fredag 31 december 2010

Ring in the new

Happy New Year to all of you out there reading this! Let's see what's gonna happen with Minecraft in 2011.


Fireworks over Stockholm last year.

The 4th video is up!

Late yesterday night I uploaded the 4th video in the tutorial series.

torsdag 30 december 2010

Internet has been down

My internet connection has been down during the evening (according to my sister) and came online just a few minutes ago. Therefore I have not been able to upload the 4th (was it the 4th?) video in the tutorial series yet. But I am uploading it as we speak!

Yesterday

all my troubles seemed so far away...

or how does the song go?

Anyway, yesterday I acually played more Minecraft then I have done the last week in total. But I wasn't building alot of technical stuff as I often do.
Instead I was at my friends house (there was a little birthday party for my friend RB and his dad Big Benn so I were there eating some cake) and we (he) put up a lokat multiplayer server which the two of us along with T-Bag played on. It was great fun. It was acually the first time I played on a SMP server and really team played. It was great since I didn't have to do all the work alone.

Later on today the next episode in my tutorial series will be uploaded, don't miss it!

måndag 27 december 2010

New video is up

Okey so the third video in my series of logic gate tutorials is uploaded on youtube and here it is!

Back!

Okey so I promised I'll be back after Christmas, and here I am!

I am currantly uploading the third video tutorial of the basic redstone logic gates onto youtube. And since my internet it's taking longer then I'd like it to do...
I got my paycheck just before christmas, so I am thinking of putting away a specific ammount of money to upgrade my internet to the best I can get at the moment, but I'm not sure. Would  be nice to be able to host a server though, would any of you be interested in playing on a server hosted by be?

I haven't had time to check up on all the new stuff that's been posted on the forum during the hallidays but I'll try to get up to date as soon as I get back from work (at 22:30 tonight).

Any way, I have recorded up to episode 7 of the logic gate tutorials so I'll keep them coming with a day or two between them.

Over and out!

söndag 26 december 2010

Nice with Hollidays

It's nice having been away from both gaming, school and work for a few days now. But starting tomorrow I will come up with more youtube videos and keep the blog updated!

fredag 24 december 2010

Merry Christmas


Merry Christmas to all of you! I am taking today off (as I have done theese last few days) to be with my family, but I'll be back with a few videos in the days that lay ahead of us. Take Care!

Over and Out!

torsdag 23 december 2010

And the winner is...

Danny!

Danny is the winner of my X-Mas competition and you can see why below!



Congratulations Danny, and I hope you will make someone happy with the account that you will get. I will contact you by email within an hour. There have been alot of people entering the competition, and that's been really funny! Hopefully I will be able to hold some sort of competitions later on as well.

While I am at it I have to say that there were some other contributions to the competition that was really great aswell and one of my favorites were this santa figure that Dylan made. It's so... friendly och cousy! I mean, just look at him!


I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year!


The competition is over!

My Christmas Competition is now over!

I have just had the two other judges, T-Bag and RB over to my place and we have decided who the winner is. He/She will be announced later today and I'll contract the person at the same time.

It was a very unanimous decision I must say.

onsdag 22 december 2010

Last day tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the last day for everyone to enter my x-mas competition!

Ready about it HERE!

tisdag 21 december 2010

Again

First of all, can you see how early it is when I am writing this! it's freaking 04:37  and I've been up since 04:00. It's hard working the opening hours....

Anyway, there haven't been much minecrafting theese last few days. I haven't even had the time to see what the Beta is all about. I just downloaded it yesterday and went to bed.

The only thing Minecraftwise I have been doing is keeping up with the X-Mas Competition which is ending at December 23 for thoose of you who didn't already know what, You can find a link to the competition to the left, where you can read about how you do to enter the competition, cous it's not to late yet!

Well I am off to catch the Sub to work now, wish me good look!

Over and Out

söndag 19 december 2010

Sorry

Sorry that I haven't been updating theese last few days. I have been busy with work and relatives all since friday afternoon.

