Also of note is a mod called Computer Craft, that adds Lua programmable computers and devices into the game (touchscreens, turtles!) as well as a set of APIs for interacting with various aspects of the game.
Yes, that's what most people tend to use for programming these days.
Although I personally have never enjoyed it as much as the famous Redpower 2 mod, which had computers as well, with 6502 assembler and Forth. It was less forgiving than Lua, but somehow more fitting the genre (of construction set, that is); programming in Lua feels almost like you could program the thing in Java and put it in a new block.
I also liked the logic gates and other stuff that came with RP2, I think that's good for kids to play with as well. Too bad Eloraam stopped developing RP2, it was the best mod for Minecraft ever.
(Also, CC computers seem to reset on world reload, while RP2 computers were persistent. They are also dirt cheap compared to RP2, and their runtime behavior is not well specified. I just kinda feel that CC computers break the fourth wall of the virtual world, in several different ways..)
I have similar preferences to you, and RedPower is one of the mods I enjoyed the most. Fortunately, Eloraam has recently started working on RedPower again.
Ah yes I miss Redpower. Was a _very_ polished mod which felt less magic (in a good way) when playing.
About that fourth wall. I know some who take this as a very strange kind of opportunity. For instance:
- SQL databases hooked up to sorting contraptions to manage inventory.
- Arduino/rpi to receive input/output from the game over the HTTP API. Think - controling doors with physical buttons, routing in game player detectors to LEDs. Lots of opportunities here.
The main advantage of computer craft is turtles, programmable robots. You can automate all sorts of things in the game and it's fun. Automating things with redpower is possible, but takes massive complicated contraptions and great feats of engineering.
One was used for mining, other for paving, and third had attached two 7x5x7 trailers, one was mobile house with basic facilities and the other was mobile Thaumcraft 2 lab.
But most things can be automated quite easily with frames, and I find it more intuitive - you just look at it and see what it does when it's done.
I also later designed a fully programmable factory using RP2, Buildcraft crafting table and a conveyor belt.
I am glad to hear that Eloraam started working on RP again. I hope I will be able to design von Neumann machine in RP, eventually (that's my ultimate goal, but there are several blocks still missing in RP, so it's not yet doable). At the very least, next time I play I want to have a full base on a moving platform (may be of several independent "trucks"), so I could easily move all stuff I have somewhere else in the world. :-)
Hey, lead dev of learntomod here.
I have spent many, many hours using Computer Craft, it was one of our inspirations for building our product. I'm glad to see it's still in wide use.
ComputerCraft isn't working with the newest versions of the core Minecraft game (1.7.2/1.7.10). There's another mod, OpenComputers, that does similar things: http://oc.cil.li
(I've assembled a custom modpack for Minecraft, and had to learn a lot about mods in the process. One of these days I need to look more at how mods are written. They're written in Java, of course, like Minecraft itself; some use Scala as well. I have a bunch of starred repositories on GitHub to look at...)
I'm confused. What does the $30 pre-order get you? Is it a subscription service? Their FAQ [1] mentions a subscription for a private server after the beta.
The page about the pre-order just says "$30" but then in the FAQ it mentions a $10 / month fee. They should really be more explicit about the pricing right up front.
Sorry that our pricing model isn't the clearest - we're still bouncing around ideas for after the beta. The $30 pre-order gets you access to the entire beta period until we release.
The subscription fee after the beta period is for use of a private server for you and your friends to use learntomod. Alternatively you can opt for a lower fee to play on a public learntomod server.
I've taken a look at the product site and I love it! I think it's perfect. Our son is obsessed with Minecraft and has recently been expressing interest about learning how to program. One question about the pricing, is would I be able to go through the lessons as well as my son? Or would we need to pay for separate accounts? The FAQ mentions something about up to 4 players per server.
Just talked to a few other people and they said
-those who preorder get a guaranteed life-time price of $10/month, regardless of whether we raise the price for everyone else.
