Minecraft Enterprise and 16-Bit ALU 151
tekgoblin writes "Joshua Walker spent the last few months creating a masterpiece. He created the Starship Enterprise 1701-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation in Minecraft using just blocks. He recorded a short video of him explaining how he did it and even gave us a sneak peek at the partially completed ship." He also posted on the Penny-Arcade forums about how he did it. If you aren't impressed by that, perhaps you should check out a 16-Bit ALU also implemented in Minecraft which totally reminded me of one of my favorite XKCD comics.
Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:5, Informative)
It is true. Massive block constructions and fluid flow logic were there first.
Source for TFA (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:3, Informative)
Power may be unlimited, but scale isn't. Apparently there's a certain distance that Minecraft makes active, so he can't expand the system beyond that distance.
Re:I watched the ALU video earlier today... (Score:2, Informative)
The ALU is from the "Hack" CPU described in this book: The Elements of Computing Systems, Building a Modern Computer from First Principles [mit.edu]
Minecraft Tux (Score:3, Informative)
Some of our local LUG people have gotten bit by the minecraft bug. We've built a massive multiplayer island. Some of the locations include Lua Beach, Torvalds Torrent, FreeBSD falls, and Xen caverns. We also have logic gate fields, where members are working on a binary adder. Working already are various logic gates. One of our members built tux out of blocks (who also doubles as a water slide!).
http://plug.org/mc_tux.png [plug.org]
This game is soooo addicting. Don't get sucked in. The best phrase I've heard describe minecraft went something like this... This game is crap. It is full of bugs and nothing works. I hate it, hate it, hate it! I'm logging in right now.
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:3, Informative)
It shows a repeater on that wiki page that extends the range. Not surprisingly it also introduces a slight delay. You could extend the signal as far as you want with enough repeaters and as long as you’re willing to tolerate the delay.
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:3, Informative)
The purpose of the electrical stuff was obstinately for much simpler reasons: Control of in-game elements. Doors open/close when powered, power can set off explosives and alter the direction of mine cart tracks. You have buttons and levers and pressure plates to provide temporary power and the red torches provide constant power unless powered themselves.
Boolean logic is just so simple that it doesn't take much more to implement a whole computer based on it.
=Smidge=
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. It uses OpenGL accelerated graphics tiles. The most common tileset is mayday.
http://df.magmawiki.com/index.php/Graphics
http://afteractionreporter.com/2010/04/02/new-version-of-dwarf-fortress-with-mayday-tileset/
Re:Stop it, please! (Score:3, Informative)
From what I understand, the speed issues of Minecraft are not so much due to Java but the poor OpenGL bindings available to Java applications. According to Notch (Minecraft's author), the engine computations themselves are only slightly slower than they would have been in C++.
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Meh. Dwarf Fortress did it first. (Score:3, Informative)
They DON'T come out at the same time. That's plainly evident in the video. It's not clear if the thing even has a clock generator.
I was thinking about the difficulties regarding timing as well - especially important if he plans to add memory cells or anything with a shared bus. Some kind of buffer + "operation done" signal would be needed, since even careful planning to make equal-time circuits is no guarantee the game will calculate and update all paths at the proper times. Just makes it all the more impressive if he pulls it off, IMHO.
This statement makes me wonder if you actually understand what he did...
=Smidge=