Single Player Commands is back! Woooo

simo_415 over on the MineCraft forums recently updated his Single Player Commands mod for 1.3. What does that mean? I'm back up and running at full steam! Progress on dungeon 3/4 is going well, and I'll maybe post a video or screen shots when I finish it up.

In the mean time, if you guys are wanting some adventure map action, I HIGHLY recommend this one:

Gourd Avenger (Adventure Map) [By Akito12345]

The puzzles and scenery are very creative and the story is excellent as well. He's already got a sequel up so you'll have plenty of game time! Give them a shot, you won't be disapointed.

Doom 3 path traced with OptiX

http://developer.nvidia.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=5892

Seems like a nice idea, but currently it's far from real-time and it doesn't look very spectacular. Imo, it should use the Brigade path tracer for better performance and quality.

UPDATE: the guys working on this have posted a new screenshot, showing much improved global illumination by using Russian roulette:

Everything looks much brighter now and actually starts to have that path traced look. Unfortunetly textures and geometry are pretty low resolution. And it's still way too slow for real-time (30 minutes for this 2048x2048 image on GTX480 + Tesla C2050).

Video Time!

Sorry I haven't updated in a few days, but like always, weekends are busy for me. No official work has been done in my side of Minecraftia this weekend, but my boyfriend has made an awesome video highlighting some of the fun stuff we do on our server. You'll get to see a basketball game between Trish and Jake which is really cool, a glass maze that I DEFINITELY struggle through, some zombie torturing, and Jake's sweet dance moves. Hope you guys enjoy this as much as we did!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AIt9iNVDhA

Thundercats night hunt

Redstone Guide: New redstone repeater blocks, and a improve Zelda tune setup

Here's a quick guide I put together for the new redstone block, and a MUCH easier setup for the Zelda "secret revealed" sound. Enjoy!



And to forget to check out/subscribe to my YouTube channel. More vids to come!

LuxRender releases LuxMark 1.0, an OpenCL based path tracing benchmark for GPU and/or CPU

Wonderful little program, which is able to run entirely on the GPU, but can also run on CPU only or on both CPU and GPU: http://www.luxrender.net/wiki/LuxMark

It would be really awesome if a real-time pathtraced dynamic benchmark like this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33rU1axSKhQ) could be included in LuxMark, where users can interactively control the number of samples per pixel and the path length with sliders (just like in Tokap) and can interact with the physics as well. It's perfectly possible to path trace the scene from the OpenCL path tracing video in real-time and it would give LuxRender and its OpenCL path tracing effort some much deserved awareness!

Constructions de folie sur un serveur

En un peux moins de deux mois il est possible de créer des choses superbes sur Minecraft. La preuve avec ce serveur multi-joueurs qui envoie du lourd !

Découvrez la Map ICI.

New intro and outro

I am going to upload a new video soon which will feature new intros and outros. Actually, the intro is animated, and not the outro. Actually, the intro is 3 seconds long, LOL. And the outro is still image, "TutorialConr", written with a background of a radial gray glow in a black background.

They seem pretty good.
I hope you all like it.

Tutorialconr.

Slow goings...

Since the 1.3 update, many mods broke. A lot of them have been updated (MCedit), but one in particular, "Single Player Commands", has not, which has brought my progress on the map to a temporary halt :( . I can still build certain things...but definitely not at the same speed as before, which is frustrating. I will be putting any major sections of the map on hold until "Single Player Commands" is up and running again.

Let's hope for a quick update!

PS, This is in no way directed at the mod creators. I don't expect all mods developed freely by the community to be 100% working on patch day. Thank you all for your tireless efforts to make MineCraft more enjoyable!

Hungry?

My restaurant is now complete! I am very excited to post these pictures, because I've been working on gathering red wool for quite some time now to finish up my restaurant vision. I think it turned out pretty good, and I hope you guys like it too! My next project is a church/graveyard area, which I'm working on as soon as I post these pictures. Have a nice day!

