Several new mods.
I've put up descriptions above; it appears at least one of them is making the Nether not work properly. I'm crashing when I leave it, which sometimes necessitates a server restart.
It's a little too late to figure out which one is causing it (assuming it's just one, and not a conflict between two) -- that's what I'll do tomorrow. Not looking forward to it, my server hoster's GUI is truly terrible, so I'll be doing a lot of copy + pasting, file deltion, intentionally crashing Minecraft, then undoing my changes and trying it again. Fortunately, there's only 5 mods, so only like 30ish configurations.
On the bright side, bugs aside, I was able to implement about 99% of what I wanted to do on the server. I'd like to allow Admins to set warp points for free, without having to give themselves the cash to do it, but that's neither here nor there.
The next step? Well, bug-fixing, obviously, then number-smoothing. After that, I'll look at some fun mods (maybe dinos) and play with them, and if I'm really happy with how it turns out, I'll start recruiting users from the forums.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Friday, June 3, 2011
Redstone Fortress
I really, really like redstone. It's a quirky logic puzzle and it's utterly ridiculous -- both things that make something great, in my book. (It's the same reasons I like Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition, even though it's perhaps the least-elegant gaming system I've ever run across.)
In any case, I'll be making some changes to my server (50.23.67.132:25617 -- contact me for a whitelist to join us!) with Bukkit and other mods. Among the changes:
●We'll be adding monsters, but disabling or altering Creeper explosions. Dankcraft turned off their explosions entirely, which is kind of a shame -- they don't inspire much terror there, but their ability to level hard work and allow monsters to stream into your base is incredibly frustrating.
●John really wants furniture. (I do too, but he really, really wants furniture.) We'll be looking for a mod that adds some decent-looking cobble, wooden, etc. chairs and tables.
●There's a great-looking dinosaur mod that I absolutely adore, but I hate its rules -- it spawns aggressives in packs (and server lag means that's essentially a death sentence) and it gives T-Rexes the ability to eat through blocks to get to a character. It also only spawns dinos near a rare block that it adds. If I can change the mod's properties, so dinos are more common, less lethal and can't break blocks, I'll go ahead with it.
●I'd like to have an iConomy plugin replace OP spawning abilities -- the idea being that you could trade in your extra goods for items from the server. Something like 512 cobble: 1 diamond (which is honestly too low, but it's about right for a tiny operation more interested in building than mining). I like mining, but I hate having to mine, if that makes sense. I'll probably have too-high cobble:other values, though -- let people trade in their extra iron, Lapis and cactus for building material, dontcha know.
Finally, I'll be clearing a 30,000ish square meter area to begin work on a massive redstone fortress. The idea is to have a mob-impregnable, self-sealing exterior and a fully automated interior; I want to base it on a real-world castle, but with fantastic, steampunk elements. A centralized rail-cart system will replace the basic one for new players at the Spawn Tower, which will be relegated to "interesting building" status. The ground level -- which will be at sea level -- will be the ground floor, but I plan on dedicating basement levels to redstone circuitry. If you've got an idea for the castle, post it here -- or if you have a suggestion for an interesting real-world castle to base it on.
In any case, I'll be making some changes to my server (50.23.67.132:25617 -- contact me for a whitelist to join us!) with Bukkit and other mods. Among the changes:
●We'll be adding monsters, but disabling or altering Creeper explosions. Dankcraft turned off their explosions entirely, which is kind of a shame -- they don't inspire much terror there, but their ability to level hard work and allow monsters to stream into your base is incredibly frustrating.
●John really wants furniture. (I do too, but he really, really wants furniture.) We'll be looking for a mod that adds some decent-looking cobble, wooden, etc. chairs and tables.
●There's a great-looking dinosaur mod that I absolutely adore, but I hate its rules -- it spawns aggressives in packs (and server lag means that's essentially a death sentence) and it gives T-Rexes the ability to eat through blocks to get to a character. It also only spawns dinos near a rare block that it adds. If I can change the mod's properties, so dinos are more common, less lethal and can't break blocks, I'll go ahead with it.
●I'd like to have an iConomy plugin replace OP spawning abilities -- the idea being that you could trade in your extra goods for items from the server. Something like 512 cobble: 1 diamond (which is honestly too low, but it's about right for a tiny operation more interested in building than mining). I like mining, but I hate having to mine, if that makes sense. I'll probably have too-high cobble:other values, though -- let people trade in their extra iron, Lapis and cactus for building material, dontcha know.
