Pondering multiplayer sandbox economies has been a pasttime of mine, and I have a few ideas (good and bad) on the subject of currency.
Good ideas:
1.) The selection of a particular resource as a currency encourages the acquisition of that resource as an end unto itself regardless of the consequences. If your money is clay, then you are saying "Go out and stripmine all the swamps". If it is Lapis, you are saying "Go digging for blue things". Currency material should be chosen based on the activities that you wish to encourage on the server.
2.) If the server's money-points and the resources are be Freely Interconvertable (10 Lapis ->$1000 and $1000 -> 10 Lapis), this will make it so that the resource can be viewed as money itself and not merely a substance to be sold for money. If the resource is decorative, people will be able to use it for show rather than that being a wasted opportunity for making money, or vice-versa that converting it into money could result in the permanent loss of something valuable or pretty. Wealth will become something that you can HAVE and show rather than a mere number somewhere. Tangible wealth is always best. If you need money, you can always dig up chunks of your floor.
Bad ideas:
1.) Players make money through casual murder. $100 per kill. If you need more money, just go on a killing spree! To prevent exploits like killing the same person over and over again, you only get money for unique kills you make each day. For maximum money, you'll need to slaughter the entire server, not just your friends. Fun all around! What could go wrong with a 100% crime-based economy?
2.) Money is given out only by performing favors for the admins. Encourages a corrupt upper-class of the admin's friends who will monopolize the money supply and force new players to sell an entire chest of obsidian to them before they can earn enough money for their own Warp point and the money that they don't give to the poor will be frivolously spent on increasingly elaborate Name-Prefixes and land speculation. Admins will be eternally entertained as they will be surrounded by bootlicking sycophants who will dance on command in exchange for money. Trickle-down economics at it's finest.
3.) Sugarcane. Surrender to the powerful farming lobby and embrace inflation. Massive fields of cane for everybody for infinite money.
4.) Time = money. There is a button in the spawn-town that gives $1 every time it is pressed. 'Nuff said.
Currencies:
-Iron: Inherently valuable and useful, having a lot of it makes you wealthy regardless of whether it's convertable to money or not. The money supply will fluctuate based on the balance between it's production and consumption. Convertability to money will encourage more mining which is a good thing anyways. The downside, as you noted, is that Iron Golems are farmable by the creation or modification of villages.
-Gold: Not particularly valuable, but quite shiny. A mining byproduct with a small rate of consumption. Has iconic value as money because it's GOLD. Does not represent true wealth, but does encourage mining. Unfortunately it is also farmable.
-Lapis Lazuli: Has NO inherent value except that it is quite pretty. A byproduct of mining, though most prevalent at levels higher than the commonly mined diamond level. Not farmable to my knowledge. Lack of inherent value makes it like a fiat currency except that the money-supply is limited by player effort. As a semi-abundant non-renewable resource it is a good candidate.
-Obsidian: It's value is that it takes time to mine (but does at least have SOME legitimate uses). This will encourage people to waste their time spawning and destroying nether portals or applying a bucket of water to the lava layer. The more time people feel like wasting due to boredom, the more the money-supply will inflate, just like any semi-abundant/renewable resource.
-Redstone: Much the same as Lapis except that it can be used in large amounts in complicated projects, and can also be purchased from villagers at exorbidant prices. Found alongside diamond, for most people it will be a mining byproduct. Encourages mining, encourages villager-farming, discourages redstone projects (makes the material more expensive).
-Clay: Finite and non-renewable. Found on the surface. Encourages ugly strip-mining of swamps and beaches.
-Lilypads: Found in swamps or as treasure from fishing. Encourages the harvesting of swamps and spending time fishing. Will result in fish being an abundant food source on the server and much time spent unproductively. Has no inherent value.
-Acacia Leaf-Blocks: Say what? Acacia trees are difficult to farm due to their shape and small number of leaves for saplings. Large acacia plantations would need to be carefully tended to ensure that enough surplus saplings could be produced to allow for the harvest of leaves for currency. Has no inherent value. Promotes tree farms and makes acacia-wood an abundant building material. (I do not actually know their yield rate, and so cannot give any estimates on rates of production, but I find the idea of "money growing on trees" to be inherently funny. Perhaps this should have gone under the "Bad Idea" section).
Geeez, this was back in 2011? It doesn't even feel like it was that long ago...