The kitchen! 6 stoves and 2 crafting tables on the left, and 3 large chests on the right to store food in.

My "VIP" booth, for a large crowd.

Smaller table for a smaller group.

A view of the left side of the restaurant. The "flower" pot was made by surrounding a dirt block with two wooden stairs. I thought it made a nice touch.

The entrance of the restaurant. The waiting area is on the right. Also, the lighting in the place was made the same way that I made the lanterns, just used light gray wool and surrounded all sides. I also just made one wooden fence post coming from the ceiling to hold them.

The outside view. I made the little breezeway area the same way I made the lanterns too, using the dirt method to stack the fence posts.

Oh yes, and here is the menu and the entrance to the kitchen.

Grizwald and the Curse Pyramid - Complete walkthrough (Part 4)

Here's the last part of the walkthrough. Stay tuned for more redstone guides/new map previews, and don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel!

Some ideas for Tokap

While thinking about ways to make the ray traced Pong game more fun, some other ideas came to mind. If you think about it, there are a lot of simple games that can be built using just a few spheres. Some ideas:

- cube and pyramid of spheres. Shoot a sphere to see it collapse!

Newton's Cradle:

and a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CZShNRtT64

- A mountain landscape made out of spheres (originally from smallpt by Kevin Beason):

- Amiga juggler: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yJNGwIcLtw The character is entirely made out of spheres.

- A game like this one http://www.donpixel.com/play/050912180926/ using spheres instead of boxes.

- A cool real-time path traced physics animation like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33rU1axSKhQ, originally developed by Chiaroscuro from Luxrender running on SmallptGPU.

As long as the number of spheres remains modest, these scenes could be path traced in real-time (with tokaspt) on a high end GPU and provide very realistic looking graphics with nice physics. Since the geometry of the "physics world" is decoupled from that of the "graphics world", the sphere-only limitation of tokaspt doesn't apply to the physics simulation, which can actually use real planes and boxes. These planes and boxes can then be approximated with spheres in tokap, while still producing 100% accurate physics as if the ball is rolling on a real plane, so even a snooker game should be possible!

There is also an amazing real-time raytraced game called "AntiPlanet" which is running on CPU but also has a version running on CUDA (http://www.virtualray.ru/eng/download.html). It's a first person shooter game where the entire scene is made out of spheres, including the weapons and monsters, and has been in development since 2001 (see http://www.virtualray.ru/eng/news.html)

Videos of AntiPlanet:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eqWtzC0Jbo

"AntiPlanet2 - indie game with real time ray tracing 3D engine which only does spheres. It has multi core and CUDA versions. The game is "doom"-style 3D shooter. The sperical graphics design is inspired by abstractionism and cubism genres of fine arts. Program download page www.virtualray.ru/eng/download.html

Night-time scene. Video was rendered in 1920x1200 resolution, system Core Duo 1860 + GeForceGTX 280"

And http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVHoN66brIw

Screenshot of AntiPlanet:

It would be awesome if the CUDA ray tracing engine of AntiPlanet could be upgraded to use path tracing. 'Tokaspt' could be used as a base framework, but it doesn't have acceleration structures (such as BVH) which are a must if you want to raytrace the thousands of spheres in AntiPlanet at acceptable frame rates. The video shows that 30 fps at 1920x1200 resolution is possible on a GTX280 with 'plain' ray tracing, very impressive numbers due to the fact that ray-sphere intersections are much cheaper than ray-triangle intersections. If the ray tracing engine would be extended to path tracing, I'm pretty sure that real-time GI (coming from a HDR skydome) would be possible at 960x600 resolution on a GTX580 with this game.

Town Update!

With the implementation of beds to the game, I've updated several places in my town. All three little townhouses are now complete. Here's a picture of each one. 

The outside of the townhouses. I put three torches on top of each one, one at the front, middle, and back. Monsters WILL spawn on top of a house if it's not lit properly! I found this out the hard way when I came outside to zombies dancing on the roof!!

