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Is anyone here familar with a popular indie game known as Minecraft?

Essentially the game is legos with a twist, you have to gather all your materials(IE wood, stone, iron, sand) and make them into other materials. One example would be burning sand to make glass. However I made this topic to talk about something that would probably be more appealing to you guys

Redstone Wiring!
Redstone is like the games "electricity" if you want to call it that. Essentially its all Boolean values. If a redstone wire is on, it holds true, if a redstone wire is off, it holds false. This allows you to make complicated machines and very basic computers inside of the game! The most i've done with it is made an image board that stores up to 3 16x16 pixel images. That may sound extremely basic, but its not Haha.

I knew about Minecraft and redstone way before I had an interest in programming. However after learning C# and programming in general I realized how similar redstone is to logic in programming. You can build AND gates, which check to see if 2 wires are on(or if 2 booleans hold true) and based on that input do something else.

Theres also OR gates, XOR gates, XAND gates, RSNOR latches and much more. All of which can be used to even build simple games inside of miencraft. The best working game i've seen was a pong clone, i downloaded the world in which it was in and it played flawlessly

Here is an example of what an AND gate would look like in Minecraft:


If both of those levers were on it would invert the torches and cause the output to hold true. If the output held true the piston would activate and move a block on top of it, if there was a block on top of it.

Anyways I felt I would share my newfound understanding of redstone wiring in minecraft and how similar it is to logic in programming. Minecraft is a great indie game and if you haven't bought it already you can find it at http://www.minecraft.net/

Weeeird haha. I knew that stuff like this was in Minecraft, but didn't know exactly how it worked. I suppose, though, that there is something a bit more traditional available for straight-up modding, right?

By modding do you mean like user created mods for the game? If that is what you mean then yes, there are tons of mods out there! Some of the more popular ones being:
Mo' creatures
Industrialcraft
Buildcraft
Auto-switcher
Optifine
Modloader

Minecraft was written in the Java language.

The devs for Minecraft are working for official mod support for the game. As of right now it takes a bit of editing the Minecraft files to get mods to run.

Did you mean something else by modding? Haha

And yeah it is rather weird but when your actually using it ingame it feels a LOT like programming logic

Yeah, by mods I meant being able to fire up a traditional coding environment and add completely new features to the game. I think you touched on that by saying they are still working on it.

Speaking of Minecraft, if you haven't seen it, you should watch The Last Minecart, a short by Corridor Digital (who Epic Meal Time called "the $%@#ing wizards of the Internet" lol).

Hahaha I love those videos

And yeah, I'm not very experienced in Java programming so I couldn't tell you quite how they do it. But i assume its just messing with the .class files that are in the Minecraft.JAR and adding new ones.

Back OT though, Redstone isn't really meant to add new features to the game, it's just something thats fun and can be rather useful.For example people have made things such as, combination locks for a door. When playing online in survival mode a LOT of people try to break into your house and steal your stuff, so things such as combination locks are very useful. There are also redstone powered elevators which help a lot when trying to move strait up.

The absolute craziest thing that i've seen made out of redstone, was a basic computer.

Here is a tech demonstration of the absolute MILES of redstone that were used:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5M78YBX ... plpp_video
And here is a demonstration of the computer running a basic calculator program:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUAZ7Gs2 ... plpp_video

That is crazy lol! Since all you basically have are on/off wiring and some triggers in the game, it sounds like he could have built that as a real, huge 1940-ish computer in the real world haha.

Yeah its insane. Somewhere in the comments he said he did it as practice for a computer he was going to build in real life . He also said in his video that he is working on programming a basic computer game for it, I'm eagerly waiting to see that haha!