Remote Desktop for Basic Looking Games?

[Stradian]

<Double Post, Oops.>

 

[TylerAW]

I can play it on a netbook running ubuntu-desktop, Intel GMA @ 166 Mhz and Atom @ 1.3 Ghz, almost full speed. Most minimal settings. Its was not pretty to look at. <_<


It would be better if Notch threw out the client code so the community could optimize it, but I'm really dreaming. Maybe after the full release of mine craft, Notch would consider porting.


On Topic:


I do not think the pandora's wifi chip is powered enough to accept those bandwidths required to stream video from another computer.

Well I cannot comment on that because I do not know it's specs.

 

[-Tj-]

Well the Pandora uses the same CPU as many cell phone devices out there, if he can get it running on their browsers or something by compiling it maybe he can get it running on ours so it's not just 4000 people playing it its all the smart phones.

True, more devices might be more enticing to a developer, but just because a device uses the same processor it doesn't mean it'll run the same. If he decided to build a version of the game for ARM-based devices running something like Windows Phone 7, he'd have to make sure it runs on every WP7 phone he says it'll run on, and let the rest take their chances. There are at least 9 phones out there right now running WP7, and I believe it requires a 1GHz minimum processor speed, certain graphics processor, a minimum memory size, and so on. If Notch says "now Minecraft runs on WP7," he'll have to make sure it runs on those phones, 'else face the wrath of many disappointed (possibly paying) players. That's a lot of work for one guy.


Of course, I'm talking theoretically. He could restrict it to individual phones with hardware that he knows could run the game, which would be ok, but it would likely cause a lot of bitching to fly his way one way or another. Also, from his blog it sounded like he's been in the process of or already has opened a studio somewhere. It's entirely possible he could hire people to handle ports to other platforms.


Another thing I noticed is that the game runs like utter dog poo on 2 out of 3 of my computers. The oldest (5 years old) runs it the best. It has the strongest graphics card in the lot but a weaker processor than the newest, which has a Core 2 Duo 2.53GHz and a 9300GS graphics card. Of course the strongest graphics card should run it the smoothest, but a lot of stuttering and lagging seems to be caused by the reading and writing of the chunks of level data that the game is constantly producing.


I wonder how the game would run if the data were being read from and written to an SD card instead of the hard drive? That might be a good test of what I feel is one of the biggest performance problems the game has. I could try that later when I'm not as busy.

 

[TylerAW]

First off this guy has made over a million bucks on this game so far which means he can afford to hire a team to port this thing to more than just PCs, it would be risky however if people on the smart phones have never even seen Mine craft. Second off Mine craft is not slow from any HDD it is not Dependant on that unless you somehow had a 100+ MB file loading which is kind of difficult. The game is under 100MBs and save files are usually under 10.

 

[WizardStan]

I would like to add a correction: Minecraft wasn't slow. As of beta, it seems to have started eating CPU and FPS.

 

[Blue Protoman]

And just when I thought it would finally run SMP at a decent speed on my netbook...

 

[-Tj-]

First off this guy has made over a million bucks on this game so far which means he can afford to hire a team to port this thing to more than just PCs, it would be risky however if people on the smart phones have never even seen Mine craft. Second off Mine craft is not slow from any HDD it is not Dependant on that unless you somehow had a 100+ MB file loading which is kind of difficult. The game is under 100MBs and save files are usually under 10.

I was gonna write a lengthy post about why I feel what you said here is wrong, but I'll let you believe what you want, since it seems like you're pretty sure of what you've been saying.


However, I will say this: it would seem to me that Notch is the kind of person who likes to have control over his project. There's several tip-offs that make me think that, but I'm at work right now and don't want to spend too much time writing this. But if this is true, it doesn't matter how much money he's got in the bank, he'll be hesitant to let others work on the code.


Anyway, here's something you might find refreshing: Notch has been quoted as saying the game will eventually be released as open source once the game has stopped selling and he's moved on.

 

[Klaue]

Anyway, here's something you might find refreshing: Notch has been quoted as saying the game will eventually be released as open source once the game has stopped selling and he's moved on.

From the same interview:


That said, it would be very interesting to port the game to a few consoles (perhaps the Pandora?) later on. I know doing a very limited Android version wouldn’t be impossible at all.

 

[-Tj-]

Definitely not impossible, but "a very limited" is the part that I focus on there. I'm interested to see if such a version does pop up, just how much of the game will make the cut. No doubt it could go pretty far, but like I mentioned before, there's a lot of read/write going on and I wonder how well that would work. Without a doubt, all that reading and writing is what slows my game down to a crawl.


Someone has already built a client that runs on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-9K8ZQTOMY, but so far as I can tell, it's not doing anything but reading data and doing fly-throughs. In other words, no collisions, no texture movement, no mobs, no items... nothing but level data, textures, and polygons, pretty much. Still, even something as basic as that might be kinda cool to show your friends your worlds.


(oh! and the Android client guy also made it available to the public: http://code.google.com/p/rugl/downloads/list)