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Minecraft

Started by MALCOLM, September 21, 2010, 08:18:12 PM

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Still Not George

"Dear Notch,

Occlusion culling isn't an "Advanced OpenGL Feature." It's basic stuff, at least to those of us who code in real languages. But good to see you hired someone competent.

Yours,

A Jealous Grumpy Indie Dev


PS: Zombie Pigmen? You're a genius. All is forgiven."

Puffin Chunks

Does this mean that it's likely to run even slower on my X3100?

Ugh, it's barely playable at times as it is.

madhair60

There's a demo, which I tried.  I ran around baffled for about ten minutes, with no idea what to go, where to go, or what the appeal is supposed to be.

Help.

Still Not George

Quote from: Puffin Chunks on April 20, 2011, 02:45:43 AM
Does this mean that it's likely to run even slower on my X3100?

Ugh, it's barely playable at times as it is.

Should run faster. Occlusion culling is an optimisation in which the game calculates which blocks you should be able to see and doesn't bother rendering any others. It already does some of this - only blocks in contact with air and inside the viewing arc are rendered even without it - but it makes things like buildings much quicker, since there's no point rendering things outside the walls unless there's a window.

It doesn't affect the processing, though, just the graphics - so the game is still going to be tracking 80 gazillion cubes and tons of monsters all the time, because Notch doesn't know how to design systems.

mcbpete

Quote from: Puffin Chunks on April 20, 2011, 02:45:43 AM
Does this mean that it's likely to run even slower on my X3100?

Ugh, it's barely playable at times as it is.
It works like a charm now on my ATI x800 so I expect you'll be OK !

Consignia

Quote from: Still Not George on April 19, 2011, 11:24:36 PM
"Dear Notch,

Occlusion culling isn't an "Advanced OpenGL Feature." It's basic stuff, at least to those of us who code in real languages. But good to see you hired someone competent.

Yours,

A Jealous Grumpy Indie Dev


PS: Zombie Pigmen? You're a genius. All is forgiven."

I just looked up, since I know nothing of minecraft, but it's developed in Java? Crikey. And this is coming from an actual Java developer and general fan.

Zetetic

Quote from: Still Not George on April 20, 2011, 01:08:23 PM
It doesn't affect the processing, though, just the graphics - so the game is still going to be tracking 80 gazillion cubes and tons of monsters all the time, because Notch doesn't know how to design systems.
Along those lines am I right to be horrified at Minecraft's bandwidth requirements? I realise that a considerable amount of data is necessary (enough so that you don't continually have to fetch data whilst mining) when moving around, but entire chunks? For that matter, entire columns of chunks IIRC. I'm not at all entitled to call myself a programmer, but it seems surprising that there's no better solution than this, even if it is non-trivial.

Anyway, madhair60. You're best off looking at the Minecraft Wiki, because while the game is terribly simplistic, it's also utterly opaque to begin with. The appeal? Well...

Still Not George

A chunk is a column - 64x64x200 IIRC. And the server shifts any chunks within the view frustum of a player - which can be quite a few, especially from the top of a hill (as the game seems to extend the far clip further at higher distances).

This is why I tend to cry and laugh at the same time when people call Notch a "genius games programmer". He's a dreadful coder, he just happens to have stumbled onto liquid gold with Minecraft. I strongly suspect that Scrolls is going to be raw faeces.

Consignia

It sounds to me symptomatic of "I've got a good idea, let's knock it up quickly and see" and then not fixing it later. I see it all the time, and it frustrates me no end, as these guys get the praise as programming geni for hacking a solution together quickly, rather making a maintainable one. I suppose it's different in the game programming world because you have to optimise much earlier than you would for a business application.

Still Not George

Quote from: Consignia on April 20, 2011, 03:23:42 PM
It sounds to me symptomatic of "I've got a good idea, let's knock it up quickly and see" and then not fixing it later. I see it all the time, and it frustrates me no end, as these guys get the praise as programming geni for hacking a solution together quickly, rather making a maintainable one. I suppose it's different in the game programming world because you have to optimise much earlier than you would for a business application.
You'd hope so... but unfortunately since publishers now demand every single bloody game be pitched in the form of a virtually complete prototype, the industry's full of bodged-together crap too. But there's a big difference between sub-optimal approaches and complete lack of any sanity in dealing with a problem.

On the plus side, the sickeningly-lucky rank amateur has made several million out of his good fortune, so he can afford people to come in and fix his failures now. Here's hoping he actually lets them do so.


(YES I AM JEALOUS WHAT OF IT?)

