Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Game: Minecraft Earth

minecraft.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 233 posts

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#161

Post by mos_basik »

4bpp wrote: post #143
wilg wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would imagine it would be really hard to make the voxel coordinate system spatially coherent over the whole planet, so placing smallish regions of buildable space at various geotagged points seems like a pragmatic approach. You could still design it to get the types of interactions you're after. Edit: To clarify I think it’s hard because of the earth not being flat but also because of the difficulty of syncing AR t…

Good point about the coordinate system; you'd run into one sort of trouble or another if you want to go with anything that's approximately "cubes" (i.e. say each voxel is a "cube" of fixed height × fixed #degrees of latitude × fixed #degrees of longitude) unless you exclude two circles of the planet's surface from the game (say, some radius around each of the poles), and even then, you would have to contend with voxe…

Oh man - the thought of trying to build structures with "straight" walls using triangular prisms is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Entirely aside from the impossibility of creating smooth surfaces and right angles - I can imagine coming up with a pattern that reasonably approximates a straightness (to a viewer at a reasonable distance, just like Minecraft's current diagonal patterns [0]) at least on a local scale but which would quickly require somewhat ad-hoc and constant adjustment for structures past a certain size.

I assume the center of gravity of such a world would be the actual center of mass of however the voxels are arranged, meaning players could affect it with large enough structures or small enough worlds. Without adjusting "straight" "horizontal" structures to conform the curvature of the world, gravity would no longer be a force that was normal to the surface of the structure at some points on it.

I can also imagine people digging to the center of a world to find the gravity flip-flop point and playing with it. Or hollowing out the interior of the world in order to get a zero-G chamber (assuming no atmosphere) [1]. Or building gravity trains [2].

[0] https://imgur.com/a/0J5RoE1

[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshel...

[2] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gravity_train

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#162

Post by andrepd »

skohan wrote: post #44

This reminds me of when I first discovered Minecraft in university. I was just going to play for a couple hours before bed, and I got sucked into the game-loop and before I knew it the sun was coming up. A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Min…

>A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train.

This is called the tetris effect. I've had it with, you guessed it, tetris. Whenever I get a bout of addiction and play tetris for an hour at a time I get up from the computer and just start seeing the stuff around me start fitting together in an interlocking fashion.

Happened with 2048 as well, I vividly remember being stopped at a red light and feeling the car in front of me fusing the one ahead to make a bigger-numbered car. Very weird.

Happens when coding as well, in fact it is happening right now as I type this! I'm having this very strong urge to wrap all "key" words in this post [like so], in ocaml documentation syntax.

(* Brains are weird! *)

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#163

Post by andrepd »

jordache wrote: post #108
saddestcatever wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft is one of the few games that I think everyone should try. It's not just "another video game", but something quite unique. It hits a certain part of the brain in both "creative expression" and "exploring the unknown" that we exercise so rarely in day to day life (or in other games). It's no wonder it really sticks with kids and becomes a way for them to express imagination. Make sure you sit down and try pla…

the tedious mining is definitely unique... holding down the mouse button to mine is creative expression?

>holding down the mouse button to mine

And football is just kicking a ball in a pitch, and racing games is just going in circles in a track. Obviously there's more to it than that simplistic reduction. In particular, you have to think where you mine, how you organise your explorations. Then, you can run into myriad things as you explore: caves, water, lava, dungeons, monster spawners, many types of ore and rock...

And if you don't fancy that and just want the equivalent of a bottomless box of legos, just fire up creative mode.

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#164

Post by ds206 »

jsilence wrote: post #80
saddestcatever wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minecraft is one of the few games that I think everyone should try. It's not just "another video game", but something quite unique. It hits a certain part of the brain in both "creative expression" and "exploring the unknown" that we exercise so rarely in day to day life (or in other games). It's no wonder it really sticks with kids and becomes a way for them to express imagination. Make sure you sit down and try pla…

What would be a sensible minimum age for minecraft?

My daughter started around 4 after she could hold an Xbox 1 controller. She could hardly push any buttons or move the characters around in the beginning, but within a few weeks she had mastered the common stuff. She usually sticks to creative mode because the monsters used to scare her. She got over that too after learning how to spawn them herself and then it became: how many skeletons can I fit in my house? It's been amazing to watch her growth.

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#165

Post by BubRoss »

fenomas wrote: post #97
ralphstodomingo wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations! Really cool of them and you. Is there a statement from Minecraft how much they'll be developing this?

Thank you! But I don't know a thing about it - I only found out it existed because an internet citizen looked at the source and let me know.

It's a little bizarre that they didn't get in touch with you at all.

