Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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?

    --
    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 RogerWilco · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's not about playing the game. it's about creating the contraption to do it. The focus is on the creative process.

      So an analogy in WoW would not be the ability to play an ingame game, but to make it. Remember the chess game from Karazhan? Suppose WoW plugins could make things like that. Suppose plugins could make battleground like concepts, with new types of combat and siege. Or plugins could add dances to the game. Or new model mounts, engineering tools, etc.

      Imagine that kind of freedom. There would be an amazing new WoW addon each month, that would end up as a Slashdot topic. Suppose someone made an addon that would allow parties and raids to meld into a combined form, like Voltron or Megazord. Suppose you had total freedom in how to defeat a raid boss: You could build a wall around it and drown it in lava, or build a cannon and shoot your plate wearing players at it (especially dwarves), fight it as a big human pyramid, so only a few people can move everyone around. Wow can't do that, because it would be totally unbalanced. It would be a lot of fun and give addon developer a whole new meaning.

      That is what Minecraft does: It gives you basic building blocks (literally), and a lot of creative freedom to mould the world.

      It means that the creativity is no longer limited to what the designer of the game could come up with, but the players can add their own creativity. The sky is the limit (literally, as it's only 128 blocks high).

      --
      RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
    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.

      --
      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 Internetuser1248 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Once again minecraft shows itself to be dwarf fortress' inferior cousin. This is not the only example.

    6. 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!

      --
      -- no sig today
  2. 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."

  3. I want to see RNA Translation in redstone by mentil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The animations I've seen make translation look neat, I bet it'd look neater with 3d blocks in a video game. Somehow.

    --
    Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.