next »

[muku]

I've finally found some time this weekend to spend some more quality hours with this fine piece of software. I love it. It gives me a combination of the feelings of playing with Lego (with the added bonus of being able to walk around in your creations) and of exploring strange dark places in the woods as a child. Sometimes while digging around underwater, I would sometimes find huge hidden underwater caverns where there's actually air, and you can only go from one cavern to the other by diving through long water-filled tunnels... so awesome.

Now if only it wouldn't still crash Java every now and then... it seems to have gotten much better, but it still happens. Being able to save alleviates it, but still.

Also, I have some performance problems on my machine. I can sort of play the smallest maps, but everything larger (in particular, multiplayer games) brings my machine to its knees. Notch, do you see potential for optimizations in the engine, or is this about as far as you can push it? It seems to lag particularly when digging.

EDIT: Holy shit, I just tried IE and I seem to get way better framerates than in Firefox.


Anyway, here's some cool stuff I made over the weekend (this is all in one map):

The game handed me a bunch of trees, so of course I did what any self-respecting gentleman would do and built a tree fort with lots of little interconnected platforms:



The large column to the left is actually hollow, and if you jump down it you end up in a super-villain style underwater base made of glass:



This is how it looks from the outside:



There's more, like an underwater airlock into which you have to dive, but it's hard to show in pictures. Do these "play map" links work? http://www.minecraft.net/play.jsp?user=muku&id=0

[Kekskiller]

The link works fine for me! I also discovered a secret hidden-by-wood underwater tunnel close to your little house on the beach.

[Nikica]

Curly &  :

[JLJac]

I was very close to write "the colours are wrong" but instead I ended up hating myself for considering writing that.

[moi]

So what will happen when the game area is filled with one billion cave story figures?

[Aquin]

@moi:  Well, by the time that happens, Minecraft will have re-sizeable server areas (?  )

Then we can just make a bigger map.  Hurray, more Balrog!

[Nikica]

Here goes a weird Balrog because there are only 16 colors but still he looks nice:

[aeiowu]

never forget the zulu church

[Notch]

Notch, do you see potential for optimizations in the engine, or is this about as far as you can push it? It seems to lag particularly when digging.

Does it lag more when the chunk rebuild value is higher? What graphics card do you have?
Perhaps building display lists is extra slow on your setup.

For actual rendering (not the chunk rebuilds), there are two optimizations waiting to happen whenever I get a night free and feel extra high on red bull:

1) Collapse tiles with the same texture and color into a single quad along the u texture axis. This is potentially a massive reduction in visible quads, and actually might speed up chunk rebuilding as well..
2) Occlusion culling! This is hard as nails, but would give fairly immense speedups in corridors and other closed in areas, as long as the actual culling overhead is lower than just rendering the stuff is.


More options for server level size and so are coming, but at the moment I'm focusing on sound and survival.

[muku]

Notch, do you see potential for optimizations in the engine, or is this about as far as you can push it? It seems to lag particularly when digging.

Does it lag more when the chunk rebuild value is higher? What graphics card do you have?

Yes, the chunk rebuild value seemed to play a big role. Also, water flooding a large area lagged like hell. It's a Radeon 9500.

Then again, as I said, I tried the game briefly with IE afterwards, and framerates seemed much higher (average 10-20 FPS in FF, 80-90 FPS in IE), so the issue may not be as bad as I thought it was. I haven't had the time to test extensively how the chunk rebuild stuff was affected in IE. Either way, this also makes me think that an eventual stand-alone version will help a lot (though I understand that the current frequent updates make this unappealing).

[Renton]

I hosted a game and played with Battlerager today. Used a Firefox and got 20-60 fps for about 2 hours and then it rocketed back to 500 fps average.

[Notch]

 
That's a very significant change. Did anything else change, or was it just randomly much faster?

[Renton]

Well 500 is my regular speed, so it's more like a significant drop of speed and then returning to normal. And no, nothing else was changed.

[Massena]

Sadly, I can't join join any servers. I'm on firefox running on OS X 10.4.
I'm getting the red screen saying the server's probably down.

Did anyone have the same problems?

Edit: Just played it online on Windows and it's great fun :D  Made a tree, had a talk and a blast!
The zombie modes and whatever is planned will be a welcomed addition, I reckon. The game does need a little violence

[William Laub]

My sole contribution to this latest server is this underground small Spleef arena that I built with some assistance from Increpare.





I'm expanding it to 55x34, but without lava sponges, I am losing ground more than I gain it.

EDIT: The entire structure has been flooded with lava from top to bottom. It's over.

[Tanner]

I really enjoy this game, but I'm stuck on my netbook until I can get a new motherboard for my desktop. I really wish I could play this without having to make it look like Turok on the n64 with all the fog and such. I'm definitely going to buy it soon, for that one day when I have a respectable computer. Keep up the good work!

[Zaratustra]

GENTLEMEN.

[Renton]

H...h..holy... crap....

[Nikica]

GENTLEMEN.

<picture>

Could we get a closer picture?

[Caio]

Haha, that's awesome, Zara Did you use a bot on a pre-existing map or is that a new map?