Survival Mode Status

Well, I’ll let a picture do the talking:

image
(That’s me and Ez trying to play. The visible items in hands are new.)

It’s far from finished, but it’s actually getting to a playable state. It’s now possible to mine blocks and place them back into the world, but items and other entities aren’t handled correctly yet. Player data gets sent correctly, the streaming works perfectly.
The maps are infinite at the moment, and uses exactly the same save format as the single player version. When the server starts saving players, it’ll save them to “player_.dat” or similar, and it’s highly likely that the single player version will do the same, so if you share your level save with another minecraft player, you’ll have separate character saves.

There are two major bugs at the moment:
* Sometimes a player will get “stuck” in place. They can still interact with the surroundings, but movement becomes impossible. I think this is client-side.
* There’s a (major) memory leak on the server, causing it to crash after some 15 minutes of gameplay.

I won’t work on MP more this week, except perhaps try to fix those two bugs. Next week I’ll add inventory/chest management to the multiplayer and possibly dropped items, and there will be invite only public testing going on next week. When that works ok, I will release a very early public version of survival mode multiplayer so people can try it.

posted 13 years ago