Yep, 2011 when piston technology was still in its infancy. This build is impressively outdated compared to the redstone hardware available now (both new blocks and superior component designs).
this is the most awesome thing i ever saw being built in minecraft! we just found a God of redstoning
That's why I wanted to build it originally, to "prove myself" to the world. Over my redstone career (March 2011 - Sept. 2012) I met many people whose talent equalled (and in some cases surpassed) my own.
I started early enough in Redstone history that I can actually claim credit for a few inventions, but anxiety and sleep problems sapped my creative energies and I couldn't continue making videos or designing things. I'm starting to feel better and may even return to Redstone Engineering. We shall see.
This is quite an impressive machine you have here. Win-detection in Connect-4 alone requires a lot of logic and is impressive by itself, but the logic for an Artificial Opponent seems an order of magnitude greater in complexity. A combination of dedication and know-how has produced a quite grand result.
How long have you been working on this project? You said that when you built the display, not only were Lamps not available, but neither were pistons? That would seem to put your starting date around June 2011. If that's correct, then this is quite a long-term project.
Regardless of the availability of different display methods, I think the torches look quite nice, making ghostly outlines appear out of the darkness -- nothing else can quite do the trick there. I also have a soft spot for torch-based displays from my "Minecraft in Minecraft" project. They have an aesthetic that's hard to replace (although the torches could stand to be a little bit brighter...).
I plan to do lots of things. Many more than I actually DO. I'd really like to continue documenting my CPU with videos, but I keep procrastinating. No matter how many videos I've successfully made, it seems that each one is more stressful to do than the last. It's never a problem at the TIME. Once I'm working on something, I'm fine.
The trick is getting started, and I haven't "gotten started" on any videos since June.
I agree, this guy should totally get off his ass and get back to showing everybody what he's made for his computer with good and proper explanations for the principles involved. 6 months is far too long to abandon this thread.
From what I could divine from the pictures, the method of operation seems to be tripwire position detectors but placed directly above a Lamp-Floor which responds to the movement of the player. Is this correct?
Also, I'd lay off attacking the guy. Even if somebody thought of the concept for this machine before him, it seems clear that he created his device in ignorance of similar machines.
If you create something on your own which you've never seen before, that counts as "invention" in my book. He may be "late to the party" as it were, but he is an inventor nonetheless.
Wow!!
That's awesome. It also looks really fast for all the steps the algorithm goes through.
I have tried in the past making one of these but i couldn't for big numbers. It was way too slow. Your modular design is incredible!!
I'll try to have a tutorial up soon for how to make the modules. It's just a lookup table, a decoder sitting directly on top of some lines of ROM. The trick is in how I managed to fit 9 lines of selection in a single length of redstone, since putting repeaters on the input line would have...complicated things, and cost a lot of speed. (Because inputs can come from either end from the layer above, you'd need to install 2-way repeaters which have more delay than I'd like. Fortunately you can just barely fit 9 selection lines in under the decoder without using repeaters.)
Wow. I think this may be the first Binary to BCD decoder that is faster than Minecrafter9's, which was built ages ago. The fact that it can be combined with its inverse to produce numbers below the decimal point just makes this even better. My only complaint is that it would be more useful if it was 2 wide as then putting it on the end of an adder array would require less bussing but it should be an easy transformation if you can find a good 2 wide decoder.
One question: Can it be modified to work with two's complement for negative numbers?
Icks has actually made a 2-wide version which layers looking forwards rather than downwards like mine which will work for what you're proposing.
To handle 2's complement negatives, what you would do is first run it through a device which converts it to the Absolute Value and tells the display whether it should show a negative sign or not. It's relatively straightforward to construct such a device. (If largest bit is a 1, the number is negative, so invert all the bits and add 1 to make it positive).
This here's a steady-state device which uses layers of shifted conversion tables to perform an algorithm that transforms Binary numbers into Binary-Coded Decimal.
Each layer is 4 blocks tall and has a propagation delay of only 2 ticks each. The layout is the same as this here (although mine has more layers to accomodate 10 digits):
An explanation of how the Algorithm works can be found on this website: http://www.johnloomis.org/ece314/notes/devices/binary_to_BCD/bin_to_bcd.html
I went one step further though, and figured out how to apply the same principle to convert Binary Fractions to Decimal Fractions. For example, 0.11(bin) can be converted to 0.75(dec). by using conversion tables with that perform the inverse function (-3 if 8 or more) and shifting in the opposite direction.