Finally, I'll be clearing a 30,000ish square meter area to begin work on a massive redstone fortress. The idea is to have a mob-impregnable, self-sealing exterior and a fully automated interior; I want to base it on a real-world castle, but with fantastic, steampunk elements. A centralized rail-cart system will replace the basic one for new players at the Spawn Tower, which will be relegated to "interesting building" status. The ground level -- which will be at sea level -- will be the ground floor, but I plan on dedicating basement levels to redstone circuitry. If you've got an idea for the castle, post it here -- or if you have a suggestion for an interesting real-world castle to base it on.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Little errors
Blogger's not the worst thing in the world, but it's got some glitches. For example, it doesn't seem to like Java 1.7 -- I can't edit posts once they're published. When I find errors later -- like "card" rather than "cart," or missing quotation marks in "on," I can't fix them. They live on forever. Sure, I could copy the entire post, make a new post, copy the text in, delete the original post and then republish the copied text, but that's tiresome (and comes with a slew of its own unintendeds).
What's this got to do with Minecraft, you ask?
Well, it's eerily similar to the game's portal system. Redstone circuits are a logic puzzle, but they're straightforward in the sense that they're predictable and always follow the same ruleset. (Aside from server restarts -- which can introduce some really unusual bugs into redstone circuitry. Nothing's easy, you know.) Portals, though, are unintuitive and cumbersome things. Here, I'll show you.
You hop into one --
And you end up in the Nether. It's a miserable place, full of angry ghosts, zombie pigmen and unpleasant blocks of all kinds. The most common, netherrack -- that red stone you see everywhere -- has the useful property of staying ablaze if you light it. It's a great component for mob grinders, particularly ones that harvest piggies -- pigs killed by fire drop cooked porkchops, rather than raw ones.
Turn around, and you see this vista. This is honestly the most amazing Nether spawn I've ever seen; it actually feels ominous and terrifying, rather than blocky and annoying. But we're not here to sightsee or to get attacked by angry ghosts, we're here to set up portals.
And here's a pair of portals I built. The reason they're so great is that the Nether's cardinal directions correspond to the normal world's at an 8:1 ratio. For every step you take in the Nether, you travel eight steps in the normal world (though it's a 1:1 match vertically -- which doesn't matter usually). This means that you can travel very quickly by moving through the Nether. However, portals aren't linked. (That's the first unintuitive thing about them.) Rather, when you hop into a portal going either direction, the game searches a certain number of squares in each cardinal direction for a portal in the other world. (That "certain number" is a 256 by 256 square in the Nether or a 2,048 by 2,048 square in the real world.) It checks in a spiral, starting with the square you're at; vertical location seems to be the tiebreaker for two equidistant portals. This means that portals typically bias toward overland travel; this feels intuitive at first, until you try making portals match up. Then it feels lunatic barmy crazy. It only gets worse when you're putting bunches of tightly packed portals to travel vertically, as I'm doing here. Two things can happen in that situation -- the first is that the portal's proximity means that even a single square can change a portal's destination. (You avoid that by giving some cardinal distance between your normal world portals, but it happens sometimes.) The second is that two portals are separated vertically enough that the destination gets thrown off -- and then you have to whip out the old Pythagorean theorem and figure out how far down you gotta bury your portal to make it work. Another frustration is that, when a portal has nowhere to connect to (as your first portal won't), it creates a portal in a seemingly random fashion to connect to. This creates even more unintuitive behavior -- the first time I created a second overland portal, it linked my right back to the same Nether portal. That kind of behavior sets up an expectation -- that portals will create links to each other -- and then dashes it when they don't. It's kind of the definition of unintuitive. Here's the kicker -- because of the semi-random nature of portal placement, you often have to tear down your auto-generated portal to make your placed ones work. The whole thing is a mess of "huh"-inspiring rules!
So here's where the Blogger comparison comes in -- it takes something like 15 or 20 seconds to break down an obsidian block with a diamond pick. When you misplace a portal -- as I did earlier when I got some poorly labeled coordinates mixed up -- you have to break down 10 obsidian squares. It's only like two minutes to break down a portal, but I dread it. It's the most excruciating timesink in the game (though it's nowhere near the worst one). I COULD just rip down one square in a portal and then cheat in the next one, which I don't have a problem doing on the multiplayer server -- but I hate leaving that obsidian up. It looks tacky and it's confusing. On a legitimate server, obsidian's a precious resource, so leaving it behind is an economic issue.
This is the new portal. It correctly links to my mineshaft, meaning I can leave that particular normal-world eyesore hidden completely underground. I was fortunate that I only had to move one portal, and it was user error, not finnicky-game-mechanics error, that caused the misdirect. Blogger isn't so fortunate -- its Javascript:void(0) errors are finnicky nonsense that I refuse to bother with.
