800+ days of Minecraft in 8 minutes

March 15, 2013 2:18 PM

A visualization of 826 days of Minecraft development, from alpha 1.2 to release 1.5, shown in 8~ minutes.

From the YouTube description:

Each dot represents a unique file, and its colour represents a different file type. Links between files are folders. Whenever someone flies by and "zaps" a file, it means they did something with it in real life. You can see as people work on new features or bugs, as they'll fly past certain files and zap them as they go.

This was made using a slightly customized version of Gource, available at https://code.google.com/p/gource/.

posted by brundlefly (8 comments total)

That's neat. I would have liked to see it faster, from pre-beta to the current version, though. This seems like a fairly narrow slice (although of course there were massive changes between those versions).
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 2:36 PM on March 15, 2013

This is exactly what programming feels like.
posted by DU at 2:51 PM on March 15, 2013 [4 favorites]

After being aware if them, I recently became aware of the Yogscast. Here is what I learned:

1) There is a storyline to Minecraft.
2) Simon never pays attention.
3) Duncan is kinda a self-involved jerk.
4) Sips and Sjin are the comedy pair of their day.

This has lead me to dipping my foot back in to Minecraft (I was banned from it for... reasons) and being pluswhelmed at the options available.

If you remember the previous Minecraft FPP with the burning down house, you might want to look at the Yogscast folks dealing with The Bomb.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:07 PM on March 15, 2013 [1 favorite]

Pro tip: Until it becomes commonplace, a gource visualization for a presentation makes your boss think you're a genius. Last one I did got played three times in a row.
posted by Leon at 4:03 PM on March 15, 2013 [5 favorites]

robocop is bleeding: "you might want to look at the Yogscast folks dealing with The Bomb."

Holy hell! They almost destroyed their entire world.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 8:41 PM on March 15, 2013

I've effectively destroyed a Minecraft world by exploding a 3x3 hole of TNT, then filling the resulting hole with more TNT, filling that blast crater with more TNT, and so on until there was one huge explosion which caused the Java VM to freeze and then fall over with an Out of Memory error. You couldn't reload the world after that because it simply could not redraw all the blocks it needed to at once while keeping track of water physics and such. Behold, now I am become blockyShiva, etc.
posted by Spatch at 8:49 PM on March 15, 2013 [2 favorites]

Spatch: "until there was one huge explosion which caused the Java VM to freeze and then fall over with an Out of Memory error. You couldn't reload the world after that because it simply could not redraw all the blocks it needed to at once while keeping track of water physics and such. Behold, now I am become blockyShiva, etc."

Ah, so that's what happens on the coding/HW side. I'm glad you mentioned that because I was wondering about that in the back of my mind.

What do you think was the limiting factor(s)? Lack of CPU horsepower? The VM? Lack of video RAM? Lack of raw GPU power? I know nothing about the inner workings of Minecraft or games in general.
posted by InsertNiftyNameHere at 10:23 PM on March 15, 2013

What do you think was the limiting factor(s)? Lack of CPU horsepower? The VM? Lack of video RAM? Lack of raw GPU power? I know nothing about the inner workings of Minecraft or games in general.

If its just an OutOfMemoryError for heap or permgen space, you can probably just adjust the JVM settings. Though, I don't know how that plays out with the graphics drivers, I haven't done java GUI work for a long time.
posted by lkc at 2:03 PM on March 17, 2013