What's a "half-decoder"? From what I can figure out, this is a 2-bit to 4-line decoder. All a "decoder" has to do is select 2^n lines using n bits of input.
Thanks.
The method for converting from binary to decimal holds values for three digits (the highest number is 255 on the RedAppe). Each time a new digit is entered, the higher digits are multiplied by 10, and all the digits are added together. I created a shorter algorithm, but it meant you had to type the digit backwards.
I'm not sure what you mean by asynchronously. Each instruction takes a different amount of time, if that's what you mean.
Is this algorithm intended to show off the power of your machine, or are you trying to use it for some basic functionality? There are hardware implementations of Binary to BCD conversion which go quite quickly, although can be a bit large.
Anyways, your computer sounds fascinating. Any chance of screenshots? Or wait, do you already have a project for it on PlanetMinecraft? I must search.
1
Good ideas:
1.) The selection of a particular resource as a currency encourages the acquisition of that resource as an end unto itself regardless of the consequences. If your money is clay, then you are saying "Go out and stripmine all the swamps". If it is Lapis, you are saying "Go digging for blue things". Currency material should be chosen based on the activities that you wish to encourage on the server.
2.) If the server's money-points and the resources are be Freely Interconvertable (10 Lapis ->$1000 and $1000 -> 10 Lapis), this will make it so that the resource can be viewed as money itself and not merely a substance to be sold for money. If the resource is decorative, people will be able to use it for show rather than that being a wasted opportunity for making money, or vice-versa that converting it into money could result in the permanent loss of something valuable or pretty. Wealth will become something that you can HAVE and show rather than a mere number somewhere. Tangible wealth is always best. If you need money, you can always dig up chunks of your floor.
Bad ideas:
1.) Players make money through casual murder. $100 per kill. If you need more money, just go on a killing spree! To prevent exploits like killing the same person over and over again, you only get money for unique kills you make each day. For maximum money, you'll need to slaughter the entire server, not just your friends. Fun all around! What could go wrong with a 100% crime-based economy?
2.) Money is given out only by performing favors for the admins. Encourages a corrupt upper-class of the admin's friends who will monopolize the money supply and force new players to sell an entire chest of obsidian to them before they can earn enough money for their own Warp point and the money that they don't give to the poor will be frivolously spent on increasingly elaborate Name-Prefixes and land speculation. Admins will be eternally entertained as they will be surrounded by bootlicking sycophants who will dance on command in exchange for money. Trickle-down economics at it's finest.
3.) Sugarcane. Surrender to the powerful farming lobby and embrace inflation. Massive fields of cane for everybody for infinite money.
4.) Time = money. There is a button in the spawn-town that gives $1 every time it is pressed. 'Nuff said.
Currencies:
-Iron: Inherently valuable and useful, having a lot of it makes you wealthy regardless of whether it's convertable to money or not. The money supply will fluctuate based on the balance between it's production and consumption. Convertability to money will encourage more mining which is a good thing anyways. The downside, as you noted, is that Iron Golems are farmable by the creation or modification of villages.
-Gold: Not particularly valuable, but quite shiny. A mining byproduct with a small rate of consumption. Has iconic value as money because it's GOLD. Does not represent true wealth, but does encourage mining. Unfortunately it is also farmable.
-Lapis Lazuli: Has NO inherent value except that it is quite pretty. A byproduct of mining, though most prevalent at levels higher than the commonly mined diamond level. Not farmable to my knowledge. Lack of inherent value makes it like a fiat currency except that the money-supply is limited by player effort. As a semi-abundant non-renewable resource it is a good candidate.
-Obsidian: It's value is that it takes time to mine (but does at least have SOME legitimate uses). This will encourage people to waste their time spawning and destroying nether portals or applying a bucket of water to the lava layer. The more time people feel like wasting due to boredom, the more the money-supply will inflate, just like any semi-abundant/renewable resource.
-Redstone: Much the same as Lapis except that it can be used in large amounts in complicated projects, and can also be purchased from villagers at exorbidant prices. Found alongside diamond, for most people it will be a mining byproduct. Encourages mining, encourages villager-farming, discourages redstone projects (makes the material more expensive).
-Clay: Finite and non-renewable. Found on the surface. Encourages ugly strip-mining of swamps and beaches.