Zetetic

#70
What I find particularly odd is the complete lack of vision. For all the possibly (purely based on reading others' opinions) poor coding abilities of Toady One/Tarn Adams, Dwarf Fortress feels as though it's a rough gem - there's a perfect game being forever chipped towards in every update, even where those updates through balance or bugginess temporarily reduce playability.

Minecraft? I've no feel of what the hell it's supposed to be, only the happy fact that it be quite a bit something that I want it to be. It's not even that Minecraft includes things that are of no interest to me, or that in virtue of its open nature it's bound to be playable in many different ways. There are, after all, many things in DF that I'll happily ignore at least some of the times that I play it. But it still seems to feel semi-sensible that someone bothered to spend the time implementing them, even though (or plausibly because), much more than Minecraft's updates I'm sure, it was more for their pleasure than anyone else's [nb]The Animal Donation thing that Toady ran being perhaps an interesting counter-example, at least superficially.[/nb].

Wolves? Christ, I'm beginning to sound like the Minecraft forums.

I'm not capturing very well how disappointed Minecraft makes me feel. One of the utterly unintentional pluses of the way it's been written, though I'm sure that this is by far not limited to Java and had it been implemented in .NET/Mono (or Objective-C or ...) for example this would most likely not be different, is the moderate ease with which others can modify it. There's some hope there at least, although I've yet to find any mod for Minecraft that has a sense of coherent extension.

Edit: Well, however disappointed in Minecraft I am, I can go read about cities in DF's Adventure Mode, which'll cheer me even though I never play it, and it'll remind me that Introversion will most likely starve to death before Subversion is released.

Still Not George

Quote from: Zetetic on April 20, 2011, 06:28:49 PM
What I find particularly odd is the complete lack of vision. For all the possibly (purely based on reading others' opinions) poor coding abilities of Toady One/Tarn Adams, Dwarf Fortress feels as though it's a rough gem - there's a perfect game being forever chipped towards in every update, even where those updates through balance or bugginess temporarily reduce playability.
Toady One needs someone to introduce him to table-driven development, I think. Most of the problems Dwarf Fortress presents can be resolved easily by approaching the problem from a database perspective. But that's me adding my voice to the many that think they know the best way to make an incredibly complex piece of simulation work better.

I completely agree with you about the "feel" of DF. There's this impossible to ignore sense that there is a "shining city on a hill" somewhere in Tarn Adams' head, and that every new version only comes out when he feels that he's moved closer to that city.

Consignia

Forgive me for asking if this going to be hard to answer, but how can a database model help the game in question? I don't know much about Dwarf Fortress but I'm interested in how it would help. If it's too much to explain, please feel free to ignore.

Still Not George

Simple enough, really. Most coding techniques use an object-based model, partly cos it's how everyone's taught and partly because most languages these days tend to support it strongly. In object-oriented approaches, hierarchies of objects are parsed each frame (or tick or whatever) and each one stores its own state and does its own processing. It works as a neat way of clearly representing complex scenes, but it incurs severe overhead in a whole variety of ways.
Table-driven development takes a different tack - it treats the entire game as a set of tables containing data about the current state of the game. It's more difficult to visualise and often more difficult to debug, but it has the advantage of leveraging decades of development into handling large tables of similar data in databases.

It's an approach that's starting to creep in around the edges, mostly in renderer creation (shifting massive lists of polygons around and sorting/resorting them for different purposes), but it also works whenever you have a massive number of individual non-complex objects whose main complexity is in transformation to another object. Dwarf Fortress is exactly that kind of situation - you have immense lists of information about block contents, stones, materials, and so on.

As an example, the biggest single issue slowing down DF is the pathfinding algorithm. How much could that be improved if you could quickly - very quickly, in fact - resort the game's state data to present only those items capable of preventing movement, secondarily sorted by ease of movement? How about keeping a table of moving actors by priority and necessity of moving?

It's something I'm currently playing with in Gestalt, so it's on my mind a bit anyway. Although not as much as procedural generation... which neatly brings us back to Minecraft.

I've been thinking for a while that it would be massively more efficient to store a procedurally generated landscape in spooled form and only transmit the delta (the modified parts). There are several excellent space-dividing algorithms you could use to modify your chunk size dynamically, meaning that the acres of unused space in most MC worlds would be held in procedural form, and the game would dynamically split up the changed bits.

But then if you were going to store the formula for the structure, you would probably want to use a convex hull anyway. Or at the very least much smaller vlox. Maybe even variable size vlox...

Neomod

Now xbox-ers can be disappointed too with this 'homage'

http://www.fortresscraft.com/

Still Not George

Quote from: Neomod on April 26, 2011, 02:43:58 PM
Now xbox-ers can be disappointed too with this 'homage'

http://www.fortresscraft.com/

Heh. Actually, I'm very much pro-Fortress Craft as he's aiming at something more like Dwarf Fortress, which is never a bad thing. Also the nerdraeg that ensued when it first became known still warms the cockles of my heart.

