I'm really glad minecraft became popular with kids. It lets them use their imagination and flex their creative muscles, I'm sure that's why they were attracted to it. It's a good change of pace from the mindless stimulation that most video games provide where they are just a passive consumer of the content.
> most video games provide where they are just a passive consumer of the content.
With books and videos, people are passive consumers of content.
With videogames, players are active consumers of content, in that they need to be engaged in order to consume the content.
The demand on creativity and imagination in videogames is usually at least in overcoming the obstacles/challenges of the game. With games like Minecraft, there's also a more tangible intermediate result in terms of building blocks.
Though, mobile games might tend to be more "cow clicker" ish, and mainstream games can be linear sequences where the game makes it hard to fail.. there's less demand for creativity there.
It kind of is. Survival was added Java Edition Classic, then was spun out into its own version with Java Edition Indev. The modern Java version is a descendant of Indev.
More of a technicality than the reality, Minecraft Classic is like a crude prototype compared to the years of additions that make up the current version of Minecraft (Java or Bedrock).
There is Minecraft for raspberry pi edition which comes free with the standard raspbian desktop image. My daughter loves it. It ties in with the education stuff in that it has a python API. For the rest it is more limited compared to normal Minecraft.
My son tried to play Minecraft when he was 4, but he couldn't read yet so we gave him Blockcraft and later Roblox, both of which he can use without needing to read. That's because the interface is usable if you just click the defaults all the time, and he can clearly tell the difference between a blue button with text and a grey button with text.
Although funnily enough, his desire to play Minecraft motivated him to learn to read.
So it might be due to kids being exposed to and wanting to play these games earlier, which has perhaps caught Minecraft off guard resulting in a new generation that plays fast-following Minecraft clones instead of actual Minecraft.
It's not the real thing, it's a Javascript remake of Minecraft Classic. You'll notice the blocks aren't correctly ordered, some blocks are missing and Minecraft Classic never had the 'breathing' block placement effect.
I've got a question since we've got a lot of developers together talking about Minecraft: why is it so inefficient? If I take a rowboat anywhere on my MC (decently spec'd) server the loading is horrible.
Is it just because there's so much going on in every chunk, and the rendering engine has to load entire chunks all the way from the bedrock to the sky?
For one, it's single threaded (last I checked). It also seems to be built on a big heap of messy Java.
Check out Cuberite for comparison. It's a Minecraft server built from the ground up in C++ and it's waaaaaaaay faster than the official server. Advantages of a rewrite I suppose...
There are two completely separate lines of Minecraft ("Java Edition" for PCs vs "Bedrock Edition" for PCs/game consoles/...), so they've done a rewrite, but not dared kill off the original product, because they aren't compatible.
Not just compatible, the game mechanics aren't even the same :(
I think the end of the line for Java Edition will come at some point, but I also think they know perfectly well that they cannot do that prematurely, and we're very much still in "premature" territory.
Minecraft IO isn't terribly efficient.
The chunks don't get rendered bedrock to the sky, but the chunks have to be loaded from disk like that.
Due to the way they are stored, there is no way to load only the visible/nearest part of a chunk.
(I'm working on a minecraft clone with cubic chunks btw)
A chunk from bedrock to sky is 5KB on disk. There's no way that loading order is the problem.
There might be issues caused by the raw number of chunk loads, I'm not sure there. But I can say that the majority of my lag issues when hosting minecraft can be squarely blamed on doing world generation in the main thread.
I wonder if cubic chunks is possible to add to Minecraft through modding, or to its nearest open-source 'competitor' (for lack of a better term), Minetest.
Another user has posted a link to a mod for 1.12 that seems to do cubic chunks. I wouldn't have thought networking would need to be altered for servers where all users have the appropriate mods installed on the client; world generation and entity AI would follow already-established rules about how loaded chunks relate to unloaded ones.
