Ya that's right I'm making a Minecraft like game for the ti calcs. The only down side is that it will be in 2D. Please give input on what you would like it to include.

Let's not make topic titles in all caps like that, please. Is the game going to be more like Terraria than Minecraft, or am I misunderstanding what you mean by 2D?

What are your plans for procedural generation and storage? Will the day-night cycle make use of the clock? For screen-to-screen movement, do you want scrolling?

oh no its guna be very simple were you just dig and build with a couple recipes and no day and night and no mobs

I'm trying to think how you could give it depth, and part of that could be a grayscale background. I was thinking you could have a button to jump to the background by one tile, but how would you see the blocks in front of the characters Z-axis? Since you'd basically have X & Y. My idea won't work

You mentioned using matrices for crafting. You could use that approach, since If [A]=[[1,1,1][0,1,0][0,1,0]] for a pickaxe seems to make sense. But I wonder if you were to substitute a letter variable for the matrix, would the program size and speed of computation fair better? If each cell in the crafting table corresponds to a different power of two, then you could sum those together and test it against a number identifying with the pickaxe.

For example,

Code:

correlates with:

Code:

And if that equals 151, then you have your pickaxe. A wooden plank or cobblestone would represent even higher powers, allowing you to mix ingredients unambiguously. Experiment away.

Well here are my unrestrained thoughts on this project. I truly don't think you've thought out what exactly you're going after. Here are a few reasons why:

- You seem to brush off advanced concepts that are key to a project like this such as map generation, efficient storage and retrieval of map data, etc. as simple and not worth thinking about, when instead you're worrying about *extremely* trivial things like ASCII art vs. "Xlib" (I assume you mean Xlib-powered sprite rendering?)

- You don't seem to have a very thorough plan delved into this; in fact, you're asking *us* what you should include. A project as major and complicated as this should be very well structure before any actual development should be put into the work.

- No offense, but this, as I've said before, is a very complicated project; it *could* be simplified down to a 2D, limited space simplistic mining game, but even then I still think you need to restructure and ask yourself "what can I actually get done, efficiently, while learning a lot yet while not having to ask questions about every aspect of the game?" before continuing with this.

You don't have to listen to any of our thoughts, but I HIGHLY recommend you do; you may not realize it, but virtually every one of us giving you advice here has been in the same predicament as you are in right now, and people telling us the constructive truth as we are doing to you, helped us out a great deal and has subsequently formed us into very structured software/hardware developers. If you follow our advice, you will eventually realize how great you have it to have people with experience giving you advice like this, and how it potentially changed you and possibly your project itself for the better.

ashbad i do have a plan and i'm only asking for your input so i can make the best game i can by putting what i know people want in it. Plus i may be explaining this the wrong way...

what i'm saying is that i'm making a very simple virsion first then i add the better graphics and more features

i'm currently worrking on the block placing.
but i'll get to crafting later. so thanks for the idea

This is of paramount importance to the actual game. Even Notch himself screwed it up the first three times around.

Also, the graphics are basically irrelevant. People playing calc games generally have enough imagination not to care too much.

Oh my gosh! thats is awesome!! even in 2d! sweet! I always wanted someone to make minecraft but anyways Id say that xlib would be better for better graphics and speed and also .

Edit by Kerm: Let's try that again!
"Oh my gosh! That is awesome, even in 2D! Sweet! I have always wanted someone to make Minecraft, but anyways, I'd say that xLIB would be better for better graphics and faster speed. [seizure-inducing emoticon removed]"

Thanks for that extremely constructive post, Orange. Let's try not to give credit for something not done yet, and perhaps restrain ourselves to 1 exclamation point.

Spud, this almost sounds it will be too large of a project. Else, it could end up looking pretty bad. Someone a few months ago made a "Minecraft" in TI-Basic in 2D that, to be honest, was pretty bad. If you could find a way to do it: fast, in 3D (somehow), and with reasonable controls, you'd be golden. Also, if you have a plan, post about it! Try to give us as much information about what you are wanting to do. No reason to hold back on something like this, and when you do, it looks like a project that was basically "I want to do this. Tell me how to do it." rather than "I want to do this. This is how I plan to do it, any ideas? Maybe this part could use some work", etc.

Nothing more constructive? Why not make it yourself, if you wanted it?

Spud: I agree a lot with Ashbad. Normally I would encourage someone to work on a program like this, but in your case I'll advice caution. Here's why: in the attention span of the average beginner programmer such as yourself, you'll either make a few features well, then get bored, resulting in an incomplete game, or you'll make a lot of features shoddily, resulting in a buggy game. In either case, users are going to be frustrated. I can't tell you how many BASIC "Zelda" and "Grand Theft Auto" and "Mario" and "Sim City" games there are on ticalc.org that are utter travesties to the real game's name. If you think you have what it takes to do justice to a "Minecraft" game in TI-BASIC, even in 2D, then good luck, and go to it. I do caution you to consider the scope of the project more fully. If it's not going to be Minecraft, in particular, don't call it Minecraft. For example, are you going to have:

-Mining?
-Building?
-Animals/passive mobs?
-Aggressive mobs?
-Redstone?
-Liquids/liquid physics?
-Tools?
-Inventory?
-Landscape?

Cheers, Kerm!



I must admit that is the most mentally irking and physically straining to look at emoticon I have ever seen in the face of the earth. Burn it with fire, someone.

EDIT: it seems Kerm is quite the Fireman

The Minecraft program that Catherine is referring to is here. If you attempt this project, that may provide some inspiration or help. Just make sure to credit the original programmer in your readme.

For what it's worth, I would absolutely stay away from the homescreen for this. It won't be enough space to have an entire map that's randomly generated to look good (imho). You could use this as a reason to learn text sprites and use them with a tilemapper. And I'm with Kerm, there. Unless you can implement everything Minecraft offers, you have not made Minecraft on the calculator.

Indeed. That's not to say that you couldn't create a fun, smaller game of some sort, based either on mining or building, or even both if you can come up with a cool mechanic for it.

well Kerm thats what I've done with the prototype so far
so far i've made it in ascii art and it looks bad but it's just a prototype
i've got the gravity the digging the jumping and the block placing.

Nice! I was expecting it to be top-down for some strange reason but that is cool!

thanks

It looks ok. I think I would make it in Axe, to make it fast with better graphics, but that's better than nothing! ^^