I was building something today and something hit me... What if the blocks were smaller? Say 1/2 the size. Now I'm sure its been suggested, but there's alot to think about here :
0.5 Block Sizes
// Mechanics
Blocks would roughly be 0.5 Cubic Meter (Currently 1 Cubic Meter as sited at MCWiki). The Scale applies only to blocks and player creations, leaving Mobs, Animals and Players the same size.
// Pros
Detailed Creations
Better World Generation
// Cons
World Generation ( Double up on Content to compensate and smaller Chunks )
World Generation2 ( More Memory for Content )
Exploration & Digging ( 64 is sea level and most heights for surfaces, so digging 128 blocks down would seem daunting to some )
Textures ( 16-bit for smaller blocks? NAY! )
Enchanting Table, Crafting Table, Etc ( These need to stay this size for player interaction )
// Cons Solutions
World Generation : Coordinate System Adjustment
World Generation2 : Well theirs always C$
Explore & Dig : Double up on Speed and/or Durability for items
Textures : Toss up and how it would look... This is more Player Preference.
Enchanting / Crafting Table : Possilty of it working with tweaks and/or model changes.
// Author's Note
Please feel free to discuss, add ideas etc. Good Day!
I think that effort could be better spent elsewhere at the moment, but sometime in the future maybe...
Uhhh, not even in a future update could I see this being implemented. This 0.5 block thing would just overcomplicate the hell out of things. The block system we have now more than fine.
I like this, but there are some things that you may have overlooked.
First of all, this would not just double up the world file size and lag generated by loaded blocks and mob pathing. No, it would multiply it by 8.
Second of all, this would make anything hollow 4x as tedious to construct. Solid objects would be 8x as tedious.
Third: Players would have to mine 16 blocks to move one meter forward underground, so forget doubling the tool durability, make it 8 times higher.
Fourth: Would ores only drop 1/8th of a valuable? Would they drop a nugget instead of an ingot? would tools mine faster?
Fifth: Would players be able to fit in a 1 by 4 area, that is to say, 0.5 meters wide and 2 meters tall, or would they have to take up a 2x4 area?
Sixth: Would worlds have to be converted? could they be converted back the other way?
Seventh:Would Endermen pick up blocks or 2x2x2 cubes of blocks?
Eighth: Would explosions be redone?
Ninth: Would things that SHOULD be 1 meter across (anvils, chests, furnaces, etc) now take up 8 blocks?
Tenth: Would stacks be the same size, or 2, 4, or 8 times larger? What about for things like food and projectiles?
Eleventh: Would water and lava physics be redone?
Twelfth: Would textures keep their current dimensions? or would they be 8x8, rendering them more repetitive and less unique?
Thirteenth: would pistons push 24 blocks out and 2x2 wide? What about pulling?
Fourteenth: Would long redstone wires be made half as fast by having to have twice the number of repeaters
Fifteenth: For that matter, would ticks have to be sliced in half as well? If so, you could potentially be looking at multiplying the overall lag of the world by a factor of 16 times.
Sixteenth: Would the coordinate system be based on blocks or meters?
Seventeenth: Would lighting be redone as well?
Eighteenth: Would you need to change the way lighting is stored due to having an extra bit worth of possible values, thereby making the storage of each block take 2 bytes and one bit instead of 2 bytes?
Nineteenth: Would mobs have to be changed to use 32x-like textures instead of 16x ones to fit with the world?
Twentieth: At what height would jumping be required in order to get up a block?
Twenty first: Would hoppers be the size of modern full blocks? slabs? or 0.5x0.5x0.5 blocks?
Twenty second: How many man-hours do you think this would take to code
If you or someone can provide satisfactory answers to / fixes for all of these questions / issues, then this might possibly have a chance of being implemented, at least in a mod.
Otherwise, I can guarantee you it will be just a dream.
EDIT: more questions:
Twenty third: would silverfish inhabit a single block? would they be able to fit through one?
Twenty fourth: Would textures only half a meter wide make everything look too repetitive on the scale of things like houses, ore veins, etc.
Twenty fifth: Would you suffocate if you were 1.5 meters deep in blocks? what about if one, two, or three of the blocks in your head where solid?
