debuging and things that could use some debug

I think I found the first of my problems in combat test. Good old variable mess up. For example block has a block_wait and a block_change and parry, and dodge have similar. The X_change is how many turns at max it can wait to change and block_wait is the actual counter for it. Easy change but showing that you should always make variable names you'll get exactly what they mean on viewing. So going to work on fully testing that out and getting the AI using punisher things itself.

Other than that my Friend finally got me to get the minecraft pre release files as we could try out a server. That didn't work too well. For whatever reason I would log in, load for a while, move around ineffectively then get timedout. Seems to be a reported occurrence with no real work around so we're left with rolling back to stable version until a real update comes out. It's annoying but it's something I can expect.

Though I did make a single player world. Which happened to be an island. With one tree. No farm animals spawned but there was some tall grass. So after carefully harvesting the tree in hopes of saplings I made a farm. From there I hit tall grass for seeds to receive one. This did not seem good with the newly implemented food system. So I left the island a bit to find a few other small islands with tall grass and nothing on them and returned to plant it and do some tree management. Before the wheat was fully grown I found out that you can starve to death in game, now I made the mistake of jumping into the ocean to see if I could get in the seemingly glowing holes at the bottom before I died which I didn't make it too. This messes up my evaluation of "Starving" because I swore it left me at .5 a heart before suffication under water took that away, but I could be wrong.

After that I made another world with more trees and the hunger problem came again. I had plenty of sheep around and got lost getting other meats through hunting. Raw meat I found out does next to nothing for hunger which proved anoying when I started wolfing food down on the last food indicater. Though I have a little wheat farm growing in the middle of a lake and want to get some pumpkins or watermelons to see how they work in game.

While buggy as hell I'm actually very interested to see how food will now play in the game. I also want notch to leave the option of "classic" play style where food doesn't matter but I doubt that'll happen. It'd be a shame though, as he did say there would be ways to ignore food and Creative omnipotent mode isn't quite the way to do that.

Switches and ores

I was going to do a boring programing tutorial or possibly talk about skills in games but then I realized I had minecraft.

Recently my friends have started up a Survival multiplayer server on a friends machine. We have messed around a few times with it so far and finally starting to do a "proper" mine. By proper I mean it's half a days walking distance from the main base. We've had plans in the future to set up a rail system and various other thigns and I relized that only one of us has the basic track system knowledge and has trouble with redstone. So I've spent the past evening and this morning messing with tracks and rails.

First thing I learned is that like the Gel water physics redstone is weird. Very weird. I knew a few more things than the friend who practically went mad from trying to make a giant piston gate and it still gave me trouble. Second thing I learned is that cart piston physics are weird. Third thing I learned is that there was complete destruction of the old pez dispenser system for minecart storing stations.

In the past minecart had a weird quirk. If a minecart passed another minecart next to it both of them would go to top speed. It allowed for long distance transportation via booster stations where a single track was laid out with a minecart placed in it with hill climbing tracks on both ends but ultimately the cart would hit a block and come to rest in the middle. This allowed the real cart to come by get "boosted" by it and have the booster station cart go back and forth a few times until it came to rest roughly in the middle where it could assist in another minecart going in either direction.

In previous versions where this worked you could make something called a pez dispencer. Minecarts have some physics to them, they'll sit on top of each other, so naturally you make a tower holding a half dozen and the bottom one sits on a half block. when needed you'd press a button and do some magical track switching to send a cart that was in a perpetual motion boost loop to come by force the stacks bottom minecart off it's half block onto some track and sending it up to you.

The days of that are gone though. In one of the recent patch updates he added powered tracks which completely remove the need of such weird quirk booster physics. I didn't miss it as I had not do much beyond make a perpetual minecart mover. Though upon trying to do some tricky piston things as I realized pez dispensers didn't' work I noticed something. When a minecart is hit by a piston it loses all physics, all the rest of the minecarts collapse into it and lose physics too. So you have 6 minecarts occupying the same space and time on the track causing very strange things to happen including teleporting through walls and overshooting tracks. If you understand minecraft you can see I sort of fixed that. Though I don't quite like the way, it doesn't' seem as elegant as the old pez dispenser.

Another thing realized was that powered tracks work via increasing the direction of movement. Push or drop a cart on them and they do nothing. In fact even the direction of the push does nothing as the object does not gain a movement direction, the piston just constantly updates it's coordinates. Leaving level powered tracks kinda useless. In fact the only way I could reliably have powered tracks work as boarding stations is if they are on a hill, which is just odd. Either way it seems I have some solution to the problem at hand and am still working on it. At least unlike my piston staircase for minecarts a mine art station isn't going to be messing up anytime soon.

Random minecraft post

So in the way long past I've bought into Minecraft alpha. Back then it was mostly due to a few friends playing it and the prospect of it becoming multiplayer. Normally sandbox games are not my thing, I like a lot of direction in my game. Being given a world canvas and told to do what I want leaves me messing around for a few minutes then going to another game where I could be railroaded in eye rolling ways but just continue. May just be my lack of imagination but I'd rather have the developers show me the features of a gaming world than to fumble around like an idiot trying to entertain myself.

This all said, I do enjoy Minecraft. For a sandbox game with little content in it there is just something very satisfying about building rudimentary structures and being able to walk around them. lately I haven't done much with it. Played a few things called "castle runs" with a friend where we try to make above ground villages as fast as we can then expand from there. None of that find coal vein and that's your new home, nope your first night is usually spent scared in a wood hut with one torch, but we're just weird that way.

Now on to why I have a Minecraft post. 1.7 just came out with Pistons. The single thing that is likely to get me building in Minecraft again. They've had redstone for a while which didn't appeal to me, you could certainly make complex things but it just seemed too troublesome and hard to do if you got material normally. With pistons though, I get a bit more sense of accomplishment making gates and doors, and other things moprh like a transformer into their final form. I have not done much with them beyond make a test bridge and a few other pointless tests but it has been one of the best developments in Minecraft in a long time. I'd get the full effect but it seems I need to go slime hunting before I can make my piston powered contraptions work just the way I want them too.

One last thing to mention. You may notice my image lacks any piston use whatsoever but there is a reason. Long long ago when I made that map it was a time when snow was a finite resource. Me being an odd case of OCD when it comes to limited or hard to get materials had cleared the entire fort ground of snow with a shovel, making them all snowballs then eventually snow blocks as to not waste them. After going about mining for redstone I returned to my main base to stick the iron and the few bits for redstone in a chest and an in game snow storm started up. I had not heard about this being added in any patches and thought it was just a nice visual addition to the game. A few seconds later I noticed all my clear green field of my castle grounds starting to get snow tiles on them. So all my tedious hard work was rendered useless, only now I can completely disregard snow blocks and destroy them however I want, they'll just come back now.