Mojang Releases Minecraft: Pi Edition For the Raspberry Pi

hypnosec writes "Mojang has officially released Minecraft: Pi Edition for the credit card sized Raspberry Pi. Back in November, Minecraft was ported to the Raspberry Pi, and it was revealed that Mojang would release a free version of the game. The game is completely free and is now available for download. Even though the game will carry only a limited set of features, the cost and complexity of building and hosting a Minecraft LAN-party has definitely dropped." From the looks of it, you should be able to run it on any ARM system that can run Debian Wheezy. More generally, the idea of a tiny box you can just turn on and have a server for a bzflag, Quake, etc. tournament is appealing.

Comments

Processing power and scalability

[loufoque]

How powerful is this device? Can it host a large enough server for less wattage than a normal PC?

Re:Processing power and scalability

[Osgeld]

best case, its equivalent to a cheap tablet, minus wifi and screen

700Mhz ARM, 256 or 512 megs of ram

so, it depends what your server is doing, if it sits there with its thumb up its ass most of the time, it might do the job

Re:Processing power and scalability

[Anonymous Coward]

if it sits there with its thumb up its ass most of the time, it might do the job

Which describes most home servers. But it's just not as fun if you're not spinning the power meter and heating the house.

Re:Processing power and scalability

[Anonymous Coward]

I use my Pi to watch porn from the DMZ. Every morning I wash the sheets and re-flash the SD card.

Re:Processing power and scalability

[Cryacin]

My home server rack IS my house heating! I brute force SSL codes to keep warm in winter, you insensitive clod!

Re:Processing power and scalability

[arashi no garou]

I've used mine as a simple file server and I think it uses around 5-6 watts at 100% CPU with both USB ports populated. It is picky about storage, but most USB flash drives and most good quality genuine SDHC cards work well in my experience. Get a good quality power supply (it uses a Micro USB port) and use a powered USB hub for any high-current peripherals, and you shouldn't have any power issues.

Right now mine serves as a poor man's HTPC, a front end to my Plex server via Raspbmc, until I can replace it with a Roku. Then the Pi will become a private cloud server via OwnCloud.

Of course, they are capable of much more than what I've done. There is a GPIO header, camera and LCD headers, and a couple of groups have even built budget supercomputers out of dozens of units. It can run Debian (Raspbian), Arch Linux, Plan 9, RiscOS, BSD, Gentoo Linux, and there is steady progress on an Android port. You can also do bare metal programming on it, of course.

Re:Processing power and scalability

[isorox]

I use my Pi to watch porn from the DMZ. Every morning I wash the sheets and re-flash the SD card.

Korean soldier porn with land mines?

There's porn of everything nowadays...

Re:Processing power and scalability

[kiddygrinder]

pretty much, it's cheap as shit to run and mine is basically a torrent box, ssh/media server and i've got one on both of my main tvs as xbmc clients. probably worthwhile to note it has a graphics chip that can decode 1080p video and it can be pretty trivially overclocked to 900mhz without upping the voltage.

Re:Processing power and scalability

[drinkypoo]

How powerful is this device? Can it host a large enough server for less wattage than a normal PC?

If what you want to serve can be delivered to the device efficiently from an SD card or USB2 peripheral connected to flaky USB, yes. Otherwise, no; buy a cubieboard or PogoPlug Rev.2 (which has USB3.)

Pi Edition?

[Skevin]

I thought this meant your Minecraft session occurred in a boat trapped with a tiger.

Re:Pi Edition?

[grouchomarxist]

You can see that here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLG8r_gdWe0

Re:It runs like crap

[Dan East]

I just fired it up on my Pi-B running Wheezy and my experience was the exact opposite. Running full screen it was very smooth, had to be 30 fps or higher. CPU usage was around 85-90%.

Re:It runs like crap

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, you're doing something wrong.

My kid is learning

[Sonoma Sam]

Wow, first he learned Linux and I got him a hosted server for MC. Next he was setting up other servers remotely. THen I found him customizing his world via VI editor from his phone. My kid learned so much computer stuff because of MC. I am really excited about this because this is something else he will learn that I may not. I learned what griefing is and how he adapted various methods to protect his world. For me, it was a C64 and cassette tape drive, for him it is the Universe and MineCraft is his hook. This is really cool because it did not have to be done but it was. Talk about doing great community service.

Re:It runs like crap

[CAIMLAS]

Yeah, it's kind of a joke.

I'm also appalled at how bad the Minecraft server is. It's one resource hungry beast, easily eating through multiple GB for just one or two people playing on a fairly 'vanilla' map without too large a world.

Re:It runs like crap

[spongman]

troll much?

pi@raspberrypi ~/mcpi $ ldd minecraft-pi | grep GL
                libGLESv2.so => /opt/vc/lib/libGLESv2.so (0x400fa000)
                libEGL.so => /opt/vc/lib/libEGL.so (0x40082000)

Re:It runs like crap

[Narishma]

For what it's worth, it runs fine and smoothly on my Pi at 1920x1080. The op is obviously doing something wrong. You don't even need to install any binary blobs, everything that runs on the CPU is open source. The binary blob is the firmware that gets loaded to the GPU before Linux even starts.

Re:Complex?

[kiddygrinder]

it's really just a this is geeky cool thing, full minecraft is a massive resource hog and would be pretty much impossible to run on anything this small.

I'm no programmer, but...

[Legion303]

Isn't MC written in Java? And isn't Java supposed to be platform-independent?

Followup question: Shouldn't it then run on any platform that has a JRE installed?