tisdag 30 november 2010

Tiny funny things


This is funny! I love it.

EDIT: The overload isn't funny, but the fact that the creeper has found the server is.

Bug update number 3

The client version is now 1.2.4
The server version is now 0.2.6 (mandatory update, there’s been protocol changes)
Bug fix list:
* Swords and other weapons now deal damage properly
* Added proper hurt animations and sounds to mobs and players
* Fixed dead players logging in as invisible ghosts
* Made arrows visible and deal damage
* Hoes now produce proper seeds
* Creepers make noises and animate before exploding
* Explosions animate properly
* No more infinite free arrows
* Server logging now appends to server.log rather than overwriting it
* Buttons and levers (and a few other blocks probably, it’s a general solution) animate properly
* Fixed minecarts (and pigs!) moving twice as fast as they should when ridden.
* The join server screen now remembers the last entered ip
* Increased chunk saving frequency on the server
* Leaving sneak mode no longer triggers a million sounds
* You can now see sneaking players
* Names of sneaking players aren’t visible through walls, and are visible a much shorter distance
* Snowballs!!
I’ll monitor for bugs for a while, then head home!
[edit:]
Server 0.2.6_01 no longer gives everyone 64 snowballs on connecting
[edit:]
Server 0.2.6_02 and client 1.2.4_01 now spawn other monsters than ONLY CREEPERS EVERYWHERE

"The join server screen now remembers the last entered ip" sounds really good to me since I was really annoyed by that in the past, but no more!

Modding

Puh I'm tired! I've been up since 04:00 today, freaking nightmare.

Anyway I've seen some interesting mods lately. I haven't used any of them since I belive that it could ruin the game for me, sort a like an addiction, that I will not be able to stop using them since it could make the game to comfy. But for thoose who can hadle it, here are a few interesting:

Kingbdogz mod
Is a mod which acually adds content to the game instead of just changeing things that are already in it. How about a lava bomb or a bunch of new dusts that you can craft things out of!



How would you like to have an unlimited amount of world saves to play on! and me able to give them names instead of the usual "World 1", "World 2" and so on. 

Do you use item editors while playing and building big stuff? tired of having to leave the game and perhaps even shut it down to duplicate items? No more with this mod! Here you can do it all while you are in game.

With this mod you will become cheff Ramsey himself! 



måndag 29 november 2010

Bug and idea-tracker!

Notch and his fellow companions is probably tired of everyone spamming the SSP forum with everything from errectal problems to a spanish chick claiming to own the sun. And inbetween thoose two there are alot of people posting bugs and idea in the SSP forum aswell, which doesn't belong there and makes the forum really messy.
It will probably be easier for them aswell to see what people want fixed and implemented in the game.

This new thing is the Bug and idea-tracker at Get Satisfaction.

Just make sure you are in the right part of the webpage, there are four different sections. "Ask a question", "Share an idea", "Report a problem" and "Give a praise". Post in the right section or this page will be as messy as the forum!

I am your father

I just found this picture out there while looking up new cool minecraft stuff. There is always someone making something new and neat out there!


Sure alot of the blocks are most likely hacked into the game, but I belive that this kinda pixelart is so spectacular that I can accept that people hack.

Acually, I don't mind at all if people use hacks, mods or such. It's their game and they can play it however they want.

Minecart control panel

For all of you out there that like to build minecart stations, here is a control palen circuit that is very compact!
Space is always a problem for me when building things, since I am not planning much when I start building I often end up with circuits that are way bigger then they have to be.

But HERE you have a really compact circuit for a multi-destination control.


This is how compact it is. Most of the wireing is underground here but the cut through chematics looks like this.

(Click to get a bigger picture)

söndag 28 november 2010

Problems with the Craft-sites

Is there anyone but me that is having problem accesing the big minecraft sites?

I can load the Official site and Notchs blog, but I can't load the wiki, the forums nor crafthub for some reason. DDOS attack again?

EDIT: Crafthub is back up (if it ever were down), and I think I could be because that they have recently changed server host.

lördag 27 november 2010

Lack of time

I'll blame the lack of updates yesterday and today on that I have been working hard, or not that hard really, but I haven't been at home that much.

