[waveringana]

When I was in fourth grade, I'd take the half a mile walk to the library almost daily which always made my parents happy because they assumed I was going to read, but instead I was hopping onto their computers, going to http://minecraft.net, and playing minecraft on IE :)

Thanks for the nostalgia

[afavour]

The longevity of Minecraft blows my mind. I was always aware of its existence but never looked into it. Now my kid is getting into it. So many generations of kids! It's incredible really.

That said, it has been a little sad digging into the current state of Java vs Bedrock, Bedrock iPad vs Bedrock Switch. The platform ubiquity is wonderful and the tradeoffs are what they are. But if folks were able to create a touch-capable web-powered Java Minecraft that would be a great fit for the iPad.

[immibis]

An interesting fact about Minecraft is that when it came out, storing the block IDs for the loaded area used up a big chunk of your computer's RAM and had to be optimized as much as possible. So it was 8 bits per block space, and when they expanded to 12 bits, they added on another array with 8 bits per 2 spaces.

Now, it doesn't even use block IDs any more. It uses one whole object per block type, one pointer to one of those objects per block space, and has a lot more block types. The on-disk format stores the entire string name of the block, once per 16x16x16 region it occurs in.

[naikrovek]

The children yearn for the mines, apparently.

[ClikeX]

It's basically LEGO, it tickles the mind. Which is ironic, because LEGO Worlds isn't nearly as inspiring as Minecraft.

[porphyra]

I used to do that except it was to play Runescape lol. The local library got some really nice Pentium 4 computers too.