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Like a Redstone Cowboy

Posted by timothy on from the tinyurl-getrollin dept.

neonsignal writes "Machine creations in Minecraft are becoming increasingly complex as people build on each other's ideas. Some notable examples include a Rubik's cube simulator, a 5-channel music sequencer, a 3D color printer, a 16-bit processing unit, and Conway's Game of Life. My own recent contribution is the world's slowest Universal Turing Machine. I'm now waiting for someone to implement Tetris in Redstone logic."

9 of 166 comments (clear)

  1. What am I missing here... by Fluffeh · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Disclaimer: I haven't ever played Minecraft, so I might not understand the fuss properly. Please feel free to educate :)

    Haven't games within games been around for a heck of a long time? There are loads of mods that either emulate classics or offer a totally new unrelated game to players. Heck, I recall even playing texas hold em with guildies during raids through an ingame mod when I was playing Warcraft.

    What is so special about minecraft that it makes so many stories? Is it just purely flexibility and users being imaginative, or is there a particular reason that /. loves it so? I recall a post a few months ago about a guy who recreated a good portion of a Star Trek ship in minecraft. Was it merely a slow news day then as well?

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    Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
    1. Re:What am I missing here... by 3.1415926535 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Part of it is that it's hard to actually make anything using in-game redstone wiring, in the same way that it would be tricky but nerdily rewarding to make a 16-bit ALU using discrete transistors and wires on a breadboard. It also requires digging around in interesting and often surprising environments to actually *get* the redstone to make this stuff, so it's makes a good time sink for addictive personalities. It's pretty different from writing a mod for a game in some scripting language.

    2. Re:What am I missing here... by Amiralul · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Ever played with LEGO? Ever built your own fort or tree house? Ever went on a beach and built up castles or simply dig holes? Minecraft if the digital version of all of these activities and more (adventure, exploration, unusual landscapes, 3D viewer for models impossible to see otherwise - Star Trek ships for instance).

    3. Re:What am I missing here... by somersault · · Score: 1, Insightful

      I like how you think building a giant in-game circuit for this stuff is simpler than just scripting behaviour.. I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

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      which is totally what she said
    4. Re:What am I missing here... by nschubach · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It depends on the person. Some people are more hands on. This is why we have hardware and software engineers.

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      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
    5. Re:What am I missing here... by justforgetme · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think that You are not getting it.

      You are right on all accounts but ignore the reason why building minecraft machina in a sandbox is more fun than programing an FPGA: Minecraft still is a game, programing FPGA's on the other hand is at best a hobby (if not straight out work for some). So it is the gamelike qualities that encourage for this. The fact that you can have Friends pop into the server your sandbox lives in and help out (or destroy everything). It is the community that you belong to when doing this.

      Don't look at this quantitatively, this is not a survival game in a free economy, this is doing things because you can.
      And that is true nerd spirit!

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      -- no sig today
  2. Give me a break by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I mean who would want to know stuff like Mozilla's Community Lead Tyler Downer leaving due to crap QA processes or perhaps the fact Nokia's Developer Network was hacked revealing the personal details of thousands of developers when we can learn about the bloody wonders of Redstone in Minecraft, land of the unoptimised shitty coding and memory management. Stop putting up this crap or at least post (Since this is games.slashdot.org) some of the PAX 2011 stuff rather then another Minecraft article.

  3. Re:Two words... by spongman · · Score: 2, Insightful

    what a sorry place we've come to as a species if every time someone has the drive, passion and concentration required to do something extraordinary like this they're labeled as having some kind of disorder.

    Michelangelo? Asperger's definitely, right?

    At least this guy's not some spaz that can't sit still for more than 10 seconds...

  4. Re:Two words... by Psychotria · · Score: 4, Insightful

    My thoughts exactly. When did a place who's slogan is "News for Nerds" become such the antithesis of that? Once upon a time (I've read for much longer than my UID indicates) we'd discuss things because they were interesting. We'd discuss just about anything that inspired the imagination. Now the big stories are world events, and the really interesting things (peoples doing things just because they're interesting and trying out new ideas) are shoved aside, or they get comments like "Two words... Asperger's Syndrome."