Anyway, yesterday Notch made a new post on his blog about the bugs in SMP.


Bug update #2. More coming early next week.

I struggled for a long time to figure out exactly why players and mobs would sometimes vanish when players respawn, and finally gave up and asked Jakob to help me sort out the problem.
While explaining the problem, we found the cause.
Turns out that the entities failed to get added to the global render list. This is caused by the chunk not being prepared when the entity is added. The servers SHOULD tell the client what chunks to render before adding entities. Then I remembered the throttling which makes entity updates higher priority than chunk updates..
So now whenever the server tells the client to add an entity, it gets added to the “reinsert if ever lost”-list I already have in place, but which was only used for a few special entities (mainly the local player) so far.
The client has been updated to 1.2.3_04 (hey look at that!), and the server has an optional update to 0.2.5_02.
I’ve got plenty of more bugs to address in SMP, which will be fixed over the coming weeks. I think we might be getting close to beta soon. =D
(btw, working in an office with real people is AWESOME. I love it)

fredag 26 november 2010

Notch is recruiting

First off, yesterday became yet another slow day, I didn't have any energy to do anything really, quite frustrating.

Anyway, today notch posted a message on his blog, it's written in swedish and is about that Mojan needs to hire more people. But I'll try to translate it for those of you who doesn't speak swedish.



We are recruiting!
Hi! We are three people working at the office now. In a few days we will be five, and in the bigining of january we'll be a crew of 6 people. But it's not enough! plans emerge, visions grow, and things that has to be done is put in a pile, so we need to hire more people.
If you'd like to work with us and qualify for any of roles below, send an email to jobs@mojang.com. Daniel and the CEO that starts to work in january will be keeping a close eye on the email.

General
It's a fulltime job here at our office in the southern parts of stockholm(södermalm). Swedish is the main language, but it's not problem if you don't know it as long as you know english. We seek personal with the right experiance and right personality that we think can contribute to make the games better. The workplace is relaxed so it's important that you can take iniatives on your own.

Job 1: Frontpage developer (Is that what it's called in english?)
Java servlets, javascript, css, templating, some database, some design. We'd prefer if you know both the technical and creative parts of making webpages, but the technical part is the primary part. If you've worked with communities earlier it's a plus in your favour.

Job 2: Backside developer (What's it called?)
Alot of Java, alot of data base, a shit load of systemization and architecture. You understand linux, know the differens between less and more, and you can overdesign a system in your sleep. Loadbalance, cloud computing and iptables.

torsdag 25 november 2010

Comment from Notch about yesterdays update

Bug update #1. More coming tomorrow

There were some pretty severe bugs with players respawning, which I’ve spent most of the day today fixing. I’ve solved a lot of them, but I noticed that the respawning player can still fail to see other players in the spawn area under some circumstances.
Instead of delaying the bug fix update until tomorrow, I decided to release what I’ve done so far now today. I’ll fix the remainder tomorrow, and also work on a few more bugs I’ve gotten told about (thank you very much for the organized lists!).
The server has been updated to 0.2.5_01, but it’s not a mandatory update.
The client will auto-update to 1.2.3_02
Speaking of which, I will make the client updater ask the player before applying new updates. Automatic forced updates are scary, and they were only in because they were convenient and I never thought about it.

Adding a new texture pack

I've had a few people asking me how you do to change from the standard texture pack to something else, so I though I'd make a short tutorial for how you do it. It's really simple.

First off you need a texture pack to replace the old one with. So what I did is that I downloaded a pack that someone else made, and a good place for that is HERE. The Painterly webpage has a wide range of texture packs, and you also have the possibility to arrange your own pack from pre-made textures. So you download a pack.



What you then do is to open up Minecraft as I have done in the picture below, and click the button marked with the red rectangle saying Mods and texture packs.



After that you press the Open texture pack folder button, which acually says "place texture pack files here".. so it's quite obvius what to do right?


So what you do then is to drag the .zip texture pack (I belive is has to be Zipped to be able to work, not 100% sure about that though) to the folder you have just opend. And then you are set to go! your new texture pack is installed.


As you can see below, you can choose from the two texture packs. Either the standar pack or the one you have just downloaded and installed.



