Anyone familiar Minecraft or Minetest?

[woodsmoke]

Hi
I was visiting with a coupla guys today and they play "Minecraft".

Somewhat into the visiting I mentioned that I had built a "classroom" in the game "Second Life", quite a few years ago, but could not get the local colleges interested in it.

I asked the fellows if it would be possible to build a "classroom" in Minecraft, described what mine did and the general configuration, and they said that yes it could be done, and possibly quite easily.

Ok so I looked at the Minecraft site, it is a "for pay" game but has a demo version and a Linux "jar file". I'm not all that good at trying to install from source, eventhough some very nice people here have instructed me on it, I'm just kinda clueless about that stuff.

So, I hied myself to Synaptic and there is a Linux version called "minetest".

So I'm just wondering if there is anyone familiar with both or either and if we could visit about them/it, so I could try to get a handle on the two versions and whether i could really "build a room" of some kind, put some "interactive" stuff in the room that people could use to "learn something" and get a reward maybe?

Any dicussion would be GREATLY appreciated.

woodsmoke

[whatthefunk]

I play Minecraft, although not on the level that many do. I dont think it would suit your purposes very well because the interactive type stuff in Minecraft is more building materials than outside educational stuff. You could easily create a world and invite your students to join, but including things relavant to what ever subject youre teaching would probably be more hassel than its worth.

Just my opinion....like I said, Im only a casual minecrafter.

[GreyGeek]

I've used both "Second Life" and I have a minecraft "Tekkit" server on which my two grandsons and I play.

The two platforms are totally different, as you are probably well aware of by now. Second Life has serious problems with avatar overload. A "location" in Second Life is measured in square meters and 65,535 SqM is all that a server can hold with the current design. Unfortunately, about the maximum number of users (represented as avatars) that a server can hold without serious lag is about 70. In SL you have an editor which you can use to build just about any 3D object. Unfortunately, each server has a limit on the number of "primatives" (prims) it can support. If you become a premium member (about $10/month) you are given a parcel of "land" that is 512 SqM. It gives you a maximum of about 1,500 prims, IIRC. When you build a house on it, put furniture in the house, etc..., you are about out of prims. Bigger parcels of land have more prims but cost more per month. I don't remember what the price brackets are but they were too expensive for my blood. I got into SL about 5 years ago, just as they were switching from their previous "engine" to their Mono engine. The old engine lagged when the avatar count reached about 70. The Mono engine was supposedly about 200 times faster. It resulted in people using a lot of active prims (ones which are dynamic and eat clock cycles) and the average server starts lagging when the avatar count reaches ... 70. So, no change. Also, 5 years ago, big corporations were checking out SL and had entire 65K SqM parcels: GM, CNN, Sears, Fox, NBC, CBS, and lots of colleges and universities, which run their own SL servers, under license, to hold their own private seminars in which the attendees can listen to a speaker and communicate by voice to each other. The corporations have abandon SL and closed or no longer have avatars manning their sites.

These days, SL is mostly a big brothel where users, mostly those who have no social life and can't relate normally to people, have vicarious sexual experiences with each other.

Minecraft also is 3D and is divided into cubic meters called "blocks". There are several hundred kinds of blocks. Blocks of "ore" which can be smelted into blocks of metals, blocks of gems like diamonds, blocks of dirt, marble, stone, lava, wood, leaves, gravel, sand, etc... Blocks of glass can be made by smelting sand. An avatar can dig down to the "floor" about 200 blocks down, and they can build up to a maximum of 256 blocks above the ocean level. The are two basic levels of Minecraft play: creative mode which does not have "mobs", and other modes which do. In the creative mode all of the basic building materials are freely accessed without mining. People use that mode to build fantastic cities and structures, towns, villages, etc... Other modes are "easy", "normal", "difficult", and "hardcore". All but the first relate to the numbers and powers of the mobs. In all but hardcore if you are killed you return to your spawn point. You can make any point your spawn point by building a bed and placing it there. "There" is usually your cave, house, or fortress. In hardcore the game is over if you are killed.

