nesdev.org

Anyone here play? Maybe someone could set up a nesdev server?

If only the server wasn't so written poorly, consuming a lot of bandwidth, RAM, CPU, read/writes to hard disk, etc.

And not being written in Java.

I. Love. Mincraft! And there's always the renting option, but that'd suck. And considering that you can run a server on your computer if you have a good connection, I don't think it's too bad. Like you said, written in Java, it's okay. Just the language that's inefficient.

In the case of Minecraft, it's not Java which is inefficient per se (though I do hate the language and everything its built on), it's that Notch has no fucking idea what he's doing. Take a look at the contents of the Minecraft jar archives sometime and then ask yourself what "efficient" programmer would design something like that. Take a look at some of the "bug fixes" and ask yourself how something like that was overlooked. Just look at the history. That's really all you need to do. For quite some time I tried tracking all of the utterly nonsensical bugs in Minecraft and gave up because the correlation between Thing X and Thing Y just blew my mind. And the server is even worse. Ask yourself why the server takes up so much CPU time even when nothing is going on (be sure to take into consideration just how fast your CPU is today). Same goes for memory commit size of the server process. Given what Minecraft does (very little), nothing should be destroying resources like that.

Amusingly, there are some guys at Mojang who seem to have their shit together -- like Jakob. Except Notch doesn't permit anyone except himself to touch the Minecraft code (why should that surprise anyone though, given that he brags about being a member of Mensa). There was one exception made where Jakob went in and fixed a series of bugs that had plagued the client for quite some time (and the bugs were pathetic) -- I believe Notch was on vacation (when isn't he?), and when he got back nixed his access.

There are Minecraft-like games under development that look promising but need improvement -- and yes, they're in Java, yet do not suffer from all the horrible nonsense that Minecraft does. A C++ alternative is Minetest-c55, which again, looks very promising.

And please, please don't bring up Dwarf Fortress. I only mention it because usually during Minecraft discussions DF comes up as some sort of amazing comparison model showing that awesome things can be done blah blah blah... whatever.

I tried Minecraft. It's quite an amusing game. Kept me entertained for a day or so. The thing that boggles my mind is, why would any sober person play it for more than a day? Surely if you want to be creative there are other activities (like building NES games for instance )

P.S. I'm not dead, not yet. Just extremely over-worked

I have to agree with qbradq. I tried it out once. Became enamored with it for about an hour and half, then suddenly realized I could be using this type of effort to create games or at least assets for games. Same thing happened when I tried OpenTTD too.

I stopped playing a while back for several reasons.

Firstly, my computer is old and has a hard time running it.

Secondly, the updates were slow, and going in an odd direction. One day the amount of enemies being spawned was ridiculous. I stepped outside my house IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DAY and there were burning bad guys all over the place. It was like god damned Pompeii. I don't give a rats ass about the nether or zombie pig men, really. Changes made seemed pretty random- almost like notch was fucking with me on purpose.

And, lastly, as a result of these first two reasons, I found better things to do with my time.