And I probably won't update anything today either.

4 days left of the x-mas competition!

onsdag 15 december 2010

Last day of studying

This has been a really slow day minecraft wise. It's been the last day of studying on this side of the year for me, and tomorrow I'll be having an exam in automatic control engineering. Yay how fun....! Keep your fingers crossed!

Basicly the only thing I did today in minecraft was trying to build a cannon, which I had never tried before, I have just heard people talking about them and a friend trying to describe how it worked. And it went... well... not god!


aaah time for bed... I'll edit this with the rest tomorrow!

tisdag 14 december 2010

Second movie in my tutorial series, the OR-gate.

10 days to Christmas!


Click the picture! Do it!

Uploading

Late night for Notch

Aaaah feeling lazy, copy-paste time.


Looong Monday

It’s 11:35 pm and I got home not long ago. Today was spent mostly with working on server-side inventory. I ran into some problems with an earlier assumption that all popups would be simple containers, so I had to move some code around to make it popup centric rather than container centric. Each popup can have multiple viewers now, which is nice. Primarely it will be for multiplayer, but later on it can be used for AI or Modding as well.
Jens and Daniel also stayed late today. Daniel did a bunch of support and worked on the ThinkGeek thing (a press release is coming, woo!), and Jens worked on some gui stuff and language support for Minecraft.
We hope to get the website updated within a few days. This will be some minor prettification, and we’ll start selling the gift codes. Codes bought before beta will count as Alpha codes no matter when they’re redeemed, so you can use those for xmas gifts.

Official merchandise!

Yesterday Notch announced that there now are official Minecraft merchandise.

You can find them HERE, and he is also telling us that there are more stuff coming up later on!
(if you can't find the products, just search for "Minecraft", duh?)

OH! and there is only one week left of the texture pack competition along with webhallen.

måndag 13 december 2010

Lack of time due to exams

I've got an exam to do on friday so I don't have alot of spare time for minecraft until that's done.

Though I have done one minecraft related thing today. I'll let the video below speak for itself!



I will make a "how to install and play" guid/tutorial later tonight or someday soon.

söndag 12 december 2010

Good news for forumers!

Today a few new moderators have been introduced to the official forum community. Apparantly they have been in service for a day or two but it's not until now that they have been officially announced.

The new moderators are
  • MrQuizzles 
  • Neodymius 
  • Theicychameleon 
  • Gaaraxebeard 
And I herby welcome them with open arms since the Minecraft forums really could use some more people cleaning it up. Especially now that people are making beta threads like there is no tomorrow.


Also! The christmas competition is coming to an end, or it's still a few days left but it's closing in fast!

If you haven't read about the competition you can do it by following the link to the left.

New clock is uploaded

Here is the new clock generator.

New clock generator

Two days ago a friend of mine told me about this new kind of clock generator that he had hear of/seen that didn't use NOT-gates(inverters) to make the delay and keep the signal going ON/OFF. Instead you use minecarts and a pendulum motion that makes the cart go over a preassure plate once or twice every cykle.

I have the designs set up so I just have to record the tutorial and upload it.

lördag 11 december 2010

Basic logic gate tutorial series

Today I've uploaded the first in my series with the basic logic gates. It is a tutorial for the beginners with barly no experiance of redstone at all. I will go through one gate in each video and try to keep it short and simple so anyone can understand it.

So here is the first video, the tutorial of the NOT-gate.

Minecraft is going into Beta on December 20!

Well the titel does pretty much say it all, doesn't it?

Here is what Notch said.

The next epoch is upon us! The skies are trembling, pigs are growing wings, and the nether is turning awfully cold, as Minecraft slowly crawls out of Alpha..


Minecraft will reach Beta status on December 20th, 2010.


With Beta comes a larger focus on polish and content, and we’ll start early on with adding proper modding support with a stable API, and we’d love all input we can get on this from the modders out there. We’ll also add some kind of non-intrusive narrative to the game to help drive the game experience early on, and to provide some kind of late game goal. There will be a bigger focus on testing and stability as well, with more time between updates.


