Minecraft bought by Microsoft

[ErosOlmi]

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/microsoft-confirms-2-5bn-minecraft-acquisition/1100-6422326/

2.5bn is not bad for an indie game

[Petr Schreiber]

Not bad, make a fortune on idea and move on to others without staying bound :)


Petr

[mike lobanovsky]

That's not just an indie game, Eros. That's Lego of the new generation. That was a real fortune and a Klondike right under one's feet -- just bend down and pick it up. They did it just like Rubik Ernő did it with his magic cube, and opposite to what Alexei Pazhitnov (my coeval) failed to do with his Tetris back in 1984. So the former is a millionaire while the latter is a nobody even if he worked for the rest of his life in the game dev industry.

Minecraft was how my younger son came to computers. He's now a college student taking his 4-year course in programming. :)

[ErosOlmi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game

:) Minecraft is mentioned.

Well my son seem more interested in playing games than in computer programming.
He is addicted to Minecraft.

[KennethUdut]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game

:) Minecraft is mentioned.

Well my son seem more interested in playing games than in computer programming.
He is addicted to Minecraft.

I'm new to thinBASIC. Finally found it after a search for something that wasn't trying to pretend my Windows machine was Linux and I honestly just want to _get stuff done_, not fart around with standards.

Anyway, regarding Minecraft, I ran a server for my nephew (who was 7 at the time, now 10) (that I ended up taking over 'cause he moved to Roblox for a while) - that ended up getting popular. Never even gave it a proper name - just "Ken's Server". In total, ended up with 27,000 unique users.

The age range of users seemed to be between 6-88 (some kid got his great grandpa into Minecraft for a few months - it was nice seeing multi-generations build together).

Anyway, I made it creative + roleplaying and let them do more or less what they wanted - the only rule was "No Bullying" (mean-girl behavior was especially forbidden, although teasing was fine). The boy/girl man/woman ratio was about 50/50 and averaged about 35 players at a time.

I shut it down in Sept 2014 after 23 straight months on a cheap Windows laptop was KILLING MY HARD DRIVE... and I didn't know that Minecraft wasn't *meant* to have 96 Gigabyte sized worlds. What did I know? I just wanted to give everybody lots of real estate.

Anyway, these kids/teens/young adults contact me from time to time, finding me wherever I'm at online and I get to hear updates. Went to college, learning programming. In high school now, teaching-self LUA and Python... in middle school now, learning multimedia and making short films and movies... installing emulators for retrogaming on their PCs.

In short, I wouldn't knock Minecraft as a gateway drug for future programming. This is especially true if they start messing around with MODs or start their own servers. They have to learn the OS they're on and like all of us, get bored of repetition and so, learn ways to automate stuff. They're unfortunately stuck with bloated languages because the programming culture encourages GIT and all that marvelous sharey-share stuff, which is fine... but overwhelming crap when a kid that should be learning BASIC or using Scratch just wants a mod to turn arrows into rainbows or something.

Anyway, enough babbling. I searched for Minecraft to see if anybody's done interfacing with it. I just downloaded thinBASIC 10 minutes ago and watched a test program work with Excel and I compiled it to an EXE. As I'm an Excel nut, and with code that's entirely legible to me (being a product of 80s BASIC and 90s Pascal), I was instantly sold on thinBASIC.

A PS - I'm 43 now. Discovered Minecraft when I was 40. I fell in love with it because it's the first *new* thing in gaming I've seen in 20 years, and I haven't been gaming for 20 years. This GenZ is going to do amazing things that we can't begin to imagine thanks to things like Minecraft shaping their way of thinking (in the same way that legos and "building blocks" likely shaped ours) and I look forward to being an old man and seeing what they've done.

[ErosOlmi]

Ciao Kenneth,

welcome to thinBasic community.
Hope you will find thinBasic useful and/or enjoyable in programming.
We are all passionate programmers having fun on it.

ThinBasic is an interpreted language that has many modules working on specific functionalities: OpenGl, networking, operating system, Excel, Ado, ... and many others.

Excel module is one of the many and is one of the latest module I developed so it is very young and still under construction.
If you need more functionalities, let me know. I'm very interested in further developing it because I use at work for many data reading and delivering to customers.

Ciao
Eros

[KennethUdut]

Thanks for the Excel integration. That was the biggest feature for me. I already put something together with it last night - a simple console based "thought collector" that takes what you write, date/time stamps it in one column and puts what you write in another column, saves the changes, then asks for more.

When you're finished, you just type "bye".

I guess it's like a log file / captain's log / type of thing. I love being able to CONTROL Excel from the "outside" rather than depending on VBA, which I love too, but I don't like being married so firmly to macro limitations.

Compiled to an EXE and I can share it, which I did already. What you did is marvelous and easy. First little EXE I've made in a long time. Very satisfying :)

-Ken

http://icopiedyou.com/kenneth-uduts-autosaving-console-based-excel-capturing-thought-collector/

I just took the code you wrote and modified it a bit. I didn't clean it up or anything. Seeing how well it integrates, I don't doubt it'll work on other systems. I'll try it on my mother's Win8 system to see if it flies and where it dumps the files, but I'm sure it'll work. No documentation, no explanation in there... it's just a thing I whipped together for myself but it shows for me how easy thinBASIC is to work with, and I've already recommended it highly to some young people who were getting REALLY FRUSTRATED with trying to learn Python, JAVA, etc from scratch. Their heads are in books when they should be DOING something interesting.

[ErosOlmi]

Next thinBasic version will have Excel and AdoDB modules documented.
Further posts about Excel module better to open a new thread.

Ciao and thanks for spreading thinBasic name.
Eros

PS: I was close to where you live few years ago during an holiday. I traveled up/down Florida with some friends and spent few days in Marco Island.
What a beautiful places.