ScriptCraft: Building cool things using Javascript in Minecraft | Hacker News Reader

ScriptCraft: Building cool things using Javascript in Minecraft

walterhiggins.net

103 pointsdpearson33 comments

Considering how much of Minecraft can be about grinding for resources or MCMMO levels... imagine being able to script the player, or even being allowed "bot teammates" you can script! Since that part of it could run on just the client (minus small interface stuff on the server for clients to request basic info and send player input), you could go all out with as much advanced AI as you can muster, without draining the server of any resources... while having a bunch of minions that gather resources, fight, explore and/or build (if you have the spare processing power/memory and the scripts.. so I guess it would be dominated by people who have many crazy fast machines and mad coding skills.. but I'd still love derping around in it, too. There's always robbing those bots manually haha..).

Apart from these bots acting on their own, players could send commands to bots via private message or towny/faction chat. Oh, and speaking of towny and factions, or any sort of teams reallly: what if this sort of "Minecraft Robot Wars" competition was set up so there'd be a few human players, with each having their bots who know their owners, but otherwise nobody knowing who is a player or a bot, and who is on what side... ?!

So you could e.g. either all join up in one town/faction and give your alliance away for more efficiency/power, or split up and try to play all sorts of diplomatic games via chat and actions, and try to deceive bots/people long and short term. Minecraft online is so much about trust, I never played another game that came close; and while that can be very frustrating and petty with humans, it seems hilarious to try to code bots that act real or otherwise deceive ^^ Especially if everybody knows that it's the goal of the game.

Please, nobody make this happen, this would destroy my life. Even just thinking about the possibilities is addicting haha.

Mechanisation seems to be available via the collection of plugins with "Feed the Beast". I don't know much about it but several YouTubers are now using it, alongside vanilla.

From the server's standpoint, running n players has optimistically the same cost whether those players are client-side bots or not (although, bots can be more abusive). In the MUD days (20+ years ago) this was called "multiplaying" and was usually forbidden, partly on grounds of this resource use, but some games did allow it. MMOs 10+ years ago saw an influx of people using GUI scripting tools to implement bots. It's fairly obvious when it's happening and people really don't like it for the same reasons that they often don't like server-side bots in multiplayer games.

So realistically I believe this is a niche idea which might be hard to make commercially viable. But it could be an interesting thing for private minecraft servers.

We wrote a library to do just that (sorry): https://github.com/minefold/node-minecraft

It needs a small fixes to work with the current version of Minecraft but it's pretty feature complete. We were using it internally for load testing (until we made our architecture support multiple games).

http://www.computercraft.info/

There exists a mod that lets you build mining turtles, script-able in lua. If you really want to destroy your time, look up the Technic modpack-it has all sorts of awesome stuff like that.

Oh, I should have known this would happen :) Thanks all!

This is cool, but for the server it is already possible to use a number of scripting languages.

By using the Bukkit server mod, which provides a stable plugin API, it is relatively easy to add a wrapper around a scripting engine [0].

For example, a plugin providing Rhino support [2] and one providing python support [2].

I would recommend either porting your work to the Bukkit framework, or working with one of the existing plugins to include some of the cool stuff you have made.

I don't currently know what the most popular scripting plugin currently available is, but I'm sure you can find it with a bit more digging than I have done.

[0] http://dev.bukkit.org/search/?scope=projects&search=scri...

[1] http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/redstonetorch/

[2] http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/pydevtools/

Computer craft, which uses Lua for scripting, is by far the most popular. There's a ton of tutorials available for it on YouTube.

I'd like to second this. You just can't ignore the multiplayer aspect of Minecraft. It's huge. Imagine if you put all the young developers on the same server and gave them access to this. They could write scripts to coordinate builds and cooperate with one another. You would need to make some adjustments to it though. You can't just place blocks without the player being in range. It would need an entire toolset to move the player. Imagine writing a script to harvest and replant a field of wheat. Or maybe a script to navigate a cave safely, killing mobs as they appear. This would really open up a world of potential. Look into Bukkit.

Bukkit plugins require running a separate server and giving the kids access to the server. Doesn't seem as practical as a client mod if you're trying to make it kid friendly.

The author mentioned It makes it possible for Minecraft Server administrators to create interesting places for players to come and play.

I agree a client mod is a great place to have this functionality, but if it is being done on the server as well then using a framework like Bukkit is a great choice.

For one thing, the author complained about obfuscation making it difficult to expose different functions in the game. Bukkit provides a stable API, so it makes sense for a scripting wrapper to expose those functions, and by doing so gain a lot of functionality.

I've implemented ScriptCraft as a bukkit plugin now. Bukkit's API and plug-in deployment mechanism is sweet. ScriptCraft and Bukkit are really well suited.

RedStoneTorch looks very interesting.

Thanks for the bukkit recommendation - it really is a great minecraft framework to code against. I've since added a ScriptCraft bukkit plug-in... https://github.com/walterhiggins/ScriptCraft/blob/master/buk...

No worries :)

I used to be very active on the team there, but haven't contributed any code for a while now. I get the urge almost every week, so maybe I should jump back in for a bit.

It has its problems, but is miles ahead from where we started and really does enable plugin authors in a way straight modding never can.

This is a great gateway drug for getting kids into coding.