And here you can see the difference between the standard pack (left side) and the new painterly pack (right side). Sorry that I took the last picture in the dark, but click on it and you should get to see a larger version of it where it's easier to see the difference between the packs.


Ofc you could also make your very own texture pack aswell. But that takes a whole lot a time compared to just downloading that someone else already made. You can be laze from time to time! But if you try to make your own texture pack, make sure you do it in a software where you can turn white backgrounds into transparent.





onsdag 24 november 2010

Slow day

Oh this has been such a slow day. I have barly gone out of the house, except for when I had to go out and get all the freaking snow away so you can get from the door out to the mail box.

The only things Minecraft-wise I've done today is to upload the binary addition tutorial. Which explains the basics of binary addition so that you can understand the redstone binary adder more easily.



And the other thing is to learn how you add new texture packs to minecraft.

Tomorrow will probably(hopefully) be a more productive day.

New update (24/11)

Notch has uploaded the update now, here is what he's posted on his blog so far.


I’m expecting bugs on this one, so I’m monitoring the usual channels (irc, twitter, email) extra carefully.
Basically everything I talked about in the last post is done, with some extras such as visible hurt animations (how did I forget that?) and visible fire on burning mobs.
The lighting still isn’t right, I need to rewrite it. I think I know what the problem is now, though. Or rather, I know what ONE problem is. You know when you’re traveling by boat, and you see weird strips of light on the ocean floor in multiplayer? That.
Also needed is visible armor on players and mobs (sheep!), and some tweaks to reduce laggy moving mobs. And bows and arrows.
There are a couple of new settings for the server:
pvp. True by default. If this is set to false, players can’t hurt other players.
spawn-monsters. True by default. Set to false to remove all monsters.
spawn-animals. Also true by default. Set to false to remove all animals.
[edit:]
Wow, that broke the game. Hold on while I try to fix stuff.
[edit:]
I’ve uploaded a new server and a new client, fixing the two major bugs I heard about.
I had to disable leaves decaying again (sorry!) because it caused infinite loops in certain situations.
Keep me posted, and I’ll keep fixing!
I have put up a server myself to try it out. It... didn't go so well, hehe. But I can tell you that the health is working, there are monsters that can hurt you pretty badly and you can hit them aswell. I am having some bad lagg though, dunno if it has something to do with the client and update or if it's just my internet that's messing around. Anyone else tried SMP after the update?

tisdag 23 november 2010

Video milestones

Just noticed that three new videos have reaced over a thousand views now. It aint that much compared to alot of other things on youtube, but I am proud of it anyway! And here they are!





Working health in SMP tomorrow!

So Notch posted today that he is going to make an update tomorrow that is gonna make the health in SMP work as it's supposed to which includes fighting monsters and other players.
The update was supposed to come today but Notch forgot to bring  the keystore with the private certificate key to the office.


He also did another post today reminding us about the texturepack competetion he's holding along with Webhallen. Where you can win a SSD drive, autographed ON the acual drive, funny place to do it. The winner will also recive the real painting of the new painting that's going to enter the game soon.


Here is a picture borrowed from Notch's blog, showing the progress so far.


The painters webpage can be found HERE
 (currantly down due to heavy traffic... It's been "Notched")

Message from Notch

Sickness, Sprint and Speakers
I spent most of the weekend in our awesomely comfortable sofa, eating painkillers and helping the NCR take control of the Dam. My best guess is that I had a cold of some kind. It probably started last week when I actually spent my days working with other people for the first time in many months.
Today was the second day in our office, and we got started with our first sprint (we’re doingScrum, you see). We’ve ordered a huge fancy cork bulletin board to keep the sprint task note thingies, but for now we just keep the notes on a desk.
Getting organized like this is a bit scary and unusual for me, but I think it’s a definite good thing in the long run, especially once we start developing a proper product backlog. It turned out I had forgotten a couple of features for SMP health. Getting physical notes to move around helps a lot for motivation and keeps me focused on the task, though, so I think this will improve my development speed. (We used scrum when I worked at Jalbum). Today, despite losing much of the day to a meeting, an interview for ABC and helping Jakob pick out glasses, I managed to finish falling damage, fixing the respawn bug I was struggling with last week (the most robust way to fix it was to send new spawn location coordinates to the client and trigger a local respawn instead of trying to quickly move the respawned player to the correct location), and implementing drowning.
Oh, and we bought speakers. Music is important, and does wonders for the mood in an office. We’ve set up a public shared Spotify list. Feel free to add music to it that you think we’d enjoy, or that might make us laugh, and we’ll listen to it tomorrow.
If someone’s deleted everything on there or anything like that, feel free to fix it. :)

måndag 22 november 2010

Secret postits

A few hours ago Notch posted a picture of their first sprint planning.