-Lilypads: Found in swamps or as treasure from fishing. Encourages the harvesting of swamps and spending time fishing. Will result in fish being an abundant food source on the server and much time spent unproductively. Has no inherent value.
-Acacia Leaf-Blocks: Say what? Acacia trees are difficult to farm due to their shape and small number of leaves for saplings. Large acacia plantations would need to be carefully tended to ensure that enough surplus saplings could be produced to allow for the harvest of leaves for currency. Has no inherent value. Promotes tree farms and makes acacia-wood an abundant building material. (I do not actually know their yield rate, and so cannot give any estimates on rates of production, but I find the idea of "money growing on trees" to be inherently funny. Perhaps this should have gone under the "Bad Idea" section).
2
Indeed not. What they did is called "One-upping" and succeeded. They know their stuff.
Yep, 2011 when piston technology was still in its infancy. This build is impressively outdated compared to the redstone hardware available now (both new blocks and superior component designs).
That's why I wanted to build it originally, to "prove myself" to the world. Over my redstone career (March 2011 - Sept. 2012) I met many people whose talent equalled (and in some cases surpassed) my own.
I started early enough in Redstone history that I can actually claim credit for a few inventions, but anxiety and sleep problems sapped my creative energies and I couldn't continue making videos or designing things. I'm starting to feel better and may even return to Redstone Engineering. We shall see.
0
How long have you been working on this project? You said that when you built the display, not only were Lamps not available, but neither were pistons? That would seem to put your starting date around June 2011. If that's correct, then this is quite a long-term project.
Regardless of the availability of different display methods, I think the torches look quite nice, making ghostly outlines appear out of the darkness -- nothing else can quite do the trick there. I also have a soft spot for torch-based displays from my "Minecraft in Minecraft" project. They have an aesthetic that's hard to replace (although the torches could stand to be a little bit brighter...).
0
0
The trick is getting started, and I haven't "gotten started" on any videos since June.
0
2
Also, I'd lay off attacking the guy. Even if somebody thought of the concept for this machine before him, it seems clear that he created his device in ignorance of similar machines.
If you create something on your own which you've never seen before, that counts as "invention" in my book. He may be "late to the party" as it were, but he is an inventor nonetheless.
0
Yes there is a chance, but I have a long list of things I'd like to make tutorials for and a massive case of procrastination.
Play around with helixes (spiral staircases) and see what you can get. It will involve a lot of alternating designs.
0
I'll try to have a tutorial up soon for how to make the modules. It's just a lookup table, a decoder sitting directly on top of some lines of ROM. The trick is in how I managed to fit 9 lines of selection in a single length of redstone, since putting repeaters on the input line would have...complicated things, and cost a lot of speed. (Because inputs can come from either end from the layer above, you'd need to install 2-way repeaters which have more delay than I'd like. Fortunately you can just barely fit 9 selection lines in under the decoder without using repeaters.)
0
Icks has actually made a 2-wide version which layers looking forwards rather than downwards like mine which will work for what you're proposing.
To handle 2's complement negatives, what you would do is first run it through a device which converts it to the Absolute Value and tells the display whether it should show a negative sign or not. It's relatively straightforward to construct such a device. (If largest bit is a 1, the number is negative, so invert all the bits and add 1 to make it positive).
1
This here's a steady-state device which uses layers of shifted conversion tables to perform an algorithm that transforms Binary numbers into Binary-Coded Decimal.
Each layer is 4 blocks tall and has a propagation delay of only 2 ticks each. The layout is the same as this here (although mine has more layers to accomodate 10 digits):
An explanation of how the Algorithm works can be found on this website: http://www.johnloomis.org/ece314/notes/devices/binary_to_BCD/bin_to_bcd.html
I went one step further though, and figured out how to apply the same principle to convert Binary Fractions to Decimal Fractions. For example, 0.11(bin) can be converted to 0.75(dec). by using conversion tables with that perform the inverse function (-3 if 8 or more) and shifting in the opposite direction.
0
As in use some memory to keep track of the currently selected address? That would be the job of the "Memory Pointer" in a CPU.
0
1
http://www.planetminecraft.com/project/redappe-computer/
0
Is this algorithm intended to show off the power of your machine, or are you trying to use it for some basic functionality? There are hardware implementations of Binary to BCD conversion which go quite quickly, although can be a bit large.
Anyways, your computer sounds fascinating. Any chance of screenshots?