Puffin Chunks

Is the multiplayer server down at the moment? Haven't been able to connect for a few hours and I'm scared my fort is feeling neglected.

fearofmusic

Fear no more, for the server is back up after some some random crash. Thanks for letting me know.

Still Not George

Had an idea this evening. A MC mod in which you're in a wheelchair and you find yourself unable to jump or even climb anything higher than 1/2 block high. Which means gentle steps are OK, but stairs are not, and practically the whole world becomes inaccessible.

Would be a really cool way of reinforcing the idea that accessibility is about access, not inability. Although Cerys can often make it up climbs, I have a couple of less mobile friends in wheelchairs and am constantly raging on their behalf against the often ludicrously half-arsed attempts at "accessibility" in many places.

fearofmusic

Big update happened today which seems to make the server a bit more stable (touch wood block) and also means all those Nether portals people have been putting up are more than just decorations now.

Time to hunt some zombie pigmen!

Jamie Oliver is fat

Have you guys tried Wurm Online?

I think it's by the same bloke behind Minecraft.

It's like a more realistic version of Minecraft with player v player stuff. It's ridiculously long winded, you need to painstakingly level up for hours just to be able to reliably whittle logs for instance to make fucking fence posts, and I had to give it up because it was such a grind.

But it's exactly the sort of game I've always wanted, I just wish it was more towards Minecrafts level of ease of use and pace. Building yourself a virtual home should be as realistic, in-depth and "dangerous" as Wurm, but as easy as Minecraft, with Minecraft's zombies.

Zetetic

Persson was one the lead designers of Wurm apparently. Somewhat revoltingly, Wikipedia has this to say on his departure:
Quotewhere he said that he felt wurm's development was heading in the wrong direction by continuing to add new in-game features such as ridable horses whilst some features that already existed did not work.

leelo

OK FoM, was it you? You know what I'm on about... ;D

fearofmusic

Quote from: leelo on June 15, 2011, 07:44:51 PM
OK FoM, was it you? You know what I'm on about... ;D

Whatever mischief you are referring to, I am ashamed to confess my lack of involvement. Can you elaborate?

leelo

OK, yesterday evening at about 6:30 I decided to log on and start my journey back from the bit of long distance exploring I'd undertaken the night before.  You happened to log out about 5 seconds after I joined and as far as I was concerned, I was the only player on the server (especially as whenever the sun got low enough in the sky, I was able to get my bed out and sleep without any waiting around for others to do the same to make the night go by).

After about 20 minutes of walking, I crested a small hill and something caught my eye:  Somebody had written 'TIT' in the sand. Not only that, but it had been done recently as the the mini sand cubes were still there, spinning and bobbing merrily.

At this point, I was still miles from 'home' so the chances of bumping in to someone that far away has got to be minute.  But ignoring all that, I'm still convinced I was the only player on the server at that time.

It was then I thought "FoM must have some sort of Admin mod where he can whizz around invisible, teleport himself near to other players and write cryptic breast messages in the sand with impunity"

If it wasn't you, someone is stalking me.  Or it was Herobrine.  Either way, I'm scared.

Puffin Chunks

Is there any chance of getting a copy of the world as it is? I would quite like to run off some maps.


Cheers.

dredd

Quote from: Jamie Oliver is fat on June 03, 2011, 10:04:00 PM
Have you guys tried Wurm Online?
I played it a while back. I had a ranch with horses, chickens, pigs and tame deer. I logged in one day to find the horses gone and the rest slaughtered - I'd neglected to repair my fences for a few days, and a section had collapsed, letting other players in.

fearofmusic

Puffin Chunks, check yer PM...

Everyone else, I've installed some scripts onto the server to allow for some interesting new commands... it may even help Leelo's burgeoning paranoia a bit.

Of course, let me know it it makes the server go all tits up.

Jamie Oliver is fat

Quote from: dredd on June 19, 2011, 12:23:02 PM
I played it a while back. I had a ranch with horses, chickens, pigs and tame deer. I logged in one day to find the horses gone and the rest slaughtered - I'd neglected to repair my fences for a few days, and a section had collapsed, letting other players in.

Wurm Online with about 90% reduction in the time it takes to do anything would be just about perfect

It takes probably 2-4 hours per day investment of time to not have the above happen, which makes the game so ridiculously cliquey it's crazy.

The only way to avoid your example is to join a village and make use of the security that provides, you cannot go it alone without spending hours logged on.