If you can spare the RAM, i'd stick the world on a ramdisk (I did when hosting a MC server and it makes an appreciable difference versus the terribleness of disk IO)
Could you expand on this more? My friends and I just got up and running on our own beefy home server and it'd be nice to take advantage of the massive amounts of RAM on it.
Others have expanded a bit, but it depends on what you're running it on, a tmpfs setup is your friend on linux and even for windows there are free alternatives :)
Of course you will probably want to incorporate something that copies the ramdisk contents to somewhere a little more permanent ever so often, set an interval you're comfortable with losing data within! (but given the huge improvement i'd say it is worth it!)
If you are running off a fast SSD for storage I'm not sure that the RAM disk method will get you noticeable perf improvements; but I don't have any data for this so appreciate any corrections.
That doesn't mean it necessarily makes a difference. If your bottlenecks are CPU speed and disk latency, an SSD will remove 99% of the time spent waiting for disk, and even an infinitely fast ramdisk can only give you another 1%.
Years ago I worked my way through some of the electrical schematics in the book “Code: the hidden language of computers” using a modded version of redbrick that added some basic support for cable bundles, junctions, a timing crystal, etc. started with basic logic gates and then eventually I was able to get as far as building an 8 bit ALU and 1kb of memory in game. I don’t think I’d understand even close to as well how these things work if not for this amazing creation!
I'm an EE engineer now almost completely due to an obsession with Minecraft in my early teens. I used to hire myself out on multiplayer servers, designing and building various Redstone constructs. By the point I started studying electronics at A-Level, I'd already had almost 5 years of experience with Boolean logic, switches, latches, memory, timing circuits and the like. MC was a gateway drug for sure.
I too might have followed a similar path if not for the fact I was already writing software professionally at the time. Your story definitely brought a smile to my face - thanks for sharing that!
The original created Minecraft Java applet was available on the website for a long time. It looks like it's now been converted to WebGL -- I wonder if it's compiled from Java or reimplemented.
Hey DC, I found this thread very late so I guess you may not see this. I played with voxel.js for a while back in the day, but ultimately I wound up building a similar engine from scratch (I think we discussed it briefly, if this rings a bell).
Anyway, I thought you might be interested to know that Minecraft Classic seems to be built on my voxel engine, the one I modeled after voxel.js! So there's a kind of circular lineage now, from minecraft to voxel.js and later back to MC...
This version is actually the last before Survival test versions started, less than two months after release of the first version (which didn't have multiplayer either)
I'm baffled why there are no Minecraft clones, a game created by a single person without a budget. The gaming industry is otherwise notorious for ripping of each other's games. Almost all successive games, Minecraft included , started by copying another game (Infiniminer). Or CandySwipe->CandyCrush et.al... I think a MMO version of Minecraft would be interesting.
I feel like people are just willing to pay $25 to get the real thing. Much cheaper than AAA games at $60+, and you get to play the same game as your friends instead of convincing everyone to play minetest or something instead.
It was an even easier decision to buy it at $10 back in the day.
Yeah, there are a lot of clones, including Survivalcraft (for iOS) and there was one for 3DS before Minecraft was released there. Linden Labs' Blocksworld wasn't a strict clone of Minecraft, but was definitely an attempt to improve it. Also, Fortnite's Creative mode is heavily inspired by Minecraft - many staples of the Minecraft scene, such as 'spleef' games, are being replicated there.
There are actually many, many games that are quite similar, some of which are quite successful:
Roblox,
Survivalcraft,
Creativerse
... to name just three
There are tons of clones and rip offs. But why would you play them if Minecraft is so cheap, and all your friends are on Minecraft servers, with Minecraft mods?
What? Minecraft is possibly the most cloned game in the world other than Tetris. Here is a list of several dozen Minecraft clones which is 8 years old and probably incomplete
"game created by a single person without a budget" hasn't been true for years now.
Mojang has 76 employees as of 2016.
And there are absolutely endless numbers of games that are influenced by Minecraft's mechanics, Stardew Valley, Stationeers, Ark: Survival Evolved to name just a few.