Twenty sixth: Would withers be composed of 3 wither skeleton heads and 32 soul sand?
Twenty seventh: Would beacons be re-scaled to require the same sized pyramid of iron, diamond, emerald or gold?
Twenty eighth: would head blocks be smaller than currently? or would they take up a cube of 2x2x2?
Twenty ninth: would mobs and players have to be remodeled to fit with this new, skinnier world?
Thirtieth: would this break every skin, texture resource pack and mod for Minecraft unsalvageably?
By this point my suggestion of making semi-intelligent goal-oriented collective-based player-like non-cheating diplomatic learning colonies of potentially flying mobs that can hold their own versus skilled players sounds like a new ore in terms of complexity, even that idea of mobs with a neural-net-controlling genome sounds like making a new boss mob in comparison tp this.
It just goes to show that something as simple and unambiguous sounding as "make blocks half scale" can be the most complicated thing in the universe to implement well.
Also, at some point, scaling down will only make it worse. That is to say, if textures where 1024x1024 and blocks were a millimeter wide, everything would look solid green for grass, green-brown for sides of grassy things, brown for dirt, solid tan for wood, solid cream for sand, solid hideous for gravel, etc.
This already happens on huge scales, giant builds don't care whatsoever that wool is grainy because nobody is close enough to see the texture except if they fly straight up the walls.
And for that matter, really big ships hardly have a noticeable effect caused by logs sticking straight out? why? Because single square meters are too small to really care about when the ship is 500-feet long.
Similarly, using grainy textures to try to convey grain fails on giant scales, as people just see a solid wall of wood or wool or stone or even stone brick that just looks like a solid wall of monochrome.
For proof, here it is, if you stare at a 68 block tall wall, you cannot display every pixel on that wall at 1080p, and staring at a 34-block wall will still likely cause single-pixel defects. Not to mention that people don't see in 1080p, they see in a complex and generalizing way, if they see an 8-block flat wall (or somewhere between about 5 and 10, depends on the person), they see texture repetition and blur it all together and only remember the general scale, the graininess, and the grain direction in their minds regardless of whether 8 blocks is 8 meters or 4 or 1 (think little-blocks mod).
Not to mention terrain generation shortcomings would be much more noticeable at that scale. Everything would look a lot more like bulbous noise than rugged and interesting terrain without some major improvements in the generation code.
Basically, Minecraft is currently optimized for objects smaller than 6 meters, or absolutely gigantic, in their smallest dimension. If we did it this way, it would be optimized for objects 3 meters, or absolutely gigantic. Objects in between are detailed at very small (pixel levels) and very large (block levels) but nothing in-between, The question is whether you want to make things like player-sized houses or normal sized houses.
"Colder than the snow that blankets the earth" "Colder than the ice that cover the stones and freezes the rivers" "Colder than the north wind blowing through a winter-bound forest" "Colder than all these is the smile of a Shade of the Dark"
I'd support if you could figure out a way to get a around all the issues, I've thought of this idea myself.
But without:
building optimizations,
complete re-coding,
making the game 16 times more efficient,
re-doing all of the block physics,
smart texturing of blocks,
re-doing the player and mobs models and skins,
breaking compatibility with every single complex mod there is,
and using a really bizzare 17- or 18-bit format to store the world,
I don't think this could work, good idea, but the details are just too nightmarish to even consider implementing.
I might also suggest asking for the thread to be locked unless you have an idea of what to do with this.
It sounds like he wants blocks where 8 tiny blocks make up the size of 1 full block. It doesn't seem like he's suggesting that everything be slabs. Regardless, it still requires a redo of the grid system and would mean that chunk updates would have to be more tedious, precise and frequent.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Hey, you there. Yes, you! Are you thinking about posting a suggestion on the forums anytime soon? If so, please read this before doing so.
So basically resize the player and every mob to be bigger? (And most likely break every adventure map ever?)
My Support Level = 10x 0 (Basically no support)
Textures ( 16-bit for smaller blocks? NAY! )
Minecraft is not 16-bit.
World Generation : Coordinate System Adjustment
What exactly would that solve?
World Generation2 : Well there's always C$
What exactly do Canadian dollars (C$) have to do with anything?