We got this picture


too bad it's such bad quality, cant really see anything on the postits, except that the white note in the bottom left has the letter M, D and J written on it. Could it stand for Marcus, Daniel and Jacob?

Replicas

I was just surin' around the ol' internet just now and found two impressing replicas of real life structures.

First off! Le Tower de Eiffel!




And last, but definitly last least, the Grand Colloseum!





Binary adder

So I finished the Binary adder tutorial and here it is!



This sort of adder is the one usually used in the big calculating computers. To understand it you will need a basic knowledge in binary addition, which I will upload a video of later tonight or possibly tomorrow. And you will also need some basic knowlegde about how redstone works.

A Full Adder which is represented in the video consists of 2 XNOR gates and a few other stuff that gives the C-out signal, the Carry output.

In a chain of adders the first one looks a little different. Since it doesn't have any C-in, input, it doesn't have to be as big as the rest of them. You can see that when I show you the 2 bit adder in the video.

Harcore mode

Notch updated his blog about an hour ago with this

I’m definitely going to add hardcore mode to the game where dying will destroy the world. I’m not sure how it would work in multiplayer, though.. Perhaps you could get “banned” from the server until the world resets if you die on a server running hardcore mode.

Obstacle and Binary adder

Just thoiught I'd show you two pictures of the Binary adder and one of the parts of the obstacle course that I am building.


To the right you can see what's called a full adder, which basicly can add 1+1 whcih in binary would give you the answer 10.  And to the left there is what I belive to be a 2 bit adder. It can add nubers up to a total sum of 6 in decimal, which is 110 in binary. I'm doing a tutorial of theese adders in an hour or two, depending on how many cups of coffe I need to get awake.

Oh and a funny math joke I found the other day while learning how adders work!
"There are only 10 types of people in the world —
those who understand binary, and those who don't."
Hah! Good shit.



And this is one of the parts in the upcoming obstacle course, the maze! I haven't learned the way through it yet so I don't know how I will make the video of this. I also got 2 or 3 rooms left to make on the course.

söndag 21 november 2010

Elevator

I'm not using any mods that changes or adds things to the game, but this mods seems quite nice!

It's an elevator mode that lets you travel up and down, duh?



I wonder if they could make it work so that you can activate the top/bottom block with redstone...

Next problem...

As soon as I finished the adder I started working on the obsticle course that i talked about erlier. The first room was very simple, you barly have to do anything there, sorta of a warm up. The second room you have some preassure on you since you can't be wrong to many times...

The idea for the second room was that I would put up 5 paintings on a wall. Then you would get a bow and 4 arrows in a crate. With the bow and arrow you were to shoot down the right paintings from the wall which would then land ontop of a preassure plate. When the paintings land on a preassure plate they acivate a redstone wire. And if you shoot down the right paintings, the door would open.

The idea is good, but since there are a few bugs in the game, it's quite unreliable. What happens is that the drawings sometime get stuck between two blocks on the way down and then never lands on the preassure plate.

Any ideas of how I should solve this?

Fixed!

Aha I solved the problem, I hadn't payed enough attention to the drawings, they were correct and they are working now!

Problem with the adder

I'm having some troubles with the adder that I am trying to understand how they work. I've read the wiki, which doesn't explain adders that well in my opinion. And also used the designs from the wiki. The problem is that I don't get the results that I expected, hehe.

This is the truth table that I'd expect to get.

InputsOutputs
ABCinCoutS
00000
10001
01001
11010
00101
10110
01110
11111

Instead I got something like this when I built the adder myself in the redstonesimulator.

InputsOutputs
ABCinCoutS
00000
10011
01001
11000
00111
10110
01100
11111

Which differes from what I thought on many combinations.