
Minecraft Physics - th0ma5
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/minecraft-physics/
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sxsde
'Unfortunately, this video is not available in Germany because it may contain
music for which GEMA has not granted the respective music rights.' :(

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jrockway
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.

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

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Zancarius
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/nrxme/minecraft_gravitational_analysis/)

[http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/p7lyz/minecraft_p...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/p7lyz/minecraft_physics/)

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jc4p
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?

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

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chakalakasp
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.

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th0ma5
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)...

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spacemanaki
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.

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th0ma5
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)

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spacemanaki
Target commercials aren't really a fair comparison to Minecraft. One is the
work of a team backed by large company and gets rendered once on powerful
hardware (I think... I don't know what you're specifically referring to but I
assume it's some computer animated spot) and the other was largely the work of
one programmer and has to run on cheap PCs and Macbooks (sure it doesn't _have
to_ but I would argue that's part of Minecraft's success: you don't need a
gaming rig to play it, as you do to play something like Skyrim).

I definitely understand where you're coming from but keep in mind that you
likely have a much deeper understanding of physics than most game players (and
likely most game devs).

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atomicdog
>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.

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pimeys
Unfortunately GEMA blocks me from seeing that video.

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

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MichaelJW
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.

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seagaia
Fascinating, thanks! Also useful in general for me!

