Minecraft Ported To the Raspberry Pi

An anonymous reader writes "The amusing 'but does it run Crysis?' question has a cousin: 'but does it run Minecraft?' The makers of Raspberry Pi can now officially say that yes, yes it does. Called Minecraft: Pi Edition, the latest flavor of the popular game carries 'a revised feature set' and 'support for several programming languages,' so you can code directly into Minecraft before or after you start playing. That means you can build structures in the traditional Minecraft way, but you can also break open the code and use a programming language to manipulate things in the game world."

Comments

Nostalgia Sorta

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember the days of not 'IF it can run' but 'lets MAKE it run Doom'...

Re:Nostalgia Sorta

[Anonymous Coward]

My watch runs doom now.

Re:Nostalgia Sorta

[Ford Prefect]

Some time last year I'd vaguely heard about the Raspberry Pi, and how it was a super-cheap, super-basic ARM board. I'd really not been paying much attention when I happened to click on a YouTube link apparently showing the Raspberry Pi running 'Quake'.

That's nice, I thought - expecting a 320x200 software-rendered Quake 1 running at an abysmal framerate, in a let's-try-one-up-from-Doom kind of way.

Shitting heck, it was Quake 3 - running at an anti-aliased 1080p at quite a speed.

Having owned multiple, expensive generations of PCs incapable of that kind of graphical performance - nostalgia's awful. Can't they just run Doom and be happy? Stop this relentless, amazing progress, please!

Re:Nostalgia Sorta

[MMC Monster]

My watch was doomed once I bought my first cell phone.

Re:Hmm

[PhrostyMcByte]

Java has yet to be ported to the Pi's floating-point, so the only option is to use soft floats. I can't imagine Minecraft running at any acceptable speed. LibreOffice is also painfully unusable on the Pi at the moment, but I don't know how much that depends on float ops.

Re:Hmm

[hobarrera]

Even though minecraft is java, it uses several native libraries, liblwjgl is one of them.
These *need* to be ported to the target OS+archtecture in order to run minecraft.

Yes but...

[loony]

... does it run emacs?

Re:Yes but...

[Ford Prefect]

so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.

If you're running 'pico', you're getting 'nano' instead, and it's nano's syntax highlighting that's the problem. Switch it off with Meta-Y and the editor becomes positively speedy. I'm SSH'ed into a Pi right now, and for basic shell stuff it's pretty indistinguishable from any other machine. There's probably something up if it's gratuitously slow.

(I'm on an up-to-date Raspbian, and I've overclocked things slightly. Software has improved loads the past few months!)

I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.

USB support is now merely 'not very good', while it used to be 'downright terrible'. I get ~3MB/s SCP-ing a large file to the Pi's (slow) SD card, so network performance shouldn't be an issue. Try again with recently updated firmware? Although it's unlikely to make a terribly good NAS anyway, with both disks and ethernet hanging off a slow USB connection...

Re:Yes but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The day that a computer can run a modern-ish video game but not a console text editor, that text editor may need to rethink a few of its life choices.

Re:Yes but...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is on my raspberry pi: http://ompldr.org/vZ2Z5dg/out.ogv (recordmydesktop seems to make everything pink when "quick subsampling" is active).
It's running X with fbdev, plasma and recordmydesktop and vim still doesn't feel l ike a "slow crawl". I just wait until kwin_gles runs on it then it will be really smooth.

I tried a usb hard disk, just for you. nfs, ext4, noatime. On another computer, nfs mount on mnt/: dd if=/dev/zero of=mnt/zero bs=5M count=200
X is getting sluggish and it has 100% cpu usage, mostly kernel load.
Writes 7.5 Megabyte/second.
Reads 6.8 Megabyte/second.

Re:Hmm

[Ford Prefect]

It's apparently a port of Minecraft Pocket Edition, which is already on Android and iOS. No idea as to the programming language, but I fully imagine it's something with less of a footprint than a full-sized JVM.

Re:Hmm

[Shark]

I can confirm that Minecraft runs on Icedtea (it's what I usually run it on), though there's an issue with hardcoded library paths on my system which is easily fixed.

Minecraft level format has always been open

[seibai]

It's always been possible to code against minecraft - Notch has kept the level format open since the game released (even if he did change it a bunch of times after he said he wouldn't).

I've already written a bunch of level generators for it, like these two:

Planetoids

Dungeon Adventure

Re:Hmm

[sammyF70]

"i played the lite minecraft for 5 mins on my ipad, and I was really really dumb. i just dug a hole for 5 mins, but never got to the bottom. then i couldnt get out."

There.. fixed for you.

Re:Hmm

[petermgreen]

Quick summary of the java situation on raspbian:

Oracle java doesn't currently work on armv6 hard float.
Openjdk with zero works but is SLOW
Openjdk with jamvm works and seems to be the most workable option right now
Openjdk with cacao is broken on all arm hardfloat platforms at the moment*.
I haven't tried openjdk with shark or avian.

* see debian bugs 688703 and 688702