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Comment by bbrks | Hacker News Reader

> Each blocks represents a ground area of 50 square metres. The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft. A maximum height of 2 500 metres was chosen, which means Ben Nevis, appears just over 128 blocks high. Although this exaggerates the real-world height, it preserves low-lying coastal features such as Bournemouth's cliffs, adding interest to the landscape.

It seems to be a 1:50 scale.

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Fortunately for the makers of the Danish version, the highest point in Denmark is a hill 171 meters high, so this particular problem didn't arise.

> The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft.

Well, I'm a cheapskate I play Minetest, not Minecraft. I'm fairly certain that Minetest has a larger height limit, but it can freeze like a bastard. The other day I went for a dig, and I used the compass to work out my position. I was over 500 blocks under the surface, I kept running into lava flows(!).

I'm now curious enough about Minetest after viewing its website that I might want to contribute. I love Minecraft and have played it since alpha, but it's always bothered me that it's built in Java - and that it runs horribly slow once Feed the Beast comes into play.

> I love Minecraft and have played it since alpha, but it's always bothered me that it's built in Java - and that it runs horribly slow once Feed the Beast comes into play.

I have never played Minecraft, so I can't comment, but Minetest does slow, it has a lot on its plate.

I just signed up with flickr, look for user "mrtucker257". I've uploaded some photos of my upmarket real estate.

Here is a link to NAFV_P's album: https://www.flickr.com/photos/123873955@N07/

Thanks for that, it was my first time on flickr.

This problem is what finally pushed me away from the game once and for all after a couple years. Minecraft itself is pretty heavy and slow given enough player load (sometimes not even that.. forest fires, lava flows and such can also bog everything down) - mods exacerbate the problem to the point of unplayability.

Which is really too bad, because things like Feed The Beast add an insane level of extra functionality and downright awesome things to the world.

Somehow I think it would be a different game if not for Java overhead. I've spent a truly ludicrous amount of time tweaking heap sizes, obscure garbage collection flags and such trying to keep the blasted thing from consuming all of the memory and crashing (and therefore corrupting the state of the world) on a relatively low-popularity server.

Not that Java doesn't have overhead, but quite a bit of the slow down for minecraft servers is caused by bad algorithms (N^2 type stuff) and data structures.

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