Flower beds in the back of each house!

As you can see, each house looks identical, only different colors and different paintings. They're pretty simple, but that's because they're just serving as extra bed spots for visitors at the moment. I really like the blue beds that the new Gerudoku pack has. I just hope eventually beds will be available in different colors! Well, it's time to get back to work. I just wanted to give you guys a few picture updates of the work that's coming along in my town!

Oh, and as promised, here is a picture of a couple of lanterns I have put up, so you can see the finished product.

Keeps your area creeper free!

That's all for now, but will definitely have more to add tomorrow!

I hate it when she...

Picture is worth a 1000 words and all that.

Credits goes to guzmann for giving me this

Pigs in SPACE! and monkeys, mice, dogs, squirrels and wolverines

Minecraft Beta 1.3

La nouvelle version de Minecraft est disponible depuis hier. Voici les nouveautés qui l'accompagnent :

- Nouveau système de lumière/ombres dans les options graphiques.
- Possibilité de crafter des lits. Dormir dans un lit permet de passer directement au matin.



- Possibilité de crafter des demi-blocs
- Ajout du Repeater/Delayer en Redstone




- Correction de quelques bugs

Et plein d'autres nouveautés à découvrir !

Beds Beds Beds

Well, Notch added beds to minecraft. Beds allow you to sleep and skip the night. If you're on a Survival Multiplayer Server you will need all players online to enter a bed in order to bypass the night. Beds cannot be used during the day as they serve no purpose. Sometimes beds will glitch and tell you that they are already occupied, or that you can only sleep in the night despite it obviously being at night. If this happens, simply break the bed and replace it in a new spot.

Simply place the bed down on some ground.

And then right click the bed to enter into it. This will bring up your chat window so that you can yell

at your fellow players to jump into a bed and/or tell them Notch is trolling them. You will also

be presented with the option to leave the bed. Pressing ESC will make you leave the bed.

Sometimes your game will pull a Morrowind (Contains NSFW language.) and you will find yourself being attacked by a mob. This will happen even if you are in a well-lit room. It appears to happen more often on ground level, making building your bed on a second story or higher the optimal choice. Be sure you are healed before going to bed. The bed does not heal you.

Beds are made by placing 3 wool on top of 3 wooden planks in a crafting table. You should probably keep wool on you at all times so you don't prevent your fellow players from being able to skip the night.

I created a new single player server. I spawned next to all these walking beds.

I'll just leave this here.....

Sssssexy Creeper by ~SammyGoddess on deviantART

Voxel based global illumination video

Last week at I3D, a very interesting paper about voxel-based global illumination was presented, which was already available for some time at Kesen Huang's I3D page. But now there is also a video of the technique in action!

Paper and video: http://www.rendering.ovgu.de/publikationen.html

The paper also contains some results of voxel-based path tracing, which are unfortunately not shown in the video.

The voxel grid allows a coarse scene representation, which is much cheaper for calculating real-time GI. Pixar, PDI Dreamworks and VoxLOD use a similar technique (see http://raytracey.blogspot.com/2010/08/faster-raytraced-global-illumination-by.html)

Grizwald and the Curse Pyramid - Complete walkthorugh (Part 3)

Part three is up (this one ends kinda abruptly though). Stay tuned for part 4, and don't forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel!

Minecraft Beta 1.3

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
* Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button
* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
* Added three new half-size blocks
* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
* Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter “whitelist ” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add ”, “remove ”, “list” or “reload”
* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
* Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

Yaaatta!

AHH!

That's the best title I can come up with to everything that happened this weekend. Not only was our main server down, but my computer got hacked! Luckily, the only thing that was stolen were my e-mail and facebook passwords. Everything has been worked out now. Good to be back!

