The Word of Notch

So after fixing some bugs today, I went to Green Meadows (or whatever gröna lund is in English) with Elin. We went on Insane, Free fall, The Broom, The Amusing House and The Catapult. Fun times!

In Minecraft, it seems mostly stable, but there are some reports on java crashing without a trace, and opera not behaving very well at all. I think a stand-alone (possibly download, possibly webstart) version of the game might work much better, since applets and lwjgl isn’t the most well tested environment on earth. I’ll spend more time on debugging, and I need to start keeping track of memory usage. When my Eee can run the game, I’m happy. =)

Some movies posted on tigsource:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCvsyTjCJi4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvcElrs4eb0

It has trouble running well on intel cards (including on my Eee, unfortunately), and there’s some strange crash bug on some versions of opera, but it’s relatively stable now:

We’re talking “a couple of minutes” soon.

Creative mode

You’ve got infinite materials and build without any delay. Can be played both as singleplayer and as multi player. You can share the maps with other players somehow. Perhaps just share the actual .level file manually?

Survival mode

Singleplayer / cooperative. You have a health bar and need to eat in order to keep healthy. You have to gather the materials you wish to use, and construction takes time. Mining through stone is slower than through dirt. Monsters, animals, play on levels made in Creative mode, or play on random levels.

Does this mode need a goal?

Team survival mode

Same as Survival mode, except players are divided into two or more teams.

Fortress mode

I finished a simple random level generator (it’s not very good yet), implemented support for different tile types, added particles, and added support for dynamic tiles. The first dynamic tile is the Grass tile. Grass dies (becomes dirt) in shade, expands to neighboring dirt tiles in sunlight.

Right now you build blocks with the left mouse button and remove them with the right mouse button, and the highlight in the world shows the currenly hovered edge. This leads to confusion, as the two mouse buttons operate on different sides of the rendered feedback, and it’s not always clear where a new tile will be placed, so instead I’m going to switch it so the right mouse button switches between place tile and remove tile. The outline will show a transparent tile of the correct type and in the right location in create mode, and a flashing red tint in remove mode. I’m also going to add a timer to create/remove blocks, so you have to keep the mouse button pressed for a short while. The actual time will depend on what type of block you’re interacting with.

(This is the same video as in my first post. No progress yet.)

Star Trek was an awesome movie experience. It had phasers and transporters and cores and “I’m a doctor not a physicist” and Simon Pegg and pissed off aliens destroying everything in sight.

JJ Abrams really knows how to entertain the audience. I’ve been a total lost sucker since the start, and I loved Cloverfield. It certainly shows that he tried so very hard to be true to the original Star Trek movies in this one. The lingo makes sense, the characters are recognizable (if a bit flat, but I guess they always were) and modern.

But my god, the plot.. It’s possibly the weakest plot I’ve ever suffered through. I don’t mind the fancy action sequences or the unlikely weapons at all, that’s the “fiction” part of “science fiction”, but what I DO mind are the horrible and frequent total coincidences in the movie. It’s never explained why certain insanely improbable things happen, and sometimes it’s even suggested to REALLY be coincidence. I assume these things are in there because it makes for a more entertaining movie, which kind of makes sense, but when writing science fiction, you really have to be able to answer the eternal question:

Why?

Deus ex machina is usually not entertaining, and it’s even less so when it’s just used to set up the basic plot in a movie several freaking times.

The awesome but insane people in #tigirc helped me come up with a title for this game, and it’s Minecraft: Order of the Stone.

Last night was good. I managed to speed up rendering somewhat, add tile/face picking, tile removal, tile adding, and I moved physics handling to a separate generic parent class, added a very silly character model (see previous entry), animated it, added physics to it, and made a hundred randomly roaming mobs walk the map with proper player physics on all.

Actually, that makes me sound faster than I am. The character graphics and modelling was already done for an earlier scrapped project of mine (a GTA: China Town Wars type renderer in pure java). I realized their blocky design would fit very well in this game, and the low texture resolution means that every player can have a totally unique skin, uploaded to the the other players when he or she joins the game.