With this amount of players, there's over four million who have brought the game. They have probably changed their skin from the default Steve, and there many different skins out there. So my questions boil down to these: How are these skins stored and associated with each user (servers and player accounts, but I think I want more depth)? What is the total file size of all the skins stored?
This is what I know about skins, they are .PNG files. On average they are 3k to 5k in size. I have changed my skin, it is one I personally made. Hope this all helps.
Your minecraft skin is found in your minecraft.jar (%appdata%--->.minecraft--->bin-->minecraft.jar) you can use winrar or a similar program to open the .jar file and go to char.png and you can edit it to your liking or download one from Here!
If you edit your char.png it has to be 64x32 pixels
probably around 4768 gigs because most skins are around 2-3 kilobytes and lets say half of the 4 million people that downloaded minecraft have a skin.
2,500x2,000,000=5,000,000,000
5,000,000,000 kilobytes is 4768 gigabytes
Minecraft skins are stored in miniscule image files, typically PNG, so there really is no telling the "Total size" of all skins.
To answer your other question, it works just like your profile pic on the forums. Only its interactive.
Meaning you can change it and use it on servers through minecraft.net, OR screw with your .jar file and eternally be whoever. (I personally am Jack of Blades. Fable FTW)
New question came up: Is the player skin loaded once the player logs in? I'm asking this, wondering if the player skin is shared from the client to the SMP server, rather than the SMP server requesting the skin from the skin server once the player joins.
Is there some file somewhere that tells the client to search "www.minecraft.net/skin/PLAYERNAME" for the players skin? Because, theoretically, if this was true you could edit the location of a players skin, make it a folder on your PC and get your friend's skin ready for offline LAN... Theoretically.
2,500x2,000,000=5,000,000,000
5,000,000,000 kilobytes is 4768 gigabytes
You estimated that a skin was 2-3 kB, but then used a skin size value of 2500 kB in your calculation.
So rather than the nearly 5 terabytes of space you calculated as being required, the actual space would be a more prosaic 5 GB.
Is there some file somewhere that tells the client to search "www.minecraft.net/skin/PLAYERNAME" for the players skin? Because, theoretically, if this was true you could edit the location of a players skin, make it a folder on your PC and get your friend's skin ready for offline LAN... Theoretically.
You could but you would have to decompile Minecraft.jar with MCP and change the .java files EntityPlayer.java and EntityOtherPlayer.java the links in there to change where Minecraft gets the skins. I made a mod that gives you a cape it just changed where Minecraft got the cape files
If you edit your char.png it has to be 64x32 pixels
Source
2,500x2,000,000=5,000,000,000
5,000,000,000 kilobytes is 4768 gigabytes
Meh.
To answer your other question, it works just like your profile pic on the forums. Only its interactive.
Meaning you can change it and use it on servers through minecraft.net, OR screw with your .jar file and eternally be whoever. (I personally am Jack of Blades. Fable FTW)
You estimated that a skin was 2-3 kB, but then used a skin size value of 2500 kB in your calculation.
So rather than the nearly 5 terabytes of space you calculated as being required, the actual space would be a more prosaic 5 GB.
I'm a little late with this nugget I know :-)
You could but you would have to decompile Minecraft.jar with MCP and change the .java files EntityPlayer.java and EntityOtherPlayer.java the links in there to change where Minecraft gets the skins. I made a mod that gives you a cape it just changed where Minecraft got the cape files
Each skin is only like 1-3kb anyways. Implying every single 4 million members changed their skins, that's only like 4GB.