Now for the reason you guys read this. MINECRAFT. Well, as you know, I've been working on this witch tower project that I've been really excited about. And I was, until I started building last night and figured out that the clouds go straight through one of the stories of my tower. Still unsure about what I'm going to do about that. May just end up finding some more sulphur and blowing up the whole thing. Yeah, I'm pretty bummed about it. I've just left it alone for now and continued working on the town, which is really starting to look nice. I put in a lot of sidewalk/road area, and started building lanterns to light up the roads. The lantern look is one I stole from Sammy, and I think it looks really nice. To make a lantern like the ones we make, you need the following:

• 5 fence pieces
• a block of some kind to put torches on
• 3 torches
• something to build "up" with (I use dirt, it's the cheapest and easiest to find around my area)

To start, build yourself "up" about three blocks. I say three because I like to have my lanterns four blocks above ground level. You're going to put the first fence post on TOP of the third block of whatever material. I'll just say dirt for this tutorial. You're also going to want to put the block that you're going to put torches on to the side of the dirt block. The side depends on which way you want your lantern to face. I usually put mine in front of the fence posts. Next, put another fence post on top of that block. Then you're going to want to knock the dirt out and put another fence post under the one you just made. Repeat this process until you get to the bottom. Finish off by putting the three torches around it and you have yourself a cute little lantern. I'm putting them up all over my town, because it just looks a lot nicer than random torches on the ground around the roads. Hope you guys can use them too! Also, I'll post a picture of what the finished product looks like as soon as minecraft.net is back up! Have a great day!

1.3 Update is here!

With BEDS!!!!

To update, simply launch minecraft it should do it automatically. The recipe for the bed is 3 cloth on top of 3 wood planks.







Here is a list of what else was updated, according to Notch's tumblr:

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
* Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button
* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
* Added three new half-size blocks
* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
* Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter “whitelist ” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add ”, “remove ”, “list” or “reload”
* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
* Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

If I have time, I'll try and post a video of some of the new stuff. So exciting!

New Launcher

I don't know if you noticed yet or not, but theres a new a launcher. Still waiting on 1.3

Video of Caustic Graphics at Imagination Technologies stand

After the fake article, some real news about Caustic Graphics:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPq08cyKFY4. Not sure if there is GI in there. Disappointing visuals and a totally misleading and deceiving comparison between rasterization and ray tracing. This guy should go work for Intel :)

And a promotional short showing a simulation of how real-time ray tracing on iPhone would look: http://vimeo.com/19937145

It doesn't look like Caustic Graphics has anything compelling to show yet. Maybe they shouldn't show anything before they have a working sample of the Caustic Two card. In fact, it's starting to look more and more like the Larrabee debacle: pathetic real-time raytracing demos on phony, unmarketable hardware.

Dead Minecraft : le remake de Dead Island

Vous avez certainement déjà vu le trailer de Dead Island, si ce n'est pas le cas je vous invite à le découvrir au plus vite. Admirez maintenant ce remake à la sauce Minecraft.

Minecraft sur iPhone, iPod Touch et iPad

Bonne nouvelle pour tous les fans de Minecraft ! Le jeu va être disponible cette année sur iPhone, iPod Touch et iPad. Seules les fonctions qui ont du sens pour un écran tactile seront visiblement adaptées. A suivre...

Grizwald and the Curse Pyramid - Complete walkthorugh (Part 2)

Here is part two! Enjoy!

Straight From The World of Notch - Our office is cold during the winter

Seriously. The radiators are tiny, and the rooms are huge. I think the landlord turns down the heat during the weekends as well.. I stopped by yesterday to get some bonus work done in between the two trips (I was in Mexico one week ago, and we’re going to GDC in one week followed by a short stop in Vegas).
Most of the work I got done last week was with the new launcher, and it’s almost done now! Here’s a mostly complete summary of the changes:

* Newly designed window looks slightly prettier, and also has a nice big space to load an HTML page showing the updates in the latest patch
* If there’s a new update, the launcher asks if you wish to update. You can choose between “Not yet” and “Yes”.
* The launcher only downloads modified files
* Logging in is done over https, preventing sniffing (we even double check the certificate)
* Downloaded files are checksummed, making sure the correct file was received
* You can force a full re-download of all game files in case you suspect your local files are corrupt
* There’s a handy link to go directly to the game install folder

We have a couple of bugs left to fix, and we’re going to try adding the ability to choose what dir to save/load levels from. Playing against your dropbox dir might be fun. Once all that is done, it’ll get released!