When the game enters beta, the price will rise to 14.95 Euro.


We will also change the license to remove the line that promises all future versions of the game for free. Please note that this change only affects people who buy the game after December 20, so if you got the game for during alpha, you will still get all future updates for free, despite this change. A promise is a promise.
Buying the game during beta will include all updates up until release, of course, and bug patches will be free.


Soon, you will be able to buy gift codes for Minecraft, perfectly timed for the holidays! Even better, if you buy those before December 20, accounts created from these codes will count as alpha accounts, and will receive all future updates for free.


And the next game update (with server-side inventory) is coming next week, before Beta


Merry holidays happy! :D

Refered too

Today was the first time I saw a random Minecraft video on youtube when someone refered to me, it made my evening! That means someone really liked what I had done!

Here is the video in question.


And here is the video where I am showing it.

fredag 10 december 2010

Yet another update!

Just after I had posted the lat post, Notch updated his blog with yet another post.


So many emotions, so little space!

Last night, I finally got inventory to the stage where it can run without any client side code at all, all through a tiny two-method interface. That means moving it server side is trivial. I expect to have most of it done today, and I feel happy as a duck! :D
There’s a really awesome Friday mood here in the office as well, with a Starcraft 2 semifinal playing in the background (we seem to have a SC2 nerd or two here, and there’s a Swede in the semi finals)
(That’s @jeb and @kappische to the left, joined by @grapefrukt visiting the office)

In addition to my joy, I also feel searing pain. I had Phal for dinner yesterday.


Minecraft piggy in concert

Notch updated his blog one hour ago with this video where you can see some minecraft piggys at around 1:34 into the video.

The new minecart booster

So here is my tutorial of the new sort of booster that was invented a few days ago.

torsdag 9 december 2010

Redstone triggering sounds?

Yesterday notch twittered about the possibility that we soon will be able to trigger sounds, or tones with redstone. He gave us this highly illustrative picture.


With C, C# and D being tones. And I can simply guess that the box at the bottom is showing that different materials will give off different sound. And ofc course SP + SMP means that it's gonna work on both singel- and multiplayer. Woho! cool stuff!

Videos

Hello everyone!

Finaly I got some new videos in queue for uploading!

First off I am going to upload the new kind of minecart booster that I have learned about. It's a vertical booster where the booster cart falls on top of the traveling cart, whick is good if you don't have that much vertical space to build on. Also it's the kind of booster that stops once every cykle, this reduces the carts momentum so it doesn't bug out when it travels at high speeds.

The second thing I am going to upload is a series of movie tutorials where I explain the basic logic gates. Most people that have contacted me have had questions about the very basics of minecraft redstone. Therefore I am going to make one short movie of all of the logic gates and post them every other day, starting with the NOT-gate aka inverter.

New messages from Notch

Three new messages from Notch that I've missed to post here.


Welcome back, Tumblr!

I missed you! While you were offline, I came up with a funny pun:
Watch it! You don’t want to tumblr and fall!

Server-side inventory and websites

(A lot of my blog posts have “and” in the title!)
I’ve been working on server-side inventory, but progress has been slow and agonizing, mostly due to the first version of inventory just being a GUI hack. I got almost nothing done yesterday, but today I will roll up my sleeves and just dig in. The first step will be to commit everything to our brand new version control system (git), the second step will be to start screaming out loud (“aaaaaaaaa!!”) and just start typing code randomly. That should do it.
Jens have been working with a consultant (did we mention we need to hire more people?) to create a slightly better version of the website, with additional payment provider support, somewhat saner design, and the ability to buy and redeem gift codes in time for X-Mas. It’s highly likely that we will keep redesigning the website for a bit.
A big “thank you” to everyone who emailed about videos! :D We got a LOT of submissions, and I think we’re set for a while now.
And on a personal and political note, I just like to say that what’s happening with Wikileaks now is a disgrace, and a sign of how little freedom and democracy we actually have. Freedom of press is one of the most important concepts we have, and it’s not only being eroded away, it’s getting assassinated in broad daylight.
Paul Millen is not enjoying our support
Support is not our strongest side. Having grown rather quickly from a one-man operation, we obviously have no idea how to deal with the level of emails we get, and that sucks bad.
Turns out in this case that he had forgotten his username, something that wouldn’t happen if we sent out proper confirmation emails.. or if the email hadn’t gotten missed repeatedly several times by several people.
I’m sorry about this, and about the current support situation. We will shape up our support routines.

New kind of booster

I was surfing around a little yesterday before I went to bed and found a model of a new type of booster. So I decided to make one of my own, looking like this.


As usual I will make a tutorial for it later.

onsdag 8 december 2010

People are starting to send in their builds!

Yesterday I recived the first email with pictures and a world save, fun!

And today I have recieved a few more, keep 'em comin'!

And if you don't know what I am talking about, I can tell you that I am hosting a small Minecraft Christmas Competition where the winner will get a free minecraft account that he or she can do what ever he/she whishes too with. How ever I suggest you give it away as a Christmas present and make a friend or family member happy!

You can find the contest thread HERE

Yarrh!

Pirates hey yee!


This is a very well made ship in my opinion! And it comes with a small pirate village aswell.

32 Cannons in total according to the thread maker, but I can count to 13 cannons at the side of the ship, and I think it's safe to think that the other side looks exactly the same, and that would make a total of 26 cannons... I must be counting wrong! 

Anyway, the design of the ship is very piraty!

You can find the thread HERE

So I tried

So I tried to make a video tutorial of how you do to convert a 3D model into a model consisting of 1x1 block that you then can import to minecraft by using MCedit. But the stupid program that I am using doesn't want to work properly!

argh argh!

I don't really know what's wrong, maybe it doesn't like that I change between so many windows when making the video... I'll give it a try again another day. And if that doesn't work, I'll make a simple text tutorial!

tisdag 7 december 2010

Spleef!

Alot of you might not know what spleef is... perhaps you have seen my spleef arena on youtube, perhaps you have not.


This is the video of my spleef arena and it's features. I just noticed that this video too has reached over 1000 views! I like it!

And if you don't know what spleef is, here is a sumary that I have been lazy enough to just copy from the Wiki, hehe.


Spleef usually takes place in an arena or stadium. In the stadium, there is a series of blocks that form a flat surface, usually several suspended blocks in the air. Two or more players in the stadium choose their positions on the slab of blocks, and after a countdown, begin the game.
The goal is to destroy blocks near the opponent to cause them to fall, while avoiding suffering that fate yourself. Creating blocks during the playing of Spleef is not usually allowed. The time Spleef matches take depends on the size of the stadium.
Spleef can be played individually or in teams.

There are also some standard rules while playing spleef.

Spleef has several rules in order to maintain fairness and balance. Here is the complete list.
  • No creating blocks between the game's start and end, UNLESS the exception (1) scenario takes place.
  • Do not delete or create blocks after you have lost
  • (1) If 2 players at any point in the match are unable to affect each other (for example: they are on two sides of the arena and a ditch wide enough to make it impossible to jump across has been dug between both sides), then, only then, can the players build blocks
  • The losers must replace the blocks that were deleted during the game. Start replacing them when the time has ended. (OPTIONAL)
  • If you are playing a team match then use the blue or red Team Skins.



Of course you can use what ever colors you may like for the teams, in my video, the arena is made for one golden team and one iron/metal/silver team.


Download my world save (to the left of the blog posts), put it up on a SMP and play some spleef along with your friends!

Don't forget!

Hey everyone! Don't forget about the two competitions going on right now that is Minecraft related.


There is a little over seven days until this competition ends, so make sure to give Minecraft your vote before then!



The texture pack competition Notch is holding along with Webhallen is ending at december 20. so you have about 13 days to finish your texture packs and send them in!


