving a very large opening for another developer (likely a large company) to swoop in with a significantly better performing game and eat his lunch. He's got a lot of work into the game already, so there's actually a relatively high bar (I love all the people saying it could be coded in a week) but if he doesn't provide significantly compelling content, he's not going to last more than 2 years.

 

[Silver Jelly]

How do I make freaking obsidian instead of cobblestone?? I kept doing obsidian by accident when I didn't need it and now that I'm curious about this Nether world thing I don't seem to be able to make any!!

 

[strawman]

How do I make freaking obsidian instead of cobblestone?? I kept doing obsidian by accident when I didn't need it and now that I'm curious about this Nether world thing I don't seem to be able to make any!!

Obsidian is created when flowing water hits a lava spring; when a water spring and a lava spring collide it creates cobblestone.

A basic Obsidian farm is composed of a trough seven blocks long into which seven blocks of Lava are poured using the Bucket. A water block is then placed on top of one end of the trough so that it flows onto and converts the Lava into Obsidian.

From Obsidian - Minepedia - The Minecraft Wiki!

So it sounds like you convert lava springs into obsidian by flowing water over the lava springs. Don't let the water spring itself touch the lava, and don't let the flowing lava touch the spring or flowing water.

I haven't done it though, so this is just what I understand to work.

 

[figmentPez]

FLP has mostly accurate* info. If you're getting cobblestone, your water is hitting flowing lava, not the lava source block. Don't try to place the water directly on top of the lava source, though. You can't place blocks on top of liquids, and you might accidentally replace the lava with the water (destroying the lava). Also, be aware that you need to be careful when dumping your lava bucket. (Never have your lava bucket out and ready when trying to use a door, chest, minecart, etc.) Not only can misplaced lava burn you, but if you accidentally dump a lava bucket in the same spot as an existing lava source block, you'll just lose the lava.

*if a water spring and a lava spring are right next to each other, you'll end up with obsidian. Only if the lava has space to flow will cobblestone result instead.

 

[Silver Jelly]

But I put lava from my bucket in a trench and the water source block over the lava soruce block... and all I got was cobblestone. What amb I doing wrong?

 

[figmentPez]

But I put lava from my bucket in a trench and the water source block over the lava soruce block... and all I got was cobblestone. What amb I doing wrong?

Screenshot? (Also, see my edited post)

 

[strawman]

But I put lava from my bucket in a trench and the water source block over the lava soruce block... and all I got was cobblestone. What amb I doing wrong?

Don't put the water source block over the lava source block. Put the water source block at least one block away so the water flowing away from the water source flows over the lava source block. The source blocks should never touch.

---------- Post added at 02:13 PM ---------- Previous post was at 02:08 PM ----------

Try this (looking down from the sky):

Make a trench in the ground 7 long (G = dirt or something that can hold lava):
GGGGGGGGGG
G_______GG
GGGGGGGGGG

Put lava source blocks in all 7 of the holes:
GGGGGGGGGG
GLLLLLLLGG
GGGGGGGGGG

Now put a water source block on the G above that is bolded and italicized. The water source will not itself touch the lava source blocks, but it will flow water over them.

 

[Silver Jelly]

I'll try that!

 

[figmentPez]

This is the method I used when making my chessboard

3x3(x1)* hole in the ground. 1 Water source block. Then place lava into the flowing water. It will instantly turn to obsidian.

(illustration made with Minedraft)

*Edit: Size chosen because that was how big I wanted my chessboard squares. It could be a lot of different sizes and shapes.

 

[Gusto]

I just started playing this today.

So far I've dog a hole in the side of a low cliff, blocked it in with stone, dug further back and down into the cliffside and discovered a series of caves where I proceeded to get my ass kicked.

I think I'll work on adventuring more outside, possibly seeing if I can scale any higher cliffs on which to build a new base.

---------- Post added at 04:33 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:32 PM ----------

Any tips for beginners would be helpful. I'm poking around the wiki a bit so I've got a bit of knowledge now.

 

[GasBandit]

Any tips for beginners would be helpful. I'm poking around the wiki a bit so I've got a bit of knowledge now.

Since you've built with stone, I assume you've built a stone pickaxe already. FIND some COAL. It can usually be found in the sides of cliffs on the surface fairly commonly. Once you can make torches with that coal and some sticks, you can really start exploring underground. A large part of your early game will be the quest for coal... then the quest for iron. But you'll be using stone tools for most things for the rest of the game, just reserving iron tools for digging out diamond, redstone and obsidian.

 

[figmentPez]

just reserving iron tools for digging out diamond, redstone and obsidian.

I think you mean diamond, redstone and gold. Obsidian needs a diamond pick to mine.

(Obligatory "will Notch ever make obsidian tools?" Personally I vote for making obsidian tools with iron handles instead of wood, making them as fast as iron, but as durable as diamond.)

 

[doomdragon6]

You can mine obsidian without a diamond pick, it just takes 50 seconds instead of 15, right?

 

[drifter]

Without a diamond pickaxe, obsidian will break, but it won't drop a block.