While I was away, Jens’s been working on 1.3, which we’re aiming at releasing sometime early/mid-week next week. I’ve forgotten all the new stuff in there (it’s sunday, ok?), but my favorite two are the redstone delay/repeater blocks and the beds. We’re hoping to be able to make the beds feature complete before GDC, but it’s more important to get the 1.3 update out, so some of the functionality might be missing for a week or two.

In other news, all the lights are on here. I tried playing Amnesia, but it turns out I’m a coward. If you’re reading this, Frictional; AMAZING JOB! I’ve never been this scared in a game, ever.

Welcome home, Notch. I look forward to seeing the new content.

House Update!

Hey guys, i've been busy...But here is an update of my current house! All of this was done legit!

 Unfinished Tower

 Main Hallway in my spawn base

 "Living" room. Will put bed in when Notch adds them.

 Kitchen

 Entry Way to the Branch Mine

 Finished farm

 Finished Reed Farm

 Two tier storage room

 Forge

My castle I am working on. Not near done.

Grizwald and the Curse Pyramid - Complete walkthrough (Part 1)

Having trouble on the Pyramid map? Getting lost? Can't find those secret chests? Well check out this full walkthrough and you problems will be solved :)

Headless HTML page rendering with phantomjs

What is phantomjs?

phantomjs is a headless browser which can render HTML pages into images. It uses a Webkit rendering engine. That's cool because the generated page images aren't missing any dynamically loaded javascript stuff. Event flash movies are shown as expected.

Building phantomjs

The phantomjs homepage contains some very useful hints about getting and building phantomjs. Read the comments at the end of the build instructions page if something doesn't work out for you. There are many useful hints.

Rendering my first page

phantomjs is controlled using javascript commands. You can launch your phantomjs javascript files from the commandline:

$ phantomjs myScript.js

phantomjs calls your script every time after a page is loaded. To react in different ways on different pages you have to track your current "state". You can persist your script's state in the var phantom.state. phantomjs restores the value of phantom.state even after another page is loaded. Other javascript variables disappear after loading a new page. Initially the state is empty.

To load a page call phantom.open(url). phantomjs will load the page below the specified URL and execute your script after the page's DOM is loaded.

The (in my opinion) coolest function is phantom.render(path). phantomjs will save a "screenshot" of your current page to the specified path on your hard drive. The path's file extension defines the image file format. Your viewport's size can be defined by setting phantom.viewportSize.

After you're done with your phantom things you have to call phantom.exit(returnCode) to quit. The returnCode is passed as status to the parent process.

Now putting all that functions together in a script gives us the following:

if(phantom.state.length === 0){
  phantom.state = '0_home';
  phantom.open('http://www.mini.de');
}
else if(phantom.state === '0_home'){
  phantom.viewportSize = {width: 800, height: 600};
  phantom.sleep(2000);
  phantom.render('home.png');
  phantom.exit(0);
}

The result after executing the script is a screenshot of www.mini.de in a file named 'home.png'. The image will show the main stage with a flash movie and a footer with three dynamically loaded HTML fragments. You can see the result below:

Clicking links

"Clicking links" like a humanoid user is simulated by firing mouse click events. The following listing defines the clickElement(id) function which can be used to "click" elements. This allows us to execute simple page flows.

