Minecraft

[civ_king]

Wait, store renderd frames? The only time that I know of where frames are stored is in multipass rendering, which I don't think minecraft uses.

Sorry, I meant rendered chunks which is why the more chunks you have loaded the slower it gets

 

[croxis]

No, only chunks in a given radius around you are loaded at any one time.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

You actually need significantly more RAM when playing because you have to store rendered frames. Of course the higher the resolution Minecraft is being played at the more RAM is needed.

This is pretty much completely false. Minecraft always has the same number of chunks loaded around you, so memory usage from that is near constant. Other things do affect memory usage too though.

Resolution has little to do with RAM usage as well. Resolution uses up VRAM, which is not equivalent to RAM.

 

[civ_king]

This is pretty much completely false. Minecraft always has the same number of chunks loaded around you, so memory usage from that is near constant. Other things do affect memory usage too though.

Resolution has little to do with RAM usage as well. Resolution uses up VRAM, which is not equivalent to RAM.

I have no idea what I was thinking when I posted that, my mind has been off since I got sick.

Also why does Minecraft increase RAM usage during play?

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

I love the single-player bed. Now I can perpetually work in sunlight if I wish.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I have no idea what I was thinking when I posted that, my mind has been off since I got sick.

Also why does Minecraft increase RAM usage during play?

Mobs, flowing resources, items, etc.

 

[MaxaTheGreat]

I found a challenge on the minecraft forums, where you must survive in a cave on the 404 seed:

http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?f=1031&t=190157

 

[Civ'ed]

I only play the free version but still, this is what I managed to make:

Spoiler :

Uploaded with ImageShack.us

A cross dug in Lalibela-style!
(the cross is three blocks tall. At first it was one layer of stone and a lot of dirt but I removed the dirt and added stone instead).

 

[cardgame]

gargamel is a very epic world seed

I have pics HERE


I also stumbled across this parody you should read, as it's highly entertaining.

My Problems With Minecraft Are All Your Fault
by ZMannZilla » Thu Feb 24, 2011 2:53 am

Hello, Minecraft Forums. Long time listener, first time caller. I have a question about Minecraft.

Now, before you reply by saying "your question has already been answered in another thread", let me preemptively retort by saying screw you for not leading me by the hand to that thread, feeding me cookies and milk while I read the thread, explaining all the really big words to me in a language even iPad grannies could understand, and giving me a shoulder to cry on when those solutions still don't answer my highly specific problem as it pertains to the stuttering dung-box I cobbled together, using parts fished from Best Buy's dumpster. You are a poor, poor excuse for unpaid hobbyists, and your unwillingness to baby-step an obnoxious noob through the world of Java on command is why you will all die alone in a syphilis ward.

Sorry if that seemed rude, but my tech issues with a video game warrant this bit of lashing out, as I'm sure you'll agree.

So as the philosopher Will Smith once said, "OK, here's the situation". A couple of days ago, I paid $20 for this "Minecraft" game that the engineers at work won't shut up about. Online reviews and other internet forums promised me a never-ending sandbox adventure, filled to the brim with DIY fun and innovative game play, so I decided to get in on this action. Being no stranger to trading my baby daughter's formula money for digital thrills, I was a little confused when the site wouldn't accept my Nintendo Points Card as sufficient payment. Strike one, "Notch".

Payment rendered and processed, and I'm ready to go. Upon clicking the "download" button, I was immediately plunged into cushion-punching rage when Java leaps out of my DVD-ROM drive, says something very unflattering about my Task Manager's ugliness, poor fashion sense and nocturnal dealings with hobos, and then proceeds to pantomime said habits - using my motherboard as the hobo. It took me 3 Google searches, 7 forum topics and 2 Yahoo Answers to find out that I needed a Java update. Afterwards, Java kept its insults to tame "yo momma" jokes, which my Task Manager still wasn't crazy about, but it coped.

