"If you're over 25, chances are your peers don't play Minecraft. I'm over 25. Therefore, I'll play Minecraft when more players are established working age adults."
Good luck with that. In the meantime, my age 40+ wife and I have Minecraft mountains to craft into beautiful and creative castle homes.
Besides, my point is more a contemplation about what references, ideas, and concepts I'll because I might not ever dive deep into Minecraft. I didn't mean it in a snobby way at all.
There is a literal reading of the post that's correct. The deobfuscation of the above line is something like you have no visceral hands on experience with concurrency issues until you try to build a massive automated manufacturing plant in modded minecraft.
Go ahead, try and build an optimized manufacturing plant to automatically hands off manufacture all the components for something complicated like the AE2 mod, without understanding concurrency. Everything in minecraft happens in parallel, not in a single threaded machine code or abstract object model. Its like real assembly line engineering, not like writing traditional code at all. Big modded minecraft systems are chock full of LIFOs and deadlocks and queueing and latency issues to work around and debug. Minimal successful production is one thing, but perfectly optimized higher speed parallel production is a whole nother challenge.
I will admit that trying to use a single printing press to make AE2 components often annoys me enough into just building assembly lines with five presses, but that produces interesting issues of its own relating to peak to average power requirements of the entire system, and minimal latency (how do you expect something 30 blocks on a side to be as low latency as something 3 blocks on a side?)
Any idiot can make a concurrent system work by using ridiculous top tier stuff and setting the goal low enough, but its a fun engineering challenge in the true sense of engineering to make it as small, reliable, fast, and cheap as possible (plus constraints added for fun, sometimes). Both in modded minecraft and in the real world.
At this time of morning, I can't think of a kids toy that teaches concurrency design concepts better than "beyond-coursery level" modded minecraft. "Here's a cheap FPGA now implement a working pipelined ALU" isn't really a kids toy although its got similar concepts inside, and its cheap enough for a kid to afford.
I would still love your suggestions on what mods are excellent though (there are so very many...). Cheers!
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I gotta ask: do you cram mods into your Minecraft server, and if so which ones? If not, which do you keep?
And how the heck do you keep up with the version mismatching? Like, should I just not update the server, or should I stick with just one engine?
By way of mea cupla, I have tried to look into it and figure it out, and came away with that it's such a mess maybe I shouldn't bother. No reason to make my day job my fun time as well; hours of glitchy wonkiness ain't my way of destressing.
(I gave Aloglia's API a cursory try and haven't found you listing your favorites, but whenever minecraft comes up I recognize you seem to be in the know. I've been playing vanilla for a while enjoying the tedious relaxation of just being able to use command blocks, but it's getting to the point I think programming a robot to build my skybride and tunnels would be a wise investment of time :)
The role of a modpack group like FTB is almost perfectly analogous to linux distro. You could figure out all the dependencies by hand and namespace everything, but the Debian guys did all the sweating for you, so may as well use their metadata.
A long time when I was starting out I was a little overwhelmed by the modpacks having a hundred mods. So I'd start up with exactly one mod installed, lets say IC (the original) or just railcraft or whatever. But that leads to heartache and wasted effort (what, I need BC pipes to hook a railcraft boiler to a turbine?).
What seems to help is hard core quest mode packs. Crash Landing might scare people away, its kind of intense (but intense in a cool way). Agrarian Skies? Some HQM packs are so confusing they almost require watching youtube videos to figure out how to get past the first steps. Maybe FTB infinity evolved in NON-EXPERT mode?
I really hope we eventually get something that is just about literally a Debian for Minecraft. That'd be even better for getting kids into the hacking spirit!
It's really sad to me to see people turned off by it because kids play it. It was never that way when it first came out and when I was getting into it. Now I leave my Minecraft shirts in the closet because I know people associate it with childish things.