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In my opinion, at this extreme, it becomes more like work, not fun. Might as well use the brain cells for building a "real" game.
I'm honestly curious: where do you think the boundary between work and play occurs here? It seems to me that many of those that make those mods do it mostly as a recreation, don't you think?
a) complexity
b) failure rate
c) consequences
Paul Falstad did (and does) all the heavy lifting for this project, but the co-host of the JS version at lushprojects.com is my site and I did the original port from a Java applet to a GWT application that complies to JS. Glad to know so many people find it useful. I always thought it was a great visualisation tool which I why I wanted to put the effort in to do the port. Off to bed now, but if people have questions…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm honestly curious: where do you think the boundary between work and play occurs here? It seems to me that many of those that make those mods do it mostly as a recreation, don't you think?
> where do you think the boundary between work and play occurs here? a) complexity b) failure rate c) consequences
I don't think complexity alone is a game stopping issue. There are plenty of highly complex games that people find fun and addictive. But complexity in combination with high failure rates (a lot of trial and error) will kill the fun.
But I think that high complexity with low error rates is perhaps exactly what makes a game fun. If you can express yourself freely and roam around while expecting most of your actions to produce an interesting result the game will be very interesting.
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People don't realize how much crazy stuff originates from minecraft. For instance, battle royale (e.g. fortnite, pubg, realm royale, etc). That came from a minecraft mod based on hunger games before Arma+dayZ implemented it on their end. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_royale_game But there's way more cooler stuff than that coming out of minecraft. We have people building full blown computers in minecraft too. E…
The full blown computers running in Minecraft has made me hope for more games that make computation an integrated part of game mechanics. Like what if parts of the game code where represented as the environment. So that you can build your own game. Perhaps you can mod the game from inside the game. Or perhaps something more controlled, like modifying the level generation by interacting with the level itself.
You know, speaking of which, I actually learned FORTH from Minecraft.
Years ago, there was a now-defunct mod, Redpower 2, that massively expanded on the game's existing redstone mechanics. Redstone wires that could be run on walls and ceilings, insulated wires, bundled cables that carried 16 signals in parallel, a plethora of single-block logic gates, and a huge array of added features like the motorized "frames" that let you move huge constructions all at once, or the sophisticated pneumatic-tube networks for moving, routing, and sorting items. It was hugely popular; many features it introduced worked themselves so deeply into the modded community that clones copying many of its mechanics would remain popular to this day.
And one of the things it added, in one update, was a computer - specifically, an emulated custom 6502 variant (the 65EL02) with 8K of RAM (expandable to 64K), and a boot disk for a FORTH-based operating system to run on it. (Some dedicated users did code up other operating systems; someone ported BASIC to the thing, although it took up an awful lot of that limited memory)
Nobody had ever seen anything like it in the modded community, and a lot of children (including me) made at least a nominal effort to learn some basic FORTH so we could build things like password-locked doors, or pilot frame-based flying machines to do useful things like quarry out half the world and deliver it to our doorstep. Lots of more advanced stuff got built, too - 3D printers, computer-controlled automatic crafting systems, teleporters with selectable destinations.
The Redpower computers ended up not terribly popular, in the end - FORTH, being a language from 1970 that nobody had heard of before and which didn't look much like anything else most Minecraft players had ever used, proved a pretty intimidating barrier to entry; and shortly after Redpower introduced their feature someone else made their own mod that added Lua-based computers with a much less barebones OS and friendlier ways of interacting with useful functionality. This had a much easier time taking off.
I used and enjoyed circuitlab.io until it went for-pay only. Nice to have an easy to use free alternative for very casual hobbyists like me.
That would be https://www.circuitlab.com/ -- I built it :) Edit: if anyone wants, reply with your CircuitLab username and I'll give you a free membership upgrade when I get home this evening.
I wanted to build this from source to use offline, but so far I can't figure out how; the source is in Java, compiled to JS with GWT, and I haven't figured out how to install GWT yet. I've really enjoyed using it online. Has anyone done a validation study comparing this simulator to a known-good simulator like Berkeley SPICE?
You can download a jar version, though perhaps it's older code. Still works fine: www.falstad.com/circuit-java/
The validation question is interesting to me because I'd like to do things that go beyond just academic exercises, so I'd like to know how much confidence to have that the physical devices behave as modeled.