// Author's Note Please feel free to discuss, add ideas etc. Good Day!
Discuss? What? I came on the Minecraft forum to discuss ideas?
*Items in this brown-like color may or may not demonstrate sarcasm. Read at own risk.
I could support quarter blocks (Cubes 1/4th the size of a normal block) that could be crafted for more detailed builds, but certainly not replacing thew current terrain system. That would be very demanding on our computers..
I almost died laughing. Do you mean that there would be some like this, or all of them like this? If it is all of them, I wouldn't support for the world.
Why do you think the grid system would need to be replaced? It's the one thing that stays the same, no non-cartesian coordinates, no flipping axes, ... You need to adjust
Do you understand Minecraft's engine in terms of code? Something being doable doesn't mean it's something that should get added tomorrow. Someone from Mojang actually made a statement against having smaller cubes.
Blocks would roughly be 0.5 Cubic Meter (Currently 1 Cubic Meter as sited at MCWiki). The Scale applies only to blocks and player creations, leaving Mobs, Animals and Players the same size.
// Pros
Please feel free to discuss, add ideas etc. Good Day!
I think that effort could be better spent elsewhere at the moment, but sometime in the future maybe...
Uhhh, not even in a future update could I see this being implemented. This 0.5 block thing would just overcomplicate the hell out of things. The block system we have now more than fine.
First of all, this would not just double up the world file size and lag generated by loaded blocks and mob pathing. No, it would multiply it by 8.
Second of all, this would make anything hollow 4x as tedious to construct. Solid objects would be 8x as tedious.
Third: Players would have to mine 16 blocks to move one meter forward underground, so forget doubling the tool durability, make it 8 times higher.
Fourth: Would ores only drop 1/8th of a valuable? Would they drop a nugget instead of an ingot? would tools mine faster?
Fifth: Would players be able to fit in a 1 by 4 area, that is to say, 0.5 meters wide and 2 meters tall, or would they have to take up a 2x4 area?
Sixth: Would worlds have to be converted? could they be converted back the other way?
Seventh:Would Endermen pick up blocks or 2x2x2 cubes of blocks?
Eighth: Would explosions be redone?
Ninth: Would things that SHOULD be 1 meter across (anvils, chests, furnaces, etc) now take up 8 blocks?
Tenth: Would stacks be the same size, or 2, 4, or 8 times larger? What about for things like food and projectiles?
Eleventh: Would water and lava physics be redone?
Twelfth: Would textures keep their current dimensions? or would they be 8x8, rendering them more repetitive and less unique?
Thirteenth: would pistons push 24 blocks out and 2x2 wide? What about pulling?
Fourteenth: Would long redstone wires be made half as fast by having to have twice the number of repeaters
Fifteenth: For that matter, would ticks have to be sliced in half as well? If so, you could potentially be looking at multiplying the overall lag of the world by a factor of 16 times.
Sixteenth: Would the coordinate system be based on blocks or meters?
Seventeenth: Would lighting be redone as well?
Eighteenth: Would you need to change the way lighting is stored due to having an extra bit worth of possible values, thereby making the storage of each block take 2 bytes and one bit instead of 2 bytes?
Nineteenth: Would mobs have to be changed to use 32x-like textures instead of 16x ones to fit with the world?
Twentieth: At what height would jumping be required in order to get up a block?
Twenty first: Would hoppers be the size of modern full blocks? slabs? or 0.5x0.5x0.5 blocks?
Twenty second: How many man-hours do you think this would take to code
If you or someone can provide satisfactory answers to / fixes for all of these questions / issues, then this might possibly have a chance of being implemented, at least in a mod.
Otherwise, I can guarantee you it will be just a dream.
EDIT: more questions:
Twenty third: would silverfish inhabit a single block? would they be able to fit through one?
Twenty fourth: Would textures only half a meter wide make everything look too repetitive on the scale of things like houses, ore veins, etc.
Twenty fifth: Would you suffocate if you were 1.5 meters deep in blocks? what about if one, two, or three of the blocks in your head where solid?
Twenty sixth: Would withers be composed of 3 wither skeleton heads and 32 soul sand?
Twenty seventh: Would beacons be re-scaled to require the same sized pyramid of iron, diamond, emerald or gold?
