In some of my previous post I've asked questions like could minecraft support more people in a server or wil the worlds ever be infinite (and before everyone gets technical on me and starts correcting me I already know that minecraft isn't completely infinite. However infinite is an easy way to kind of describe it.) . On both of those posts the responses were that the xbox can't handle the truth... I mean minecraft. Minecraft seems like the most basic game I've ever played. The graphics aren't incredible, there aren't cutscenes and the game engine itself isn't what you call the greatest . these facts are what what make minecraft amazing but it hardly seems like they would push the xbox to its limits. Anyway why can't xbox handle 16 people or ever-continuing worlds and other things like that?
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RAM...that's really the only thing. Now they could prob squeeze a little bit more out of it were it not for the 4 player splitscreen but it likely wouldn't be that much and that's never going to happen anyways.
Minecraft's save files are measured in the amount of chunks loaded on the map. The more chunks loaded, the bigger the save file. If the map was infinite, the save file would go up in size, and could cause the game to start messing up on an Xbox with low storage space. I've had maps on the PC go up to about 15GB before, and this could cause the hard disk to go haywire if it doesn't have the space, or could cause it to stop working entirely, then your last worry would be why Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition has a world limitation.
As for the 16 players thing, it's more of a bandwidth capability rather than a storage thing. The Ethernet port (and for the newer systems, wifi chip) wouldn't be able to handle 16 players at a time making changes to your map all at once, constantly sending and receiving data between 16 systems. Before you use other games like Halo or Call of Duty as an example, those games don't require the player to make changes to the world around it. Just a simple deathmatch type game, which means less variables, which is easier on the network.
Simple - The minimum system requirements for running PC Minecraft per the Mojang website are:
CPU : Intel P4 or its AMD Equivalent (AMD K7)
RAM : 2GB
GPU : Intel GMA 950 or AMD Equivalent with OpenGL 2.1 Support
HDD : At least 100MB for Game Core and Sound Files
and the Xbox 360 doesn't meet these requirements.
To expand, the game as it exists on the PC is too large and takes up too much processing power, RAM and storage for the Xbox 360. In order to create an Xbox 360 version that runs at all on the system that IT is being optimized for, the company doing the work has made some decisions... and, as Geneo points out, those decisions include not only technical considerations, but also things like differing target markets, keeping the pricing point to certain level, living within whatever restrictions/limitations Microsoft Live imposes on the game, etc. No doubt, IF a different company was doing the programming, certain different decisions may have been made and the Xbox game would have been different (That is, different things would have been smaller or missing or maybe the game would have cost $100, etc.).
The reality, however, is the still the same... the game as it is currently written for the PC takes up too much RAM, too much processing power, and too much storage space for the Xbox 360... so, the BEST non-technical answer, IMO, is still that provided by your first respondent... "It simply can't."
You (and a lot of others that have come before you) can continue to ask your question in as many different ways as you want to; but just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean it's gonna change.
In other words (without getting "technical"), a Toyota Corolla can't haul as much as a full size pickup. They're just built different, and the main limitation is the chassis. Besides, the different versions are built for different markets- they are suppose to be different.
This same question has been asked in hundreds of posts over the last year and a half. But you won't have to search them- in about 1-2 weeks they'll be the start of hundreds of more posts asking why the One and PS4 versions can't be like the PC.
Before you ask, yes, the xbox one does meet the requirements for minecraft and even passes them.
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Religion, has actually convinced people, that there's an invisible man, living in the sky, who watches everything you do every minute of the day, and the invisible man has a special list. Of 10 things he doesn't want you to do. And if you do ANY of these ten things he has a special place, full of fire, and smoke, and burning, and torture, and will send you there to suffer and choke and scream for all of eternity... But he still loves you.
I see what you're saying, and I agree.
And, except for different programming languages, publishers, and platforms (controlled/not controlled by the different entities), they could have the same features.
But that's not gonna happen.
The consoles will never be exactly like the PC anymore than the PC will end up being like the consoles.
Minecraft is not a simple game. Yes, it has retro-looking graphics. That does not mean it has the system requirements of Pac-Man. Things like cut scenes are actually fairly simple: you just play a video. If they were a Minecraft thing, they could be added with ease and very little overhead. The bottleneck isn't the graphics; it's the data.