Okay, so now I can finally see the title screen. "MINECRAFT - WOOO! FUNNY YELLOW TEXT!" I click to start the game, and it starts innocently enough with blocky hills and blocky sheep. I go punch some sand, and suddenly my screen freezes, all hell breaks loose, and I hate you all for not telling me why before I even asked you. My RAM begins vomiting on my CPU fan, my hard drive is sending the complete works of Shakespeare to its buddy in Hong Kong using Morse code, and my video card starts constructing a noose from one of my unused power cables. My Task Manager tells me, in a timid and weep-quivered voice, that every available resource is crammed to capacity (I think it wanted to do a Scotty "I'm givin' 'er all she's go' Cap'n!" impression, but, y'know, the whole Java incident from earlier). 6 Google searches, 15 forum topics and 4 phone calls to my engineer buddies later, and the consensus seems to be that my computer needs to be optimized.

Now, I don't know programming so well, and I couldn't tell you the difference between Javascript and a screenplay about Juan Valdez, but I'm pretty sure that a $20 program that takes up 50MB of space, should not require me to defrag my hard drive, shut down processes, run de-gunk software, install a game booster, tweak my video card, attach a leaf blower to my GPU fan, forage more RAM out of Best Buy's dumpster, pump Ex-Lax into the IDE controller, take my computer to a monster truck show and give my life to Christ, just so I can play this cobbled-together mess of what I assume is the worst code ever constructed since Dan Brown's therapist suggested novels as an outlet for his daddy issues. If "Notch" isn't the collective term for 35 Swedish house cats walking across a room full of keyboards, I for one will be very surprised.

After many long and excruciating minutes of optimization, I fire up Minecraft again - "MINECRAFT - WOOO! REFERENCES!". Start game, blocky landscape, punch sand, and now I have a sand block. Punch another sand block, now I have two. Then, I punch a sheep. The sheep took this personally, grabbed my video card, and commanded it at gunpoint to move at 5 FPS while it called in reinforcements to crash my computer into the stone age - and where, might I ask, is the forum thread where you jaded Einsteins address this? Believe me, I looked - 47 Google searches, 947 forum topics and the personal assistance of Jeff Goldblum and his Vorpal Macbook +5 later, and all I could find was some user-written mods - proof that you guys CAN help, but choose not to. I'm making a Christmas Card List just so I can take all of you off of it.

So, the mods. After doing my very best to understand and follow a cryptic list of instructions written in illiterate nerd-speak, featuring such gems as "open this folder" and "please, for the love of all that is good and holy, do NOT forgot to delete this file", I manage to install something called Optimine. Notch sensed a disturbance in the Force, and responded by releasing an update almost immediately afterwards. This required me to spend long, agonizing hours waiting for mod updates. In a search for distraction, I stooped so low as to play Civilization IV, Toribash, Painkiller, Warlords III, Portal, Puzzle Pirates, and finally, with my own infant daughter. Finally, the update came out (about TIME, people - I paid almost $20 whole AMERICAN dollars for this game, where's the doggone customer service???), and I repeated the impossibly complex instructions from earlier. The result - now I can play for about 10 minutes before the sheep draws steel on my processor. At this point, I am convinced that Notch is this generation's Nigerian royalty, and that all these technical issues are just a complex scheme to distract me for 7 days and keep my $20. A REAL programmer would abandon their meatspace lives to fix this issue, and stop hiding behind excuses like "beta" and "known issues with Java" and "we're working on it, no really, here's pictures of us working on it".

After all of this, I am starting to get very very annoyed. I'm sick of this community's refusal to stand idly by as a man they don't know is having grief with a video game. I'm tired of being outwitted by a roomful of cats, snickering at me from their evil fortress in Sweden. But I won't let you win, Internet. I am determined to find some joy in this purchase, and so I will keep playing this hunk of tangled code and broken promises in ten-minute increments until I die of a burst blood vessel. And I hope that my experience has encouraged you lazy jerks to finally give people the help that they ask you so nicely for, the first time they offer it, in simple language and without being a bunch of sarcastic trolls, or else face the wrath of a class-action lawsuit, served by a gorilla in a Mad Max costume.

So, now that I've explained my frustration, here's my question:

How come most of the recipes have a 3X3 grid, but I only have a 2X2 grid in my inventory?

 

[Civ'ed]

That... is gold.