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#166

Post by soulofmischief »

Qwertystop wrote: post #120
soulofmischief wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ideas introduced in the GO app have moved into actual Pokemon titles, notable the "no fight, just throw to catch pokemon" mechanic Which is why I won't be buying the Let's Go series... I might as well be watching TLC reality TV shows all day for all the intellectual stimulation I'm getting out of swiping pokeballs with my finger. I'm mainly curious as to how team Mojang plans to solve multiple builds in the same lo…

> Which is why I won't be buying the Let's Go series... I might as well be watching TLC reality TV shows all day for all the intellectual stimulation I'm getting out of swiping pokeballs with my finger. Wild battles were never especially intellectually stimulating anyway? Even trainer battles are only sometimes of any particular interest beyond grinding, and those are still in Let's Go completely unchanged.

There is significantly more intellectual stimulation in encountering a Pokémon, determining if it is worth capturing (good base stats, rare personality, rare moves, colors, etc), and choosing from a set of capture strategies depending on the circumstance.

Maybe this Pokémon flees if attacked or frightened. That's OK, use Bind with a high-speed starter. Needs a particular status condition? Can't get their health too low? Only a particular grade ball works? Only a special ball made out of fruit by some weird creep in the neck of the woods? They only come out at certain times? You have to track their migration patterns? Hold certain items? Complete certain tasks?

Little to none of these nuances carried over to the Let's Go series in their fleshed-out form. Sure, a lifetime of grinding out wild battles makes them feel a bit stale, but it doesn't mean the nuance isn't there. It just becomes routine for experienced players. These experienced players feel like they have nothing to do or think about when the entire strategy is just repeatedly flicking a Pokéball with their thumb.

Ultimately, design choices like this meant to bring in the casual audience are cheap and non-cognizant of veteran fans. You think Nintendo would have learned from this after failing to recapture most of the transient market acquired during the Wii run once they attempted to usher in the Wii U.

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#167

Post by ajnin »

steve_taylor wrote: post #104
behringer wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and now the reason for the GNU GPL license becomes apparent. If some unfathomably wealthy corporation founded by one of the richest person to have ever lived isn't going to pay you for your work, at least you can get something out of it by making them open source their work.

If this library was GPL licensed, Mojang/Microsft wouldn’t have bothered taking the time to even evaluate it.

That's an interesting dilemma. If your goal is to get your source code to be used by lots of people, then it seems logical to use an as permisive license as possible to "compete" with other open source projects. But it might be short-sighted, because then if your code gets incorporated in proprietary projects it may become used a lot, but it won't propagate, it won't generate new projects that might get even more use. If on the other hand you want to get your source code into the hands of as many people as possible (that is not only users but empowered ones), that's different, and a licence like the GPL that is inherited (I don't like the term "viral" very much, it seems too pejorative) seems better, but then they can't compete against more permissive licences, so they can't "reproduce" that well either !

This is a "tragedy of the commons" of sorts. If all open source projects could collaborate and choose a single license, what would it be ?

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#168

Post by jtl999 »

oneepic wrote: post #128
fenomas wrote: post #84

Since there's not much info on this, and since I missed the relevant thread last week, I'll just note here for the record that Mojang's other recent release, a browser-based retro game called Minecraft Classic, was built on my voxel game engine. [game] https://classic.minecraft.net/ [engine] https://github.com/andyhall/noa/ if anyone's interested. It's pretty weird waking up one morning to find out that Mojang built…

Interesting note indeed. I remember there being a different Minecraft Classic mode from somewhere around 2009-10 that just ran on Java and you could play it through a browser (Java applet I guess) or download a Java client. The server was in Java too, of course. So perhaps they decided to rewrite it in JS? I used to be an admin on one server and split my time between building stuff and banning griefers/undoing the gr…

Minecraft Classic was the original Java based game around that time.

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#169

Post by RHSeeger »

vidarh wrote: post #133
retube wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can a server be hosted at home, or does it need to be on a proper hosting platform? Windows or linux?

On top of what others have mentioned: There are basically two version of Minecraft at this point. The "classic" Java version, and the MCPE version, which is what you get on Apple devices, Android and the "native" Windows 10 version. The latter has "realms", where you can just pay to have Microsoft host it for you, and is tied into Xbox Live.

I play what I thought way the recent version and I can play with my daughter (on the same LAN) by selecting Friends and clicking her game.

Re: New Game: Minecraft Earth

#170

Post by agency »

skohan wrote: post #44

This reminds me of when I first discovered Minecraft in university. I was just going to play for a couple hours before bed, and I got sucked into the game-loop and before I knew it the sun was coming up. A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Min…

That reminds me of when I first discovered emulators as a kid and was playing a lot of SNES Mario classics and shamelessly abusing the quicksave/load functionality. I was playing so much I remember walking around IRL and having the thought pop into my head "this would be a good time to quicksave"
Post reply on HN