Haha, I tried to do that on a YouTube video earlier :'D

You know the stories about building your house on sand Kos :C

It's not /on/ sand, It's floating /above/ the sand.

As long as it's held up by one thin column of rock, you'll be fine.

 

{{unrealistic simulations}}

not in minecraft - you can build castles in the sky, no problems at all

...really? I haven't played in too long, can't remember :(

Sand and gravel both require blocks underneath them, else they fall.

Everything else can be stuck onto a wall/floor/ceiling and they'll stay there (even if the block is then removed).

(Of course, water and lava will flow downwards, if there's no block below, but the source block stays in place.)

Actually, there's a few more exceptions - organic blocks (leaves,cactus,canes,etc) have special rules about how they can be placed, or if they'll stay in place.

Ooh, ok. I can't say I'd noticed before, I only got around to very basic building in Minecraft :-$

 

I keep restarting, I tend to think I want a particular world with plenty of hills and mountains and stuff... I should stop being picky and just get on with something.

I now want to play waste several hours this evening and start making a floating shelter, evolving into a floating base (of DOOM, with lava/water around it to stop creeps and possibly automated dispenser traps). Someone will owe me a life :C

You think you'll get that done in just "several hours"? :P

*days

:(( *watches*

We need a Teh server...

edit: or we can rent one for $25 per month or something if enough of us really want it :/

 

I wouldn't imagine that it's very bandwidth intensive... Will a dedicated server run on a single-core, old 1.5GHz laptop d'you think? If so I'd be happy to get it running on that for now. I wouldn't imagine it's bandwidth-heavy either, so my measly 3Mbps down / 1Mbps up should be fine. Right?

I don't think it's worth paying for, there are plenty of other servers out there. Just if someone has a spare machine lying around and a reasonable connection, kinda thing.

And yeah the server is java so it's quite resource heavy, particularly RAM, so not sure that machine would be up to it. But there's only one way to find out :D

I've been looking. Beyond getting a server, which we could probably just get another Linode instance for, I found hMod (which is being superseded by Bukkit, but that's not out yet) which allows you to add your own plugins to Minecraft, all in a deliciously simple looking API which handily includes MySQL support and many more lovely things.

I've haven't had a proper look at the documentation, but I imagine it can't be too hard to write a plugin to integrate with Beehive's user authentication then we can force people to register here before they can play on Teh Mine and do things with permissions n'shit.

All we need to do is get a server and install hMod on it and get someone to write some Java to create our plugin.

That's a common assumption/misunderstanding.

Java will use as much memory as you give it - if you say it can have a max of 4G, it'll most likely go ahead and reserve that space, even if it doesn't need it and isn't actually using it.

See here: http://www.fusion-reactor.com/fr/images/screenshots/MemoryGraph1.gif - it's been assigned upto 500MB and is allocating around 175MB, even though most times it's using less than 50MB and never appears to go over 150MB.
(The specifics will vary, but the general concept is the same with any Java server, afaik.)

The point is, you need to run a Minecraft server and measure how much it is actually using (or even, how it performs without much allocated to it), and then you'll know what you actually need.

It's a pity the server wasn't done as either a WAR or lib/JAR file that could just be plugged in to an existing JEE server, cus then I could plonk it onto my Tomcat and test all this without any hassle.

94.173.2.75

I believe they use Hmod on the RockPaperShotgun server, and they're currently having to do some weird things with downgrading their clients since Hmod isn't being actively updated to the latest server version.

Yeah, I saw that. There is an unofficial hMod doing the rounds, dunno if that supports the newer builds of Minecraft or not. There is also Bukkit (hMod's successor) that I mentioned, but they seem to be using the Black Mesa / Duke Nukem Forever method of development for it and haven't yet released anything.