Minecraft
Oh, look! A post containing pictures of things I've done. Shame it isn't anything more exciting than running around in a computer game. One of these days, I plan to get a life.
In the mean time here's some spans from Minecraft, the best thing to happen to people with mild OCD and lots of free time in...a good long while. For a game which started off as a project for someone learning how to design games, it's surprisingly good fun. Also, for a game written in Java, it's surprisingly responsive. Though, this may just be an artefact of the fact that everything is a cube. Probably easy for the VM to handle. And, to be honest, Java VMs are bloody good these days.
So, I've been playing it a little. Just a little, honest. I was kind of lucky in finding an island I liked the look of near the spawn-point on the LAN server I set up, and it quickly became 'home', with a little harbour, and a couple of light houses. As I never thought I might ever actually care to show anyone, I didn't take any images (although, I could take the random seed for the map, and go find it :P), and it's been knocked around so much that it's completely unrecognisable now. For example, the little lighthouse is now a lava monstrosity that towers above the clouds and descends into the depth of my forge area.
This is actually probably the bit I'm most proud of, even though it isn't the most impressive of the most difficult to build. There's just a certain style to it, I feel. The pillar of lava is actually surrounding a tower, which has it's own internal staircase and an external ladder to allow access to the top (which is, in theory, not covered in lava. It is, however, no longer possible to stand on the top, due to a change in collisions calculations which essentially reduced the height of the map by 1. Or something like that). Due to the nature of the fluid physics, the lava blocks at the top will flow infinitely1, allowing my lighthouse to burn eternal. It stands above a small dock, with a glass passageway to the main entrance to my base. I'm just glad the glass can stand the torrent of lava so well.
It isn't just a lighthouse, though. It's also a fuel source for the furnaces in the room beneath the entrance. This room was the first major construction, and has changed rather a lot over the course of my building projects. It's main purpose is supplying me with a lot of furnaces for converting ores to usable materials etc., and was in near constant use when I was building the Cathedral.
The Cathedral2 is my biggest building project in Minecraft to date. It involved levelling most of a mountain (you can see the edge of the bit I left in the far left of the first image) and building up a large amount of foundations on the rest of the island. Not that I actually need foundations, because this is Minecraft and physics are entirely irrelevant, but I like doing things neatly.
The Cathedral itself is still a work in progress. I want to rebuild the tower / spire to look more in proportion, and also to to let in more light. In fact, more light in general is required, as I may have forgotten about windows when building some of it, and about laterns when I was building all of it (this is the trouble with building from the outside...). There's also the big question of how I'm going to 'furnish' it - currently, it's entirely bare, but I'm hoping that I can fashion pews out of wooden step blocks, and then build some kind of altar or...I don't know, really. Just something pretty.
One thing that is finished is the font, and the dawn window. Annoyingly, I just missed dawn itself when taking these screen shots, so you lose the lovely pink effect. But, I hope the impression is still made
So, there we go. I have managed to waste a rather large amount of my life. Go me! :)