Minecraft Physics

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/minecraft-physics/

by th0ma5 • 14 years ago

80 23 14 years ago

th0ma52• 14 years ago

I know it is often the topic of SIGGRAPH demos, but I always get distracted now when game or demo physics don't go the extra mile in calculating all of the factors, or having realistic drag (and things like that)...

AndrewDucker• 14 years ago

I'm similar. I'm playing a lot of Terraria recently, and it bugs me that you can have a tower of water in a tube connected to a shallow lake, and the pressure doesn't force the water through.

Zaak• 14 years ago

That bugs me too. I have started a small project to make a more realistic water simulation, and found it to be quite a bit more involved than I had expected. Just adding pressure would fix the problem you mentioned, and would probably be pretty easy to do. Adding velocity so that the water sloshes properly seems to be the hard part.

spacemanaki2• 14 years ago

What would be the advantage of highly realistic physics though? In some cases it would improve gameplay (I remember the Newtonian physics in the Independence War games resulted in relatively novel gameplay) but in a lot of cases I don't think it would. Minecraft especially is kind of abstract, and it already struggles a bit with performance on some larger multiplayer games. Super realistic physics would just make this worse and not add that much to the gameplay, IMHO.

th0ma52• 14 years ago

Well, yes I can see in games it being just eye candy maybe, but even in incredibly flashy renderings (like heck even Target commercials) there's just sort of a basic Verlet integration of speed and acceleration or deceleration but not many things like air drag, friction on the surfaces, little "oops" that happen with uneven surfaces and random errors in trajectories, etc... I have seen SIGGRAPH white papers that contain a lot of these sorts of things and more as a group, and well, lets hope those eventually get read and used. The current state of the art reminds me of when I first learned Photoshop and I couldn't stand any magazine covers I saw (actually I guess I still can't heheheh)

pak• 14 years ago

Minecraft does have terminal velocity, though (it's obvious from the very first shot showing the pole while falling), therefore it does have some implementation of air resistance. So as soon as the video says "assuming air resistance to be negligible," it's oversimplifying, as Minecraft clearly does not have negligible air resistance.

sxsde• 14 years ago

'Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.' :(

jrockway• 14 years ago

This seems like an error; I'm pretty sure that song is long out of copyright. (GMEA can claim copyright on a particular performance of that work, but how does it know?)

Anyway, the transcript is the only important part; the sound is a computerized British voice reading the transcript with some classical music in the background.

eru• 14 years ago

Unfortunately, in Germany GEMA enjoys the privilege of inverted burden of proof. Look for `GEMA-Vermutung' for details.

icebraining• 14 years ago

Try this: https://youtubeproxy.org/default.aspx?prx=http://www.youtube...

jc4p• 14 years ago

How do they make the jump from 43 blocks to 43 meters? Are they assuming that each block is exactly one meter?

Also why did the video randomly go blurry at times?

thoradam• 14 years ago

Yes, one block is considered to be 1 cubic meter. http://notch.tumblr.com/post/443693773/the-world-is-bigger-n...

pimeys• 14 years ago

Unfortunately GEMA blocks me from seeing that video.

chakalakasp• 14 years ago

Another fun question would be to figure out what the terminal velocity is. It's reached pretty quickly when you jump off of things in Minecraft.

Zancarius• 14 years ago

There's a couple of discussions on Reddit related to this particular video which offer some interesting criticism:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/nrxme/minecraft_g...

http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/p7lyz/minecraft_p...

seagaia2• 14 years ago

Anyone done this for other popular games? could be interesting as well!

MichaelJW• 14 years ago

There's the Sonic Physics Guide (http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Physics_Guide), though that's more about implementing the physics of the original Sonic games in code, rather than explaining real-world physics through playing Sonic games.

seagaia2• 14 years ago

Fascinating, thanks! Also useful in general for me!

atomicdog• 14 years ago

>Similar to Angry Birds, this is a great world to explore physics.

Comparing Angry Birds (a physics-based game) to Minecraft (a game with... gravity) is a bit of a stretch.

Minecraft Physics

Related Stories