Man, this really is a pretty Nether. All that blue sky is a huge bug; on multiplayer 1.6 servers, when you portal to someplace, whatever world you logged into -- Nether or normal -- will be rendered in the distance. (The normal world looks very unusual with Nether skies.) When you travel back to your point of origin, you get disconnected; it's a little aggravating. As pretty as this Nether is, I'm looking forward to a bug fix.
What's this got to do with Minecraft, you ask?
Well, it's eerily similar to the game's portal system. Redstone circuits are a logic puzzle, but they're straightforward in the sense that they're predictable and always follow the same ruleset. (Aside from server restarts -- which can introduce some really unusual bugs into redstone circuitry. Nothing's easy, you know.) Portals, though, are unintuitive and cumbersome things. Here, I'll show you.
You hop into one --
And you end up in the Nether. It's a miserable place, full of angry ghosts, zombie pigmen and unpleasant blocks of all kinds. The most common, netherrack -- that red stone you see everywhere -- has the useful property of staying ablaze if you light it. It's a great component for mob grinders, particularly ones that harvest piggies -- pigs killed by fire drop cooked porkchops, rather than raw ones.
Turn around, and you see this vista. This is honestly the most amazing Nether spawn I've ever seen; it actually feels ominous and terrifying, rather than blocky and annoying. But we're not here to sightsee or to get attacked by angry ghosts, we're here to set up portals.
And here's a pair of portals I built. The reason they're so great is that the Nether's cardinal directions correspond to the normal world's at an 8:1 ratio. For every step you take in the Nether, you travel eight steps in the normal world (though it's a 1:1 match vertically -- which doesn't matter usually). This means that you can travel very quickly by moving through the Nether. However, portals aren't linked. (That's the first unintuitive thing about them.) Rather, when you hop into a portal going either direction, the game searches a certain number of squares in each cardinal direction for a portal in the other world. (That "certain number" is a 256 by 256 square in the Nether or a 2,048 by 2,048 square in the real world.) It checks in a spiral, starting with the square you're at; vertical location seems to be the tiebreaker for two equidistant portals. This means that portals typically bias toward overland travel; this feels intuitive at first, until you try making portals match up. Then it feels lunatic barmy crazy. It only gets worse when you're putting bunches of tightly packed portals to travel vertically, as I'm doing here. Two things can happen in that situation -- the first is that the portal's proximity means that even a single square can change a portal's destination. (You avoid that by giving some cardinal distance between your normal world portals, but it happens sometimes.) The second is that two portals are separated vertically enough that the destination gets thrown off -- and then you have to whip out the old Pythagorean theorem and figure out how far down you gotta bury your portal to make it work. Another frustration is that, when a portal has nowhere to connect to (as your first portal won't), it creates a portal in a seemingly random fashion to connect to. This creates even more unintuitive behavior -- the first time I created a second overland portal, it linked my right back to the same Nether portal. That kind of behavior sets up an expectation -- that portals will create links to each other -- and then dashes it when they don't. It's kind of the definition of unintuitive. Here's the kicker -- because of the semi-random nature of portal placement, you often have to tear down your auto-generated portal to make your placed ones work. The whole thing is a mess of "huh"-inspiring rules!
So here's where the Blogger comparison comes in -- it takes something like 15 or 20 seconds to break down an obsidian block with a diamond pick. When you misplace a portal -- as I did earlier when I got some poorly labeled coordinates mixed up -- you have to break down 10 obsidian squares. It's only like two minutes to break down a portal, but I dread it. It's the most excruciating timesink in the game (though it's nowhere near the worst one). I COULD just rip down one square in a portal and then cheat in the next one, which I don't have a problem doing on the multiplayer server -- but I hate leaving that obsidian up. It looks tacky and it's confusing. On a legitimate server, obsidian's a precious resource, so leaving it behind is an economic issue.
This is the new portal. It correctly links to my mineshaft, meaning I can leave that particular normal-world eyesore hidden completely underground. I was fortunate that I only had to move one portal, and it was user error, not finnicky-game-mechanics error, that caused the misdirect. Blogger isn't so fortunate -- its Javascript:void(0) errors are finnicky nonsense that I refuse to bother with.
Man, this really is a pretty Nether. All that blue sky is a huge bug; on multiplayer 1.6 servers, when you portal to someplace, whatever world you logged into -- Nether or normal -- will be rendered in the distance. (The normal world looks very unusual with Nether skies.) When you travel back to your point of origin, you get disconnected; it's a little aggravating. As pretty as this Nether is, I'm looking forward to a bug fix.
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