 

[Maniacal]

Sigh, the first result on Google for "crafting" (without quotes) is the Minecraft wiki article showing every single crafting option :/

Though he really does have a point about the mods, the mod and plug in community seems very rushed and poorly organized. Okay I haven't looked at more than a few mods and a number of texture packs and one plug in (towny) but still, not (new) user friendly.

 

[Civ'ed]

Sigh, the first result on Google for "crafting" (without quotes) is the Minecraft wiki article showing every single crafting option :/

Though he really does have a point about the mods, the mod and plug in community seems very rushed and poorly organized. Okay I haven't looked at more than a few mods and a number of texture packs and one plug in (towny) but still, not (new) user friendly.

Actually it's the Runescape wikia article, but nonetheless.

 

[Maniacal]

Actually it's the Runescape wikia article, but nonetheless.

Nope that's second for me. So still playing Runescape then eh?

 

[Luckymoose]

When I played the game I did notice the relative craptastic state of this so called coding. For a game with graphics easily reproduced in a flash game it shouldn't kill a modern PC. Then again you can't expect one guy using java to make a decent game. Swedes aren't known for bug free games anyway.

 

[Civ'ed]

Nope that's second for me. So still playing Runescape then eh?

What no way, stopped that last december! Minecraft is tons better!

 

[Rub'Rum]

When I played the game I did notice the relative craptastic state of this so called coding. For a game with graphics easily reproduced in a flash game it shouldn't kill a modern PC. Then again you can't expect one guy using java to make a decent game. Swedes aren't known for bug free games anyway.

I guess it's the limitations of Java, I dunno... I know that I wanted to run a server for just my gf and myself and it reduced my computer to a crawl, I mean, I do have 4 gigs of RAM it's not too bad. It seems odd that we could play in a huge world like Sacred 2 or GTA 4 in multiplayer in different parts but the way Minecraft is built sort of makes it a lot harder on the hardware. I mean, I know there is a reason why it is like this, but I also know that it probably doesn't have to be like this. I have some hope that they will change the platform in the long-term, but eh.

 

[croxis]

The problem isn't the language, but often how it is coded. My example I often cite is Eve Online by CCP. Most of the game is written in python. What they have found is that, per unit of developer time, there are more speed boosts to improving the python code then porting it to c/c++

I should also point out that when a game is being developed the code is optimized for readability. It makes down the road changes more easy to do. Optimizations for speed and memory is one of the last things that are done before the game is released.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

When I played the game I did notice the relative craptastic state of this so called coding. For a game with graphics easily reproduced in a flash game it shouldn't kill a modern PC. Then again you can't expect one guy using java to make a decent game. Swedes aren't known for bug free games anyway.

Oooooh boy, this argument. Graphics are not everything, especially in a game like minecraft. There are so many things going on in the chunks that are loaded that most of the memory and CPU time goes to that. Sure, there are inefficiencies, but those are in every game, and also the reason why the game is in Beta.

As for the Java comment: did you know that IBM's Watson is partially written in Java? No? Well, Java is not the craptastic piece of molasses it used to be. In fact, it is quite widely used. A good programmer also does not much care which language is being used. It's not Java that makes Java slow, it's crappy Java code that makes Java slow.

I guess it's the limitations of Java, I dunno... I know that I wanted to run a server for just my gf and myself and it reduced my computer to a crawl, I mean, I do have 4 gigs of RAM it's not too bad. It seems odd that we could play in a huge world like Sacred 2 or GTA 4 in multiplayer in different parts but the way Minecraft is built sort of makes it a lot harder on the hardware. I mean, I know there is a reason why it is like this, but I also know that it probably doesn't have to be like this. I have some hope that they will change the platform in the long-term, but eh.

It's not a limitation of Java. The same kind of code in C/++, Python, asm, etc would be just as slow because the code itself is not optimized. Java might make this lack of optimization a little easier to do, especially with it automatically managing memory, but it is by far not the main problem with the code -- it being Java that is.

 

[Skwink]

Well I'm going on a hiatus. I recently broke Minecraft trying to install the MineColony mod into the .jar. Now it doesn't load, and I've had enough Minecraft headaches for a few days.

 

[Maniacal]

Delete folder... start minecraft and it downloads a new .jar, problem solved.