
Breaking the fourth wall with Minecraft - gebe
http://hashbang.gr/breaking-the-4th-wall-with-minecraft/
======
kohanz
> _I have a couple of WiFi-enabled bulbs near me, wouldn 't it be nice to be
> able to control them using Minecraft?_

I mean nothing against the author and like-minded individuals and I have the
utmost respect for people with such a "tinkerer" mindset, but often reading
things like this on Hacker News makes me feel like a bit of a fraud, because
my internal answer to the question above is basically "No, not really". I'm
wondering if others feel the same way. Does it make me less of a "hacker"? I
enjoy programming, sometimes I wonder how things work, but oftentimes I don't
mind that it is abstracted from me and "just works", and I rarely if ever have
the urge to integrate two seemingly unrelated things to create a unique hack.

~~~
andrewmcwatters
Yep, I feel the same way. I don't really like tinkering, though. I don't like
the mindset of tinkerers, either. Every tinkerer I've come across has never
finished anything of substantial size, and every one I've met had terrible
programming habits, or such strongly opinionated views, you couldn't work with
them or discuss something you liked because it wasn't inline with their holy
views of writing god-awful code.

When I pursue a project, I work on it in terms of 10s of thousands of lines of
code over a 2-4+ year span of time. When I take up small projects, I make sure
they're useful for production purposes.

I often think about the portfolios of people like this, a large number of
repositories to show for, and nothing ever particularly useful. Everything is
a gimmick, and nothing ever took serious architectural decision making on a
grand scale.

~~~
staunch
Feynman thought tinkering had value :P

[https://www.physics.ohio-
state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html](https://www.physics.ohio-
state.edu/~kilcup/262/feynman.html)

~~~
ganeumann
"Among the redeeming qualities of our species is that we play. Indeed, we
surround ourselves with toys, and we remain preoccupied with them throughout
life… We display almost inconceivable creativity as we tinker with our
playthings. The force of imagination and the passion for experimenting propel
us toward outrageous designs and technological achievements."

From Henk Tennekes' _The Simple Science of Flight_

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kator
Reminds me of dockercraft, discussed recently at:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10584956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10584956)

I have a raspberry pi controlled cat feeder I built and have been playing
around with the last couple of weeks as a side project. I showed this to my
wife and she said "Oh so can you make it so I can feed that cats while playing
minecraft?" LOL

~~~
lucaspiller
Next up: Order pizza and laundry through Minecraft

~~~
emerongi
Next up: Live your whole life through Minecraft.

Wait... is this what VR is going to evolve to?

~~~
prawn
Part of it, and in a way.

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nkrisc
I'd like to hear more about the bulbs used. Cheap wifi bulbs with a simple
protocol sound like fun.

~~~
easytiger
prob the Phillips bulbs. Sadly they don't sit flush in most sockets, despite
using the same fixture name.

~~~
tjohns
Definitely not the Philips Hue bulbs. Those use a REST API on port 80 for
network control, whereas these bulbs are using a proprietary binary protocol
on port 5577.

~~~
nkrisc
From what I've been able to find about the Philips API, there's also a modicum
of authentication while these appear happy to accept input from anyone on the
network.

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Tepix
Also check out "Minecraft: Pi edition" for the Raspberry Pi. It comes with
embedded python support and is free:
[http://pi.minecraft.net/](http://pi.minecraft.net/)

Somewhat unfortunately, it hasn't been updated since 2012 and lacks a lot of
features of the Pocket or PC version.

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NovaS1X
Now the next step is to build a replica of his house and this specific room
down to the details so he can turn the lamp on in game which turns on the lamp
in the real world.

~~~
soared
Build a replica of someone else's house and let me control their lights!

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ccvannorman
This is what Code Hero, which I helped develop [1] tries to be. I hope this
will have some success as well! With the right spark, there is a ton of
creative fuel that can be channeled from excited kids into computer
programming.

[1] [http://primerlabs.com/codehero](http://primerlabs.com/codehero)

~~~
soared
Poking around the website it looks like an awesome project. I'm going to give
it a try! But, the site needs a marketing person or someone gifted with
visuals + words. Also, codehero.org has a redirect loop and most of the pages
are access denied.

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vidarh
This seems like it'd be awesome for Minetest [1]. Minetest has a lot of (very)
rough edges, but basically it's a Minecraft-like engine where most
functionality beyond the very basic is added through mods written in Lua. I'd
be fun to be able to live-code the mods on an in-game computer..

[1] [http://www.minetest.net/](http://www.minetest.net/)

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EvanPlaice
Finally, 'Hackers' the movie style 3D interfaces for managing networking
infrastructure.

In all seriousness. As networking structures become more modular, it might not
be a bad idea to have systems where the architecture can be modeled and
monitored visually.

I have come across presentations of some custom/proprietary systems that
provide interesting visualizations of networking interactions. It would be
awesome to see a generalized platform implementation.

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nonword
So cool. Reminded of Gibson's The Peripheral - even if there's nothing so
existentially twisted in what the author actually did. I suppose the
interesting part is just that the author is controlling a light IRL from the
center of a russian-doll of emulated environments, but it sure feels profound
given that one of those environments _emulates_ an environment you can walk
around in.

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accommodavid
Now if this whole thing could be accomplished using pure redstone circuitry
[http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109385-Computer-
Bu...](http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/109385-Computer-Built-in-
Minecraft-Has-RAM-Performs-Division)

~~~
DuckyC
Redstone has no means of communication to the outside, so even if you created
an entire computer with redstone(very unlikely) you would have no means of
communication outside of minecraft.

~~~
kefka
That would be a neat experiment to see if the conjecture, "Redstone has no
means of communication to the outside" is true. It would be interesting to
find bugs within the redstone rendering engine that leak or emit data. I'm
thinking of something similar to the Super Mario World bank switching pong
game.

~~~
simias
That would be using a security vulnerability to reprogram the game then, of
course if you can do that you can do anything on the computer. Since Minecraft
is sandboxed in the JVM that might prove difficult though.

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seccess
Open Computers is very powerful. I once knew a modded Mincecraft server admin
who used Open Computers to receive and send text message updates about his
base and the state of server when he was away from his computer.

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dataminded
Would be great if Microsoft extended the python API they set up for the
Raspberry pi to other platforms. It's tons of fun to play with.

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stabs
I'd like to play minecraft in minecraft. I would totally install minecraft on
that minecraft also and play minecraft on it.

~~~
worldsayshi
Been done: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnO1QZJ--
M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdnO1QZJ--M)

... sort of.

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tlrobinson
Now implement a video chat protocol in Minecraft. How trippy would it be to
receive a video chat call from a Minecraft avatar?

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intrasight
Who else thinks that Minecraft will become the next iteration of nested
simulated universe.

~~~
tgb
I've seen a video of a 2D minecraft implemented in minecraft. Minecraft all
the way down...

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Yahivin
Now you just need to be able to SSH into the server running the game itself...

