Minecraft server built in Node.js | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft server built in Node.js

github.com

48 pointschapel15 comments

You linked to a fork of the original project http://github.com/nornagon/nodecraft

Ah, thanks. I didn't notice at first. Though the fork has more recent commits where as the main hasn't had any for a while now. Still pretty cool and hope it goes somewhere.

Even more impressively, this appears to be for the new protocol version - the new protocol is significantly harder to implement a server for than the old one (I say this having written custom servers for both in Python), and requires, among other things, a full lighting implementation in the server.

I'd be curious to see how this compares to the Java one for speed (and some other SMP servers that are springing up) - it's quite difficult to store an infinite size map efficiently in memory and still keep good random access times.

They might want to switch that to the UDP server ( dgram ) Networked games over TCP is not usually recommended: http://gafferongames.com/networking-for-game-programmers/udp...

They can't if the minecraft client uses TCP.

Doh, sorry, obviously.

In which case, I wonder whether he (notch) is going to have trouble with the online performance. I've tried online play briefly and it didn't seem bad, I guess it isn't really twitch based.

I've played online (a few weeks ago) and there did seem to be problems with the server due to periodic GC causing massive lag and disconnections every so often.

It could also be people laying minecart track. This, unfortunately, completely kills the server and makes it need to be restarted.

in my experience, tracks on smp hosed the clients, not the server.

Server takes a massive hit as well.

Maybe DCCP [1] would be better. Non-congestion controlled protocols are bad for the internet.

[1]: Datagram Congestion Control Protocol: http://read.cs.ucla.edu/dccp/

UDP is not always the best protocol for networked games. TCP can be a good choice for games which exchange only or mostly important messages which must not be dropped and delivered in sending order (eg. most round-based games). To make that work with UDP you'd end up re-implementing a lot of already existing functionality inside TCP.

UDP is supposed to be better for real-time games, but both Minecraft and World of Warcraft actually do great with TCP.

This is pretty awesome, can't wait to try it out. The current minecraft server is such a memory hog and can be sort of hard to run a decent server on a small VPS. I wonder how this version compares.

For a sec, I thought it said "Node.js built in Minecraft" and didn't even find it a bit weird...

I knew this was coming..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com