Twenty eighth: would head blocks be smaller than currently? or would they take up a cube of 2x2x2?
Twenty ninth: would mobs and players have to be remodeled to fit with this new, skinnier world?
Thirtieth: would this break every skin,
textureresource pack and mod for Minecraft unsalvageably?By this point my suggestion of making semi-intelligent goal-oriented collective-based player-like non-cheating diplomatic learning colonies of potentially flying mobs that can hold their own versus skilled players sounds like a new ore in terms of complexity, even that idea of mobs with a neural-net-controlling genome sounds like making a new boss mob in comparison tp this.
It just goes to show that something as simple and unambiguous sounding as "make blocks half scale" can be the most complicated thing in the universe to implement well.
No Support.
This already happens on huge scales, giant builds don't care whatsoever that wool is grainy because nobody is close enough to see the texture except if they fly straight up the walls.
And for that matter, really big ships hardly have a noticeable effect caused by logs sticking straight out? why? Because single square meters are too small to really care about when the ship is 500-feet long.
Similarly, using grainy textures to try to convey grain fails on giant scales, as people just see a solid wall of wood or wool or stone or even stone brick that just looks like a solid wall of monochrome.
For proof, here it is, if you stare at a 68 block tall wall, you cannot display every pixel on that wall at 1080p, and staring at a 34-block wall will still likely cause single-pixel defects. Not to mention that people don't see in 1080p, they see in a complex and generalizing way, if they see an 8-block flat wall (or somewhere between about 5 and 10, depends on the person), they see texture repetition and blur it all together and only remember the general scale, the graininess, and the grain direction in their minds regardless of whether 8 blocks is 8 meters or 4 or 1 (think little-blocks mod).
Not to mention terrain generation shortcomings would be much more noticeable at that scale. Everything would look a lot more like bulbous noise than rugged and interesting terrain without some major improvements in the generation code.
Basically, Minecraft is currently optimized for objects smaller than 6 meters, or absolutely gigantic, in their smallest dimension. If we did it this way, it would be optimized for objects 3 meters, or absolutely gigantic. Objects in between are detailed at very small (pixel levels) and very large (block levels) but nothing in-between, The question is whether you want to make things like player-sized houses or normal sized houses.
Isn't slabs a .5 of a block?
"Colder than the ice that cover the stones and freezes the rivers"
"Colder than the north wind blowing through a winter-bound forest"
"Colder than all these is the smile of a Shade of the Dark"
But without:
building optimizations,
complete re-coding,
making the game 16 times more efficient,
re-doing all of the block physics,
smart texturing of blocks,
re-doing the player and mobs models and skins,
breaking compatibility with every single complex mod there is,
and using a really bizzare 17- or 18-bit format to store the world,
I don't think this could work, good idea, but the details are just too nightmarish to even consider implementing.
I might also suggest asking for the thread to be locked unless you have an idea of what to do with this.
It sounds like he wants blocks where 8 tiny blocks make up the size of 1 full block. It doesn't seem like he's suggesting that everything be slabs. Regardless, it still requires a redo of the grid system and would mean that chunk updates would have to be more tedious, precise and frequent.
My Support Level = 10 x 0
(Basically no support)
Minecraft is not 16-bit.
What exactly would that solve?
What exactly do Canadian dollars (C$) have to do with anything?
Discuss? What? I came on the Minecraft forum to discuss ideas?
*Items in this brown-like color may or may not demonstrate sarcasm. Read at own risk.
Please read these two threads:
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/2572194-please-read-this-before-making-a-suggestion-v2-0
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-discussion/suggestions/44180-for-the-critics-ftc
That's a real bummer, as I was really hoping they'd add microcubes into the game.
Here's a link to an ancient thread that I once supported
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/212369-eighth-blocksmicrocubes-ver-042-mod/page__hl__+microcubes
It has made its way into many mods though, so don't despair.
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UNOFFICIAL REPLYING GUIDE (FTC)
Do you understand Minecraft's engine in terms of code? Something being doable doesn't mean it's something that should get added tomorrow. Someone from Mojang actually made a statement against having smaller cubes.
Okay, but mentioning that doesn't boost the suggestion.