A fully explored PC world could have 921,600,000,000,000,000 blocks to it. To give you an idea of the scale of that number, if every person alive on Earth (from newborns to the elderly) when I started writing this were to draw an equal share of the blocks on paper, each person would have 129,391,704 blocks to draw. If they worked drawing blocks 16 hours a day, every day, and they could draw 10 blocks a minute (after all, a lot are air; that would just be a big square) it would take each person 2,216 years to draw his or her share of the blocks. (and that's every person on Earth) That's a LOT of data for the computer to keep track of, and for each block, remember, it not only has to keep track of what type it is, but also whether there's a tile entity on it -- torches, redstone dust, whatever. That quickly becomes an obscene amount of data.
The PC swaps chunks out to disc when they're not being used. (and sometimes it loses them, which a while back made me very grateful for my backups, as the chunk it lost was the one with my storeroom in it!) The XBox, at least as I understand it, can't do that; it has to keep things loaded all the time. So the size of the map is limited by how much data it can keep in its RAM -- and it's got fairly limited RAM compared to a modern computer. Remember, it's an 8-year-old computer. There are probably Minecraft players who weren't even born when the first XBox 360 came out. It's only got 512 MB of RAM. And that is a whopping limitation for a data-intensive game like Minecraft. The guys at 4J are doing a good job with the resources they have, but that data limitation is a big one, and it's not one that's easy to overcome, given the system's limitations.
Without getting technical the simplest way to put it is that there is a lot more going on under the hood; in the coding then you might think, despite the graphics looking retro.
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My First World, always getting back to is a pleasure I enjoy with each new update that brings in more things to add in.
It's hard to explain without getting technical...Akynth pretty much hit the nail on the head with his explanation. The other thing you have to realize is that the xBox tried to load all chunks at once, while the PC only loads the chunks it needs and then unloads them when the player leaves that zone. I think that part of the reason that the 360 uses that strategy is for split screen play on the same console (up to 4 players in different parts of the same world can be extremely data intensive to keep track of).
If you simply just want a non-technical answer, Tamorr's is probably the best you will get.
It is actually far easier (data wise) to do a HD VR landscape that you cannot modify, than it is to keep track of several quadrillion 'blocks' of data that may or may not be in certain places & orientations and render them all individually and correctly. couple that with MOB spawning, MOB AI and pathing, Player world interactions, automated redstone effects, etc. it starts to add up really fast.
Apart from world size though, and given that the current player limit is unlikely to be increased, can we expect many more features? What I mean is, is it unreasonable to expect all the new blocks and play mechanics/mobs to be added with the possibility of even more in the future? At the moment, I could care less about world size and player limits. Maybe I'll change my mind on it in the future, but I'm perfectly fine(and impressed) with those settings at the moment. But I want all those new mobs, produce, blocks and play mechanics.
My biggest worry with 360 Minecraft at the moment is that I jumped in while the bus was slowing down. I'm hoping there's still many more strong and regular updates to come and that I'm not expected to unboard the 360 bus and jump on another vehicle to see anything new.
I don't think that the 'bus is slowing down' quite yet, but we can pretty clearly see an end in sight. I think the xBox360 platform will continue to see a lot of new updates in the months to come.
Technically no. More like the Shear number of blocks is a lot to render... Rendering a block is easy... It is rendering the mass amount of block within the world as individual parts that makes the system strain a bit... Well one main reason...
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My First World, always getting back to is a pleasure I enjoy with each new update that brings in more things to add in.
Technically no. More like the Shear number of blocks is a lot to render... Rendering a block is easy... It is rendering the mass amount of block within the world as individual parts that makes the system strain a bit... Well one main reason...
Yes, and the kicker is that a hard drive is not required on the Xbox. You can't be swapping huge amounts of data to a storage device unless it meets the size and I/O criteria of a hard drive. Flash memory does not. This, I suspect, is the real issue here with world size, not the 500 MB of RAM. Games must work on the lowest common denominator (such as a 4GB console without a hard