Click on the pictures to get to each competition.

måndag 6 december 2010

T Flip-Flop

Yet another of my Minecraft videos has reached 1000 views on Youtube! this time it's the short tutorial for how a T Flip-Flop looks like and works.

Here is the video.


And below are some of all the things I've built that uses T Flip-Flops in one way or another.



The door bridge is connected to a T Flip-Flop

I'm not much for mods but...

As I've said before, I am not the kinda guy using alot of mods while playing Minecraft, but today I found one that I had to try out!

It's basicly a mod that let's you convert a 3d-model that you have made in some software to a model vinsisting of blocks (such as Minecraft is). This new block-model can then be implemented in any of your Minecraft saves by the use of MCedit.

I found this idea very interesting so I had to try it out, and here is what I menaged to make just now.


I have not made the hand itself, I just took it for a tutorial and trial purpose. I had to work a bit with the cmd-window since I am not used t working with it. But in the end I menaged to get it right. The only thing I could figure out how to do is to rotate the hand so that the fingers are pointing upwards. When I tried to rotate it round what I thought to be the z-axis the whole thing just became a stright line, with no dimensions at all... how wierd isn't that?

EDIT: I think the problem with the line was that I tried to move the hand to a negative referense plane when rotating around the z-axis. If I rotated 180 degrees around the x-axis it worked perfectly to get the hand standing. I won't make a picture of that though, just trust me, it's there!

We'll be back shortly...

I've never had this message before when trying to reach Notch's Blog...

Best Downloadable Game

Today (or possibly yesterday) The Good Game awards took place and Minecraft was nominated in the category "Best Downloadable Game" (DLC), and won before games such as Red Dead Redemption, Undead nightmare.

You can see the Good Game video HERE

söndag 5 december 2010

What I've been up to lately

Yesterday (or had the clock gone pat 00:00?) I told you that I'd give you a little prewview of what I've been working on theese last few very inactive days.



Here are two pics of one of the things I am working on. I am not sure what I should make of it really, hehe.

The other thing is just missing one room, and I can't figure out what to make in it! It needs to be some cleaver puzzle thingy.

Christmas Competition!

Living in a winter wonderland!

Christmas is coming towards us with great speed. And to celebrate christmas I thought I'd have a small Minecraft competition! and there is a prize for the winner!


What is the prize of the competition?
The winner will be rewarded a Minecraft account, that he/she can do whatever with. For example give it to a friend as a christmas present!


Theme of the competition
Since it's winter now and christmas is knocking at our doors the theme of the competition is winter/christmas. So what you have to do is simply to build something, anything really, that in someway can be connected to winter or christmas. A giant santa, Rudolf or an iglo, what ever you can think about.


How do I enter?
Anyone can enter the competition, simply by sending me an email to rolfdavidminecraft@gmail.com.


What should the mail contain?
Make sure you Title the mail with something like "Minecraft X-Mas competition"
In the email I would like three things, a few pictures of what ever you have built, and the world save where you have build it. I want the save so I can see that it's really you who have made it and that you didn't just take the picture from somewhere on the internet.

It is also appriciated to type a short instruction on how to get to the build, if the spawnpoint is far from it.

A movie of the build is also nice but not mandatory.


When is the last day to enter the competition?
I will take one last look at the email accounts at 12:00 on december 23 and the winner will be choosen before 18:00 the same day. This is so that the winner can give away the account if he/she whishes to.


Who will be judging the competition?
Me along with two others will be grading the contestants individually.


If you have any questions, just post a comment here on the blog and I'll try to answer it as soon as possible!



Hope you'll enjoy this!
/Rolf-David

New milestone

Today Minecraft has reached a new milestone, that milestone is that 700.000 games have been sold as of today!

700.000 games á 10 euro would give a sum of 7 million euro!

Which changed to a few different currancys are:

9,357,599.85 USD


9,386,608.77 CAD


9,445,442.41 AUD


5,929,911.03 GBP


63,832,865.77 SEK


Quite a few fancy pennys eh?



