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.
1.6.6 server update fixed the disconnect bug -- and the chunk loading error.
ReplyDeleteCheers!
Yea, there's a 1:1 correlation for the y-direction. It's the same 128 size. So, it's basically: Normal World(X,Y,Z) --> (X/8, Y, Z/8)Nether Portals also don't remember what they are linked to. They do a check every time you go to use it.
ReplyDeleteRight, but they check the Y link last. I've had two portals in the Nether at the same Y coords that linked to normal world portals that were separated by 100 or more squares on the Y axis. (By linked, I meant that they'd always travel to the same portal.)
ReplyDeleteIt's a useful way to travel up or down several meters in a moment.