After the beta: we haven't decided on a final pricing system. We're shooting around ideas of doing a tier system.
And about running your own learntomod server:
At this stage we aren't letting people run their own learntomod server, the only exception being 3rd party hosting companies that want to make it available to their users.
Thanks for the info. I'll admit that I probably wouldn't subscribe to such a service. If it was a fixed price for the software I would definitely buy it for my kids.
Relevant (shameless plug) for my and @kdurrani's implementation of LOGO's famous Turtles language but in Minecraft and in 3D https://github.com/tombh/mc-turtles
We taught Code Club in primary school and Minecraft is the one thing that is guaranteed to grab and sustain kid's attentions. We actually used it at first through a Raspberry Pi and unplugged the keyboard and mouse, so the only way kids could interact with Minecraft was through Python ;)
I'm 44, and started programming when I was 12 on a ZX81 and then a Commodore64. Back then we had magazines instead of the internet, and any serious program was written in assembly rather than BASIC. One of the more advanced things the magazines did was print out hex dumps of the machine code, with a checksum on each line, and there was a program (which you had to enter manually) that would let you type in those hex dumps. It would checksum each line as you went along and warn you if the checksum you entered didn't match the checksum of the bytes you entered. That was a huge improvement over just typing in the programs, because you knew you didn't have any typos.
Many, many hours were spent typing those programs in. I'm still really good at typing with one hand while the other is used to point at what I'm typing in.
I'm 28 now. I totally did that! I copied a bunch of programs by hand, from a single-player pong clone to a 3d plotting engine with hidden-line elimination on an Apple ][e.
Minecraft is very popular among kids, however I tried hard to deny my kids to play that. Instead I redirect them to program in python and processing and javascript, that might be more boring but they can play whatever games they built themselves using the 'real' programming language. So far it worked well. I always wondered how beneficial Minecraft(and the new code Mod) could be to kids? I dared not to let them play as I was told it's too addictive for kids...
I would agree with you if you were talking about Call Of Duty, but I think Minecraft is a different game.
The amount of potential creativeness and ingenuity that exists just in vanilla-minecraft makes the game more appealing developmentally to kids. Building structures develops spacial reasoning and 3d thinking. Collecting resources disciplines management skills. Collaborating with others and respecting their buildings both teach important social behaviors that are otherwise non-existent in most other popular games. These are just a few reasons why minecraft is both a really fun game, and a really exciting game to push further.
It's the modern sandbox game, and it's just a canvas. So we are trying to bring programming to the above skill set with learntomod.
It's fun and relaxing, and there's some evidence that children need relaxation.
It's also potentially sociable, if you can find a suitable server.
While I wouldn't want to overstate the benefits of Minecraft I do think it's a pretty awesome game that changes to fit the playstyle of whoever's using it.
I've seen amazing things made in creative. Not just stuff turned into a model and imported, but built block by block.
> I dared not to let them play as I was told it's too addictive for kids...
Set firm boundaries and stick to them. Set conditions on play - "You must have finished homework before play". This also means that you have a privilege that you can withdraw if needed.
How about playing with your kids? I have a private Minecraft server set up where I, my fiancee, our godsons, and their mother all collaborate. We use a custom-assembled modpack with a lot of different options; my fiancee has been learning to breed trees and bees (Forestry mod), while I've got a nuclear reactor going (IndustrialCraft 2 mod) and am starting to design a rail system (RailCraft mod), and one of our godsons has been building fancy houses, furnished with add-ons from BiblioCraft and MrCrayfish's Furniture Mod.
I'd love to hear where you are hosting that server. I currently have a tekkify [1] private server running with some additional mods such as Forestry and currently the world folder is about 700MB. For a while I've used an openvz vps but the load was too high and I pulled it to our local network on an old machine I had laying around. (For those wondering, openvz is a no go for modpacks unless you have a very expensive plan.) The load went from 2 to 5 which is terrible. I've been thinking about getting a dedicated machine at kimsufi [2] as hosting locally in our home network isn't so great really with low upstream speeds. For a vanilla world however (no mods except bukkit) you could run it on a openvz host though. To even lower the load more you could tweak the view-distance or even add a bukkit-plugin which limits the amount of entities that spawn.