Ongoing projects

At the moment I have two ongoing projects, one that is going really slow, but is nearly finished. And one that I have ju begun building and is therefor far from finished! I'll give you updates tomorrow on the progress, and a few pictures as well!

lördag 4 december 2010

Sick n' tired of lagg

I consider my computer to be relatively strong. It's got a 3 GHz quad core CPU, 8 GB of DDR3 RAM and a Nvidia quadro graphics card. But I am still laggin when playing minecraft, from time to time I'm algging real bad even. As right now, I have started Game booster and give Minecraft a high priority so it will be devoted alot of the computers capacity (see older post for how to do it).

Are any of you having the same problems? What computer specs do you have?

It's driving me insane!

fredag 3 december 2010

Indie of the year (The quest for cake)

If you haven't already noticed it, Minecraft has made it to the finals of the indie of the year game awards over at indieDB!

Make sure to cast your vote this time around aswell and show the world that Minecraft is the game to play!

Simply creat an account at modDB and cast your vote HERE!

Notch has promised that if Minecraft wins, we will get cake ingame!

Click to enlarge and acually see what it says.

Rolf-David at youtube

I though I'd promote my youtube page a little by telling ya'll that it's growing slow and steady, hehe. At the moment I got just over 100 subscribers and about 15.500 views in total. I know it's not that much considering that some people get several hundred thousands views on each video they make, but hey! you gotta start somewhere. And sure, minecraft isn't as small anymore, but I'd still consider it a indie game so the client base isn't that big.

Click on the picture to get to my Youtube page!

Even more from Notch

Bug update #5, and we need videos

Client version 1.2.6
Server version 0.2.8 (not mandatory)
* Added /kill command. Does 1000 points damage to the player
* Did some patching client side to prevent duplicated entities
* The join server page now remembers the port as well as the ip
* Fixed a bug where joining a server on a specific port caused the client to forget all keybindings
* Added lakes and rare lava pools, both on the surface and randomly in caves.
* Fixed a crash bug when destroying the vehicle from under a player
* Players connecting to a server or respawning are invulnerable for three seconds
We’re working on tweaking minecraft.net a bit, and we need to replace the YouTube video on there. But it turns out nobody here is good at making videos, and you guys are just awesome at it. We need your help!
We’re looking for one video for the front page that sets the mood of the game and sells it well without being too cheesy, and for one tutorial type video on some help page somewhere. We have some requirements:
* No custom texture packs, it should show off the “raw” game
* No video effects like bloom or blur
* No copyright protected music
* You’ll have to tell us that we can use your video
So if you have anything good, or if you want to make anything new, please email us (notch@mojang.com and/or junkboy@mojang.com), and we’ll select a few nice ones and possibly rotate them every now and then to keep the page fresh.
We’d appreciate it a lot!

onsdag 1 december 2010

More from Notch

Bug update #4, and we’re six people in the office now!


Client version 1.2.5
Server version 0.2.7 (not mandatory, but you might want to update anyway)


* Fixed a rather bad memory leak bug in the server (entity position updates accumulated in orphaned player objects)
* Riding carts and boats now works properly when you travel long distances.
* Harvesting crops no longer yields fake seeds
* Removed /home (sorry!)
* Snowballs again!


I will start looking at server-side inventory soon in an attempt to reach beta soon.
I’ll also fix mob jump animations in SMP, the ugly black lights, and make leaves decay again. Once that’s in place 
BETA! :-D



In other awesome news, today was Jens and Junkboy’s first day at Mojang. There’s a consultant here as well, so we’re six people crammed into a slightly chaotic room. January 1, we’ll have access to the entire office. Carl (the CEO) will join us not long after.
If you’re curious, make sure to check out Jakob’s biweekly dev diary on pcgamer:
http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/11/29/minecraft-dev-diary-1-merch-mojangs-next-game/


New type of boat elevator

For those of you using boat elevators, here is a new type that seems to be working quite well and fast!