function clickElement(id){
  var a = document.getElementById(id);

  var e = document.createEvent('MouseEvents');
  e.initMouseEvent('click', true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, false, false, false, false, 0, null);

  a.dispatchEvent(e);
}

if(phantom.state.length !== 0){
  // save screenshot for every page / state
  phantom.viewportSize = {width: 800, height: 600};
  phantom.sleep(2000);
  phantom.render('screen_' + phantom.state + '.png');
}

if(phantom.state.length === 0){
  phantom.state = '0_home';
  phantom.open('http://www.mini.de');
}
else if(phantom.state === '0_home'){
  phantom.state = '1_config';

  clickElement('quicklink_id1');
}
else if(phantom.state === '1_config'){
  phantom.exit();
}

The script will load the URL http://www.mini.de which is the home page. After loading the home page the element with the ID 'quicklink_id1' will be target of a click event. The element with the ID 'quicklink_id1' should be the 'MINI KONFIGURATOR' link in the footer.

Asserting stuff

Within phantomjs scripts you can access you page's DOM, the global javascript variables and global javascript functions. This enables us to do some kind of unit testing.

I'm extending the listing once more:

function clickElement(id){ ... }

function fail(msg){
 console.log(msg);

 phantom.exit(1);
}

function assert(condition, msg){
 if(condition){
  return;
 }

 fail(msg);
}

if(phantom.state.length !== 0){
 phantom.viewportSize = {width: 800, height: 600};
 phantom.sleep(2000);
 phantom.render('screen_' + phantom.state + '.png');
}

if(phantom.state.length === 0){
 phantom.state = '0_home';
 phantom.open('http://www.mini.de');
}
else if(phantom.state === '0_home'){
 phantom.state = '1_config';

 clickElement('quicklink_id1');
}
else if(phantom.state === '1_config'){
 assert(document.getElementById('cake'), 'I am missing the cake!');

 phantom.exit();
}

Check this out: phantomjs returns a status code of 1 when the assertion fails. This can be used to do some custom post processing in the shell:

$ phantomjs myScript.js && echo 'Test successful' || echo 'Test failed'

Further information

For further information see the following pages. They are sorted by what I think is important.

• phantomjs javascript API


• phantomjs homepage

MineCraft update coming this Tuesday!

It's official, as confirmed from Notch's Twitter and Rock, Paper, Shotgun, the 1.3 update will be released on Tuesday, February 22nd.

It's confirmed that one of the new craft-able items added will be a bed. However this won't just be for cosmetic purposes. Ever wish it was daylight so you could make a quick run over to your garden for more wheat? Ever wish that stupid gold clock would turn just a little bit faster so you could get back to exploring? Well the bed does just that. Right-click on it and you will sleep through the night, making it instantly day time :)

There are other things that will (hopefully) be included in the update, but what I'm rooting for is this:


This Redstone repeater would make traps/music setups SO much smaller and easier to work with. Cross you fingers guys, we will find out on Tuesday!

Pub Minecraft par Martin Waltz

Le réalisateur Martin Waltz s'est fait plaisir avec cette publicité pour Minecraft. Totalement déjantée, elle risque de vous plaire à pas mal de joueurs.

Vidéo : Minecraft en vrai

Cette vidéo absolument géniale transporte Minecraft dans la réalité. Du très bon boulot !

Et en bonus : le grenade en diamant !

How to get more views on your website : Send Google Crawlers

Not getting to show up on Google ? If you search the name of your website, or something similar, and it's not coming up, it can be frustrating.

If you do what I am going to tell you, you'll see a really big change, and it's free. Best of all, it's Google.

Go to this site,

http://google.com/addurl

And 'Add your URL' !

Enjoy !
Tutorialconr.

You know you've played too much Minecraft...

...when the real world and Minecraft become indistinguishable.

How they build things in Australia

We come from a land down under...

Keep the beautiful Minecraft building coming, people!

Is this how you play Minecraft?

User "knirefnel" over on reddit.com posted this beauty that encapsulates the Minecraft experience to an absolute tee: