Here is a comic which is all about Call of Duty. And not Minecraft. Heavens no. We’re talking about real games now. Serious games.
Call of Duty. Not Minecraft.
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Raytracing
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
The Gradient of Plot Holes
Most stories have plot holes. The failure isn't that they exist, it's when you notice them while immersed in the story.
You may want to post the link with this one.
[Edit] Or maybe I just looked at this too quickly.
First not setting Spoiler Warning to public, now lack of link!
I bet that if Minecraft is ever converted to other platforms, it will be much more serious threat for World of Warcraft than any other multiplayer game.
I’m not seeing a link there either. Makes me wonder if Shamus isn’t a little bit distracted…
That missing link is the product of…err,so many hours spent on making that comic,yeah,thats it.Nothing to do with minecraft,no siree.
Hum.. Shamus, not that I want to bother you, but have you received my emails?
I have not. I was planning on doing a “if you haven’t heard from me by now, then I haven’t heard from you” post this week. I’m actually really alarmed by the number of people who say have emailed me with no response.
I am beginning to suspect that Thunderbird’s spam filter is a kleptomaniac.
I had just assumed that you were too good for us little folk! ;)
That is strange, I will try to send you from an alternate email adress. Do you think you could just confirm reception on receival?
Darn, I have been growing white hair because of your spam filter :-P
Sent a few seconds ago
Chalk me up in the “sent an email but don’t think it got through” category, too. Don’t worry about it if you’re busy, though. :)
In fact, there have been two or three occasions with similar results in the past several weeks. Perhaps Thunderbird is not friends with gmail? I don’t know why that would be, however…
Strange. I use Thunderbird and it seems to work just fine.
Then again I refused to update it, since from what I hear the updates turn it into crap.
The address is 10 years old and I was not particularly secretive about it. About 50 spams make it through the adaptive filter and must be manually sorted. Now I’m thinking the AF eats some valid ones as well.
Well, if you haven’t received it by now, I think I will have to find another way to contact you. Do you have an alternative email you could use?
If yes, I’ll write down my email address here and you could simply delete it after you wrote it down?
edit: but it will have to wait for later tonight, leaving the office/computer
All right. I fully 100% hope you delete this comment once you took note of my email. (also MSN, if you use it)
remimaloney at internet dot look dot ca
Again, I hope you would be interested in my proposition. It is sound, AFAIK, and financially viable, and could give us further future opportunities.
All right, you can delete this.
Not even interested in giving me a reply, apparently.
Its possible. From what I’ve seen the filter is rather hit and miss with stopping spam. Sometimes letting it through, sometimes stopping it, sometimes stopping legitimate emails that you even have in your address book.
That last one happens to my brother all the time.
I want access to the Combine server. :(
Is there an official (or de-facto) twenty sided server?
I’d like to point out that I don’t find CoD very serious. :D
It really does work this way, btw.
Me: “Hey, come look at this!”
Other: “… those graphics suck.”
Me: “That’s not the point! Here, try it!”
*Other person takes the controls*
(20 minutes later)
Other: Now let’s make this a little rounder… fill in the empty spaces…
Me: You realize it’s been like half an hour..
Other: There! That was awesome, this game is amazing! … What did you say again?
Me: Never mind.
BTW, this is in Minecraft classic. Much different from Alpha, which I have yet to play (or even see much of.)
Shamus said:
That’s likely because Minecraft creates (procedurally) a playable area eight times greater than the surface area of the Earth. (Source)
It doesn’t create(nor store) it all at the same time, so it ain’t quite that the problem. It still has to keepa lot of thing in its memory and generate and update them quite rapidly specially when moving so that’s the biggest performance hog.
The world is not generated all at once.
Minecraft is capable of generating a surface area approximately more than eight times the surface of earth.
“Chunks” of world data are generated as you explore.
The problem is more likely due to the volume of tirs (three edged polygons) that are needed to process for occlusion, back-face culling, and the fact that Minecraft is not optimized for low end video cards, or software rendering modes.
That, and the fact that it is not likely very optimized in general, since it is still in active development. No use waisting time making things work faster if you can’t be sure where the bottleneck will be.
Also, if there is a twenty sided Minecraft server configured, can I suggest the name “Combinecraft” or “Combminecraft”
Edit: Drexer beat me to it… :-(
I support the name of Combimecraft. Has all the elements and is not only silly but kinda hard to roll off the tongue.
Ah, but your answer is so much more elegant. Don’t feel sad.
Aw, thanks.
And Shamus said Civ V would delay production.
Have been waiting for Experienced Points to show up on the Escapist for the last week, lol.
With the comment on the bottom of the comic…
I have a pretty powerful computer. And Minecraft still lags on moderate settings, especially around dawn/dusk and water/lava physics in action.
“Can you make the pixels bigger?”
I should note that with Cataclysm coming, I’m looking forward to your series on WoW beating it out the door …
Will it still have level requirements for crafting?
Given that Minecraft is the most awesome use of procedural generation in gaming history, I was surprised that you hadn’t talked about it sooner.
Not surprised to hear you’re addicted like the rest of us.
I would love to hear you talk about Minecraft with your programmer / designer hat on, what you think about the procedural generation.
I also think the success of the Alpha build is really interesting: Imagine you had a grand idea for a painting. You make a rough sketch that doesn’t at all capture your vision. You show it some people and they love it. They pass it around. It is hailed as one of the best drawings ever. And you’re thinking, “But it’s not finished yet…It’s supposed to be…”
Second-most awesome. Dwarf Fortress tops it (and Minecraft clerly gets a LOT of its concepts from Dwarf Fortress – there was a whole thread about that here, recently).
Are you really suggesting that a matter of personal taste has been “settled”?
Really?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8u7px_GzWQ
Of Course!
I’ll grant you that Dwarf Fortress is probably more awesome, (I haven’t played it but the stories of other people’s games are pretty amazing) and I’d also enjoy reading Shamus on procedural generation in DF, but Minecraft is what I’d most like to hear him talk about.
Aww, why did Breen have to dismantle the light house? I’m sure it was a nice lighthouse.