I've got a Spider server on Creeperhost, which I use for myself. At the moment I'm running the Direwolf20 pack with an insane amount of automation going on, all chunkloaded in the few chunks around my base. I've gotten to the point where I'm starting to have problems with CPU load, but if I spread my stuff out and turned off things I don't need anymore it'd be fine. (Eg: I don't think I really need more than the 120 million cobblestone I've collected, or the million logs, or 125k+ carrots and potatoes.)
The server is cheap enough, and if I wasn't so nuts it could handle a small number of players easily.
Honestly I don't know I can host Minecraft for free, maybe I can set up a server to try it out and see how it goes. What's minecraft's business model if the server is free?
Sort of backwards to what you might expect: they give away the server and sell the client. (Which makes sense, since the client can also be used to play standalone.)
The client costs $26.95; you can buy it online with a credit card, or buy prepaid game license cards in some stores. You authenticate with Mojang's central server when you play the game. Actual game servers are usually configured to reject client connections if the user isn't authenticated. (You can turn that option off, but you get a big warning message in the server logs when you do.)
The same login for "vanilla" Minecraft also works with modded versions, such as those accessed through the Technic Launcher (http://www.technicpack.net).
OK. Thanks. Just checked with my kids and I was told they're no longer interested in mindcraft and think it's "boring". They're doing those html5-games-for-fun and got addicted into chess these days.
Consider going with a specialized managed hosting service for minecraft; they're fairly affordable and tend to scale in price based on amount of RAM the machine has. For reference, example of hosting companies are beastnode, creeperhost, and 'redstone host'.
While I myself can appreciate maintaining a linux VPS and installing things from scratch (erm, that's precisely how I do minecraft hosting), managed hosting 'just works' without a maintenance overhead, and there are easy to use web control panels for plugin installation and configuration.
Most servers that kids like to play on aren't standard - they are 3rd party modifications (ex: bukkit). Such 3rd party servers have plugins that make the gameplay more usable. Example of some useful plugins are essentials, worldedit, worldguard. The headaches you will typically get is upgrading the server (after a minecraft update) and installing plugins. The hosting services mentioned above make it incredibly easy.
My server is actually at my home, so my godsons and their mother use a VPN to log into it. It's easier to have it hosted on a cloud service like DO. (If you're just accessing it at home, you don't have to bother with the VPN part.)
It's fairly easy, feel free to email me if you have questions. Though I've noticed a modpack wich fancy things really adds to the experience (playing with my younger brother and sister) as in vanilla you're fairly limited when it comes to decoration and ways-to-go. Hosting a modpack trough technicpack [1] is basically loading the modpack and afterwards moving the folder to the server and running it over there.
If the child is at an age where you should be worried about their ability to handle the game, you should be monitoring their usage as well. Unless you can keep them away from all of the different ways they can find addictive games to play (hello flash player) then it seems to me better to be involved and encouraging responsible use?
I don't know that minecraft needs to be beneficial. I certainly doubt super mario or sonic the hedgehog were when I was young. It's a game. It allows lots of creativity, it has lots of variety. No mod will change the fact that it's still a computer game. Treat it as such and I don't see a problem?
That style seems to have become fairly common, and it really does suck on small screens. What's worse is when you try to zoom in to make the text readable and suddenly the top banner takes over the entire screen.
Or when it moves at the wrong moment as you go to scroll/pinch and then counts it as a click and opens the new page. At the very least let me close the damned thing, I've seen and read it enough to interact. Now let me read the site.
Also of note is a mod called Computer Craft, that adds Lua programmable computers and devices into the game (touchscreens, turtles!) as well as a set of APIs for interacting with various aspects of the game.
http://www.computercraft.info/