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Minecraft Enterprise and 16-Bit ALU
tekgoblin writes "Joshua Walker spent the last few months creating a masterpiece. He created the Starship Enterprise 1701-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation in Minecraft using just blocks. He recorded a short video of him explaining how he did it and even gave us a sneak peek at the partially completed ship." He also posted on the Penny-Arcade forums about how he did it. If you aren't impressed by that, perhaps you should check out a 16-Bit ALU also implemented in Minecraft which totally reminded me of one of my favorite XKCD comics.
First minecraft was plugged from the teamfortress.com blog, then 2 days of penny arcade were devoted to it, and since then it's been coming up every few days on slashdot and Boing Boing. The servers have been wrecked like 40% of the time from the constant barrage. If you like minecraft stop telling people about it!
It is true. Massive block constructions and fluid flow logic were there first.
TFA is sourced from this article at Ars which should (in theory) stay up so I recommend reading it there.
I made Devil's Butte from mashed potatoes, and you can EAT it afterwards...you can E-A-T it afterwards...
signed,
Richard Dreyfuss
P.S. I also made a 1840's era bacon fort, but I ate the westward facing wall and all my soldiers died at the hands of the Hamokee Indians.
Sig Follows: "Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself." -- Mark Twain
The ALU is from the "Hack" CPU described in this book: The Elements of Computing Systems, Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
Some of our local LUG people have gotten bit by the minecraft bug. We've built a massive multiplayer island. Some of the locations include Lua Beach, Torvalds Torrent, FreeBSD falls, and Xen caverns. We also have logic gate fields, where members are working on a binary adder. Working already are various logic gates. One of our members built tux out of blocks (who also doubles as a water slide!).
http://plug.org/mc_tux.png
This game is soooo addicting. Don't get sucked in. The best phrase I've heard describe minecraft went something like this... This game is crap. It is full of bugs and nothing works. I hate it, hate it, hate it! I'm logging in right now.
There's a glaring mistake under the diagrams where he talks about not naming this ship the Enterprise and giving it a different Naval Construction Contract (NCC) number. The USS Galaxy's NCC number was not 1700, that belonged to the USS Constitution in the 23rd century. The Galaxy's was 70637.
If he can't get this minor detail right, what was did he screw up?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
... which totally reminded me of one of my favorite XKCD comics.
It wasn't very nice of the story submitter to prevent 6 people in the thread from earning a +3 Funny.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Just be careful with fire or else: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnjSWPxJxNs from http://videosift.com/video/How-not-to-make-a-fireplace-in-Minecraft ... :D
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I understand the draw of sandboxing, but is there a reason why this game looks like it's running the ID Tech-1 engine? (ie, doom)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The douche bag here is you. He explained he didn't build it ingame. And it doesn't really matter how he made it.
I have only played the single-player mode in Minecraft Alpha. It's hard to describe exactly what makes it so compelling. The best thing i can think of is its sense of adventure.
You're dropped into a randomly generated world with nothing but your fist. The terrain generator makes these fantastic landscapes that, while not always entirely Earthly, are usually quite engaging and natural: forested rolling hills, rocky islets, mountains with waterfalls (which have effective and consistent physics)...and dark foreboding caves, sometimes a small hole in a hillside, other times a straight-down pit you almost have to fall into to see. You never know what you'll find just over the next rise.
It's up to you to bootstrap your survival. You've probably seen the Penny Arcade comics, so you know the basics: punch a tree, get some wood, craft some tools. You'll want to find some coal for torches and make a safe house before it gets dark--that's when the monsters come out. And because the combat is so basic, the outcome of every mob encounter is always in question. Zombies aren't so bad, but skeletons, spiders, and the sneaky creepers can ruin your night pretty quickly.
It's a sandbox game, but it's also a little like Sim City or even an RTS: if you want to build stuff, you first have to collect the resources to do so. Any block can be removed from the game world, provided you have the right tools, and any block you've gathered can be placed wherever you like. Iron ore can be smelted (after you've crafted a furnace) into better tools; there's also rarer stuff like gold ore and diamonds the further down into the earth you go.
And that's where Minecraft really shines: down in the caves. You'll find mazes of twisty little passages, all alike. You'll find huge rooms with water- or maybe even lava-falls in them. You may come to a dead end with a dirt wall; dig your way through it and you might discover a whole new set of tunnels. Wherever you go down there, you'll need to light your way with torches. Not only do they let you see pitfalls and baddies, but their light keeps more monsters from spawning. I have never played a game where the darkness was so fear-inducing. It's surprising just how tense I get when I have a pocket full of ore, but I'm lost deep below the surface, running out of torches, and my last pickaxe and sword are almost busted. Conversely, the rush of happiness and sense of reward if I survive and find my way to daylight is just as magnified.
So there's that sense of adventure, and there's also room for lots of individuality. There is no in-game map to hold your hand, and there are as many methods to (try and) keep yourself from getting lost as there are players. I play on a MacBook Pro, meaning my render distance is pretty short, so I tend to use trails of torches above-ground to lead me from my fort(s) to working caves. Inside the caves I'm working out a system of double and triple torches in various configurations to keep myself oriented. Other people build arrows out of cobblestone or dirt, or wall off certain branches for later, or heaven knows what else. You're forced to deal with the challenges the game world throws at you, but you can do it however you like. What's the point besides exploration? Well, you can build a minecart roller coaster or a giant Sphinx, or just a homey little cottage. Whatever you build is entirely individual, since as you say you're basically working with big-ass voxels. I like expanding my houses sometimes, but the real fun for me is in the exploration.
Oh, one more thing. The game is currently in Alpha. It has no right being even mildly playable, and instead it's the most engaging game I've played in a long time--in fact I can't remember the last time I was up until 5:00 AM playing a game before this. When Survival MultiPlayer starts to come together (it's playable but players and mobs can't deal damage yet) it's going to be a big deal. I'm having so much fun in my own worlds, I can only imagine what it'll be like exploring with a group of friends.
Your brain is not a computer.
Indeed, I wonder why someone hasn't made Minecraft in sauerbraten already. It would look 10 times better and run much faster too.