First minecraft was plugged from the teamfortress.com blog, then 2 days of penny arcade were devoted to it, and since then it's been coming up every few days on slashdot and Boing Boing. The servers have been wrecked like 40% of the time from the constant barrage. If you like minecraft stop telling people about it!
I think the lag is caused by having a large render distance. If you set it lower, the game will run smoother.
The thing that irks me is that even if you're facing an opaque wall, if the render distance isn't low, you'll still get a choppy game, which means that it's actually considering drawing blocks that it could've discarded immediately, because they're being obscured by the wall you're facing...
It's probably handling around 10000 times more polygons than Quake, each block is 12 polygons. Java is just passing the data off to OpenGL to do the heavy lifting. Depth culling a scene 1000 blocks deep is going to be quite heavy on the renderer, and it will need algorithmic enhancements rather than programming language enhancements, such as reducing complexity in the distance (which is probably hard for this game, compared to games with 2D terrain meshes).
Guess what? Hidden surface determination [wikipedia.org], including Occlusion Culling is hard(tm), even for completely static scenes! Don't forget this game has a fully modifiable world and lighting (through torches) making it even harder.
I picked up this game a few days back (after this story and finding out about the world size and mine carts...) and I have to say the lighting in this is actually really cool.
What turned me off before was the limited size of the world you were in. Now it's just amazing in scale... if only we could get some DF like minions to push around and maybe some better fluid dynamics I'd stop playing DF: I'd feel bad for Tarn Adams, but that's the way it goes.
Actually MC was compared more than once to DF. Due to the fact it's totally deformable, and red dust circuits give you a lot of complexity for traps and devices. In case you've only tried the free version, there are sometimes free weekends for the alpha, in which the fluid dynamics are a bit better but still not in the level of DF.
Someone even wrote a DF->MC converter so you could import your fortress for a nice 3d visualization:)
I wonder how hard it will it be to bring all that into MC... Doesn't reall
I bought it... twice actually. (Gifting, gotta love it.)
I've been tinkering with different cart boosters and trying to come up with some kind of mine cart death machine seeing how enemies and animals just love to jump into carts. My latest efforts led me to a cart that goes just outside the bounds of calculation though and it's getting me to think more about building my own DF/MC clone with my multi-threading and multi-processing experience. The only caveat to that plan is that I also suck at graphics.
Actually I'm pondering doing the same as well! in my little to none spare time... (and I guess more than a dozen others). Picked up a couple of tutorials on OpenGL 2.0+ (with 3.3 as my target) and it's really quite fascinating how much the world has changed since I originally played a bit with graphics. About the art itself...... I hope to get some friends to help.
So, good luck to you and hopefully the journey will be interesting and fun:)
The dynamic world continues to generate for awhile after you begin playing. Obviously Java is crippling but there are some serious computational problems being solved. Water starts in seed areas and flows outward until it meets walls at the exact height of the start point, and stops there. How would you do that quickly for a 4 billion sq km area?
It doesn't actually work this way - it only computes a smallish area around you and generates as needed from a fixed random seed (so going back to an old area will be the same) + changes you have made.
I put up my thumb... and it blotted out the planet Earth.
-- Neil Armstrong
Stop it, please! (Score:5, Funny)
First minecraft was plugged from the teamfortress.com blog, then 2 days of penny arcade were devoted to it, and since then it's been coming up every few days on slashdot and Boing Boing. The servers have been wrecked like 40% of the time from the constant barrage. If you like minecraft stop telling people about it!
Re: (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Dude, I play Minecraft singleplayer so I really don't care about the servers.
That said, if the server is anything like the client I can see why it can't handle the load. Don't write games in Java idiots.
Re:Stop it, please! (Score:1)
I think the lag is caused by having a large render distance. If you set it lower, the game will run smoother.
The thing that irks me is that even if you're facing an opaque wall, if the render distance isn't low, you'll still get a choppy game, which means that it's actually considering drawing blocks that it could've discarded immediately, because they're being obscured by the wall you're facing...
Re: (Score:2)
Huh, I hadn't heard anything about the game performing poorly. Odd, since it looks worse than Quake.
I'm not complaining about it looking bad, mind you; I'm just surprised that it can't run on a Pentium 1 with all its settings turned up to full.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not complaining about it looking bad, mind you; I'm just surprised that it can't run on a Pentium 1 with all its settings turned up to full.
exactly, that's what happens when you write code in Java. I'm not saying you can't write fast Java code, it just takes more effort.
Re: (Score:2)
Which is wierd.
Why not take a game that was released OSS like Quake II or Quake III and make it into a MMORG like this?
Why make it look like wolfenstine?
Re: (Score:1)
It's probably handling around 10000 times more polygons than Quake, each block is 12 polygons. Java is just passing the data off to OpenGL to do the heavy lifting. Depth culling a scene 1000 blocks deep is going to be quite heavy on the renderer, and it will need algorithmic enhancements rather than programming language enhancements, such as reducing complexity in the distance (which is probably hard for this game, compared to games with 2D terrain meshes).
Re: (Score:1)
Actually this game would probably be ideal for ray tracing. Nothing too complex in terms of reflections or lighting or shading, but lots of geometry.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Guess what? Hidden surface determination [wikipedia.org], including Occlusion Culling is hard(tm), even for completely static scenes!
Don't forget this game has a fully modifiable world and lighting (through torches) making it even harder.
Re: (Score:2)
I picked up this game a few days back (after this story and finding out about the world size and mine carts...) and I have to say the lighting in this is actually really cool.
What turned me off before was the limited size of the world you were in. Now it's just amazing in scale... if only we could get some DF like minions to push around and maybe some better fluid dynamics I'd stop playing DF: I'd feel bad for Tarn Adams, but that's the way it goes.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually MC was compared more than once to DF. Due to the fact it's totally deformable, and red dust circuits give you a lot of complexity for traps and devices.
In case you've only tried the free version, there are sometimes free weekends for the alpha, in which the fluid dynamics are a bit better but still not in the level of DF.
Someone even wrote a DF->MC converter so you could import your fortress for a nice 3d visualization :)
I wonder how hard it will it be to bring all that into MC... Doesn't reall
Re: (Score:2)
I bought it... twice actually. (Gifting, gotta love it.)
I've been tinkering with different cart boosters and trying to come up with some kind of mine cart death machine seeing how enemies and animals just love to jump into carts. My latest efforts led me to a cart that goes just outside the bounds of calculation though and it's getting me to think more about building my own DF/MC clone with my multi-threading and multi-processing experience. The only caveat to that plan is that I also suck at graphics.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually I'm pondering doing the same as well! in my little to none spare time... (and I guess more than a dozen others).
Picked up a couple of tutorials on OpenGL 2.0+ (with 3.3 as my target) and it's really quite fascinating how much the world has changed since I originally played a bit with graphics.
About the art itself...... I hope to get some friends to help.
So, good luck to you and hopefully the journey will be interesting and fun :)
Re: (Score:2)
The dynamic world continues to generate for awhile after you begin playing. Obviously Java is crippling but there are some serious computational problems being solved. Water starts in seed areas and flows outward until it meets walls at the exact height of the start point, and stops there. How would you do that quickly for a 4 billion sq km area?
Re: (Score:2)