When a person joins a Minecraft server s/he is "spawned" on some piece of land that can be a small island of only a few dozen SqM to "continents" of several thousand SqM. The only thing a new avatar has is the "clothes" on their backs, an empty inventory with room for about 20 items, and a portable 2X2 crafting table, which is displayed using the "E" key. Their first task is to build a shelter before nightfall so they can survive till the next day. That's done by punching a tree to get blocks of wood. They are crafted in a 2X2 portable crafting table to form a wooden sword for defense, a wooden pick and shovel for mining, and a wooden axe which is use to chop down more trees more rapidly than by punching them with the avatar hand. With the wooden pick a hole is dug into the ground or side of a hill. Usually cobblestone is encountered and collected. When a room is carved out several meters under or into the ground, the wood is used to create "boards" from which a 3X3 crafting is fashioned and placed on the ground. Cobble stone is used to create a furnace in which smelting can take place. Usually, while mining in stone, coal is encountered. Boards can be crafted into sticks and when combined with coal forms torches, which are used to light the rooms and mine shafts. Cobblestone can be used to create stone tools which are more durable, and work faster, than wooden tools. When Iron ore is smelted the Iron bars can be used to form Iron swords and tools. With an enhancement table the iron tools can have their powers increased or enhanced. At between 7 and 20 meters above the base rock diamond ore can be located. It can be used to create very durable and powerful weapons, tools and armor. Killing cattle gets meat and leather, which can be used to make armor. Chickens are killed for meat and feathers. The feathers are used with flint, from mining gravel, and sticks, to make arrows. Sticks and spider silk or wool can be used to make a bow, which gives long range killing power. You can build a lot of things in Minecraft. The most elaborate are rails and minecarts, powered by "Redstone", which is Minecraft "electricity". The mobs include creepers, which explode, zombies, spiders, slime balls, skeletons and nethermen. There is an "alternate universe" called the Nether, from which Goldstone and blaze rods, among other things, are obtained.

Tekkit is built on Minecraft and one needs a Minecraft license to play it, but Tekkit is free. If Minecraft were a Model T, Tekkit would be a Lexus. In Tekkit you can make Nuclear power stations, solar collectors, geothermal collectors, etc., to generate electricity, which is used to power batteries, drills, lasers, etc... There are LOTS of videos on YouTube which one can use to see the differences between Minecraft alone and Minecraft with Tekkit.

For educational purposes?

One could use it to teach team leadership, planning and building of a quarry or even a city, roads and rail lines, an economy (you can barter with each other and with villagers which are AI avatars), terraforming, defense, etc... and all related to the costs of development and the risk involved. Avatars can have fatal accidents if the person falls from more than 8 blocks.

For biology, physics, etc... There are other, better and more accurate simulators, which are free.

Again, check out some of the Tekkit videos on YouTube. You will probably see opportunities that escape me. For PURE FUN it is hard to beat! Just ask my 11 and 6 year old grandsons ... and ME! :cool:

[67GTA]

+ 10 for Minecraft. Minetest is an open source attempt at Minecraft, but falls VERY short.

[woodsmoke]

Hi folks,
Thanks very much for the replies.

GG, Your summary of SL pretty much tallies with my experience, I purchased land, but I have not been back for a couple of years and did not know about the fall into debauchery.

But, it was beginning when I was there.

As to my needs, they are MUCH simpler than what GG posted. My use was merely as a study guide. And, to a certain extent, given that I did not have a "lot' of students do it, it seemed to work a little.

What I did was build a building and place "paintings" on the walls, which were of significance for studying for an exam, such as a picture of a cell.

The students would then answer a multiple choice question using what was, then, the "bulletin board" function.

The big advantage of using SL as opposed to Steam games was that one could have an avatar with a "hand" to do things, which was not quite as doofus as shooting a multiple choice question with a gun! lol

Thanks again all.

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

I had never heard of "MineTest", so I downloaded the c55 version from the PPA and ran it using my optirun command to give the native Linux binary as much video power as I could. I don't know what the version in the repository is like, but the c55 version works ... but is different. When you chop wood or mine the blocks don't fall down or lay on the ground, they appear instantly in your inventory, which is summoned with the "i" key. Graphics isn't bad ... classic 1.0 Minecraft. I'm going to play with it some mmore to see how much it has.

[GreyGeek]

Minetest is interesting. It has a lot of mods.
Here is a Linux video showing a lot of mods and their features.

[sealbhach]

Minecraft is HUGE! I've never dared to get into it myself but some of the things people make in there are incredible. This guy made a calculator and this guy made a working CPU.

[woodsmoke]

Again, thanks folks, after midterms i'm going to dl it.

any other comments appreciated!!

woodsmoke

[GreyGeek]

Well, Woodsmoke, I downloaded all the mods shown at the link to that video I posted. All but one was unpacked into ~/.minetest/mod/minetest

The lone exception was Realtest which, I was told, is not a mode but a game. I don't under stand what they mean by that, since you can't enter "realtest" on the CLI and get anything to run, but I unpacked it into /usr/share/minetest/games, like I was told, and I stopped getting the abort which gave a "... can't find realtest.lua" error. I also had to rename the cornernote-minetest-craft_guide-b3b1538.zip to craft_guide to craft_guide and add depends.txt to /usr/share/minetest/games/minetest_game/default/ and place "craft_guide" in it (without the quotes). That gave me the ability to create a mining lazer, mining drill, an electrical generator to charge them that uses coal, a solar array, etc... To be able to get armor you have to install the armor mod. To get mobs you have to install the mobs mod. Other mods give various abilities. It has crashed on me twice in the several hours I have used it. It is VERY fast, even when running it without my Nvidia chip activated by the optirun command.

Over all, it is not as well polished as Minecraft but it is very usable, IMO. I would put it at Minecraft 1.0 with a little extra because of all the mods.

[GreyGeek]

It turns out that RealTest is a version of MineTest, which you select from an options menu instead of the default MineTest. It's supposed to have more ores, inventory items, etc. It has more bugs.

So, with that last hope gone I removed Minetest.

Over all, as open source software goes, I'd give it a D. As far as the developers go I'd give them an F.

There are glaring problems which will prevent any significant growth in that project:
First is the fact that install information is not well organized nor version controlled.
Secondly, and for me the biggest reason to cease exploration of it, is the fact that not all the mods are 3D. Critical mods and items are 2D !!! In a 3D world I find that amazing. While an animal, like a sheep, may look great in side view, if you walk around it it looks more like a poster board display of a sheep. There is no leg or head movement. It moves as if an invisible person were pulling a poster board display of a sheep. If you hit the sheep or sheer it you can't see what is happening to it unless you attack from the side view. The mod developer dismisses any pleas to make 3D animals and mobs by saying that blocky 3D creatures "look ugly". Apparently having a creature become so thin in front or rear views that it is nearly invisible is "pretty"? What it really says to me is that the mod developer doesn't know how to create 3D animation. Amazingly, TORCHES, picks, axes and other major objects behave exactly the same! As you walk by them they disappear into a one pixel wide line.

Very little comes in the basic MineTest. You can punch trees, make axes and swords from the blocks, and find coal and iron, make furnaces, chests and other basic stuff like slabs, buttons, etc... But, beyond that you'll need mods. Mods come and go. The biggest problem is that they are all version sensitive, besides being prone to crashing.

Bottom line: Initially I had high hopes. But, after a day of experimentation I find that overall MineTest is not very good and barely usable for basic stuff. Most mods are so buggy as to become unusable with time. Eventually you will hit a bug which crashes the program. They are using C++ to write the engine and mods, but apparently not a cross platform API, so bugs which show up in Linux or Windows don't in a Mac, and visa-vera. With the attitude some of the mod and mob developers are taking it won't be going very far in any reasonable length of time. So, I mark it up to a learning experience, but I advise you not to waste your time.

[woodsmoke]

Well thank you very much GG

I didn't want to have a lot of "play" in it, per se.

I, basically wanted to build a room, in which I could put "illustrations" that would have some kind of "place" to interact with questions, like "is this a cell", and they say yes or no and then get a response as to the correct answer.

And, also, I had great hopes that the "file" would be able to be exported to "Minecraft" or some other game so that a large group of people could try out the basic idea.

So, again, thank you very much GG, I was thinking that people who had already used it might chime in, but for you to go to the trouble to figure this out after the question is above and beyond!

thanks again.

woodsmoke