The JS language also allows a transition to html5/web stuff (cool web pages they and their friends can see with some simple-to-setup hosting) and perhaps ultimately server side (nodejs).

And a child walking that path would then be exposed to enough ideas/different environments that learning a different language would be a natural next step.

This is a pretty exciting idea. I wonder how easy it can be made. i.e. I wonder how much of the distracting tool-based detail can be swept to one side.

Plus no one is going to get a god complex on with all the people who cry how shit javascript is.

I'm currently introducing my 10 year old niece to programming using ComputerCraft, a single player mod that introduces several programmable objects in to the Minecraft world. Installing is a bit of an exercise, because it requires Forge, but it is otherwise worth it. I recommend using MCPatcher to load Forge, then just drop the ComputerCraft zip in to the /mods folder inside your Minecraft data folder.

http://www.computercraft.info

Using MagicLauncher[1] makes it much easier.

1: http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/939149-launcher-magic-la...

Wow! Thanks so much for that link.

One of the downsides of the diversity in the Minecraft modding community is that it can be difficult to identify the "best" way to do something. New tools come and go, and compatibility wanes when new releases hit.

We experimented with this kind of scripting in Manic Digger: http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&#...

It would be better if it had exposed all the commands from the server modding api: http://manicdigger.sourceforge.net/news/wp-content/uploads/2... . (note: old version)

I think JS would be useful for making Adventure game mode where blocks (script-boxes) contain javascript code that spawns NPCs, defines dialog trees, quests, items.

Another example: Spleef arena control room http://mdgallery.strangebutfunny.net/View?id=103

Cool. As a matter of fact, about a week ago I tried to do something similar by trying to integrate Python with Minecraft. I actually did expose the full Bukkit API to Python (easy enough to do), so all its commands are available.

I didn't really like the "type your code in Minecraft chat"-approach many similar projects were/are taking (i.e. "/js myCodeHere()" in chat) and wanted a proper interpreter window. To integrate the Java-based Bukkit API with Python, I used Jython. The result is something similar as shown here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Pi_Edition

I've yet to put up a blog post or something, but I've thrown together a quick video of me playing with it (it's a bit slow so feel free to forward) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI3PfgCSI7Y

I think something like this could really help in getting kids excited about programming. Back in the day, I started learning programming with LOGO http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logo_(programming_language) , a quirky adaptation of LISP, but where you could immediately see your results drawn on screen. It's cool to see Minecraft as some sort of modern "canvas" for programming.

I wrote a bot a year or so ago which implemented a very basic subset of Turtle / LOGO using python for minecraft classic and a repl. When the newer protocol came out, I stopped working on it after the protocol changed but it was a fun exercise.

http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/python-plugin-loader/

I have been using a python-bukkit plugin layer for quite some time for a lot of small administrative plugin tasks on my private server. You should check out his project, it's on github.

I am a Minecraft server owner (http://craftworksfactionrpg.net) and I've used a scripting plugin extensively to add server-side functionality to my server. The plugin is called 'Skript', http://dev.bukkit.org/server-mods/skript, and has a fairly large exposure of Bukkit APIs.

With this, I've created an entirely custom RPG class plugin, and a complete dungeon editor.

Problem was, with the 1.4.6 update, Skript stopped working in some areas so I've been forced to go into Eclipse and write Java with the bukkit APIs directly. For someone with experience, jumping into Bukkit plugin development was a piece of cake, but I was able to build out very very very sophisticated plugins with Skript before the update broke it.

This is, potentially, amazing.

Minecraft is aiming for some extensive modding re-write, which will make installing and using mods easier. I 'm not sure how much work the author will have to do to get scriptcraft running under the new system.

I'm also interested in how it compares to existing world building tools. Most of those are out-of-minecraft software. But things like world edit, etc.

Hi Dan, Adding in-game scriptability means you can do some serious in-game world building with a little knowledge of Javascript. I haven't used out-of-game tools like mcedit. I personally like the ability to prototype at the in-game command prompt. E.g...

  /js box('35:15',4,9,1)

...creates a 2001 Monolith at the current location. The real power of ScriptCraft though is its ability to load and execute javascript files containing functions, and the ability to easily extend the Drone class. E.g.

  // file monolith.js 
  Drone.extend('monolith',function(){
      return this.box('35:15',4,9,1);
  });

After loading monolith.js, players can do the following to create 3 monoliths...

  /js monolith().right(6).monolith().right(6).monolith()

I've provided a couple of example scripts but it will be interesting to see what players do with this.

I would love if the Minecraft guys provided Javascript scriptability without the need for a mod.

That would ruin the game for most players. It has to be a server mod.

Agreed. It makes sense for admins to be able to build using javascript but would lead to accidental/deliberate griefing if all players on a server had it.

It looks like Bukkit might be a perfect fit for ScriptCraft. Bukkit seems to have wrappers around a lot proprietary minecraft code. The ability to use those wrappers in Javascript would mean that once ScriptCraft was installed, futher Bukkit plugins could be written entirely in Javascript (no need for java).

Isn't this sort of what the Raspberry Pi version of minecraft does?

Sort of, yes. Except that version will support many languages instead of just JS. In the demo videos you see them using Python commands. The concept is almost exactly the same, though the guys at Mojang are building the interpreter into the game itself instead of it being a mod.

More info here: http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Pi_Edition

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