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Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

github.com

101–110 of 154 posts

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#101
post #99
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard disagree. Severs aren't free to run. They're welcome to recoup those costs and even make a profit from providing a valuable service. Ethically they're doing nothing wrong by letting people play a 30-year-old game for free, even if they're in violation of our utterly insane copyright laws.

I didn’t see any statement on the site that the ads and donations were ringfenced to cover server costs.

Sure, I said they're welcome to make a profit.

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#103
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the high-effort comment! Has there ever been any community-led effort to create and maintain a "Minecraft spec" (similar to the Tetris spec) and make an open source reference implementation, or is the game to complex for that? Kind of surprising Mojang didn't go into that direction (e.g. to match Redstone behavior).

Modders have done so; I believe the Minecraft map data structure, at least for the Java version (because it can be decompiled), is pretty well understood. The client/server protocol as used nowadays (?) was actually developed as an open source project at first, because the open source server software ended up being better than their own in-house one.

There is Minetest, which has at least one configuration that attempts to mimic vanilla Minecraft, but I'm not certain how accurate it is.

The stored data structures are well understood for both versions. See for example https://www.amuletmc.com/ (Editor, Python) or https://github.com/df-mc/dragonfly/tree/master/server/world/... (Code, Go)

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#104
post #43
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently got into Minecraft due to kid reaching Minecraft age. I keep meaning to write an intro for technical parents, because it's very confusing at first. The original was written in Java, and people decompiled and reverse engineered it almost completely, so there are tons of mods that reach in and change things deeply. They then created MCPE (pocket edition) which was a "cut-down mobile edition". That evolved in…

Thank you for the high-effort comment! Has there ever been any community-led effort to create and maintain a "Minecraft spec" (similar to the Tetris spec) and make an open source reference implementation, or is the game to complex for that? Kind of surprising Mojang didn't go into that direction (e.g. to match Redstone behavior).

IIUC, aside from non-deterministic timing of simultaneous updates, the things that are different about redstone in bedrock are mostly things that _could_ be considered bugs. eg. block spitting (extending a sticky piston for only one tick leaves a pushed block behind, rather than pulling it back in, which makes flying machines more compact in Java), and BUD power (interaction between block updates and redstone state changes)

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#105
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The invisible majority of players uses Bedrock. The majority of players that stream/post videos or use/write mods use Java. If you want to play with friends (Macos, Linux etc.) you need Java, because Bedrock is Windows and consoles only.

Interestingly, it looks like the Bedrock-based "Education Edition" is on MacOS, but normal Bedrock is not.

Yes. So clearly it's not a question of being able to run, or of weird graphics quirks or something. It's a strange omission. Given that Mojang is now owned by Microsoft, it's slightly suspicious…

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#106
post #87

Pretty cool! If people are still interested in playing city builder games, I am in the middle of developing one right now. I cleared the CPU hurdle of path finding via developing my own algorithm ( old demo here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q0l87hwmkI ). Here I am pathing around 300,000 units to their own unique destinations. Unfortunately I dont have a video update yet, but my game's graphics are now isometric…

Thank you for sharing!

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#107
post #20
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not playing Minecraft, but this has fascinated me from afar. AIUI, Microsoft has two teams on two different continents essentially developing two very similar but subtly incompatible versions of the same game. Funky. Do they share any code or formats? Are the client/server interoperable? Does the C++ one even have a server implementation?

Servers are not interoperable by default. There is 3rd party software that acts as a proxy letting Bedrock players connect to Java servers but it'll just remove anything that the more limited client doesn't support. They both use completely different network stacks, Bedrock using RakNet over UDP, Java using Netty (?) over TCP, so they have to be translated accordingly.

You can use Geyser [0] to "bridge the gap" to Bedrock clients. There are bugs here and there, but it works pretty great to get everyone on the same server.

[0] https://geysermc.org/

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#108
post #72
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Playclassic.games does not intend to violate any copyright or violate any license of a game. I thought there was a chance this site might have arranged licenses from the original publishers, funded by revenue from the (many) ads, but no, it appears to be good old fashioned piracy. Edit: I tried Settlers, which has one of those copy-protection systems that involves entering information that can be found in the print…

Hard disagree. Severs aren't free to run. They're welcome to recoup those costs and even make a profit from providing a valuable service. Ethically they're doing nothing wrong by letting people play a 30-year-old game for free, even if they're in violation of our utterly insane copyright laws.

A website costs a few bucks a month to run and the files should be distributed via BitTorrent anyway. This service could be funded by any single individual.

Re: Convert SimCity 2000 cities into Minecraft worlds

#109
I hope we can all begin to learn some lessons from stuff like this; I think this kind of thing is the only path to a remotely interesting "metaverse" to the extent that such an idea is valuable.

And it's so weird. It's obvious that private companies buying game properties is very often death and annoyance -- but it's (sadly to me) equally obvious that straight-up "nothing but free open source" is unlikely to get the engagement and interest. (e.g. otherwise Minetest would have taken over Minecraft a while ago)

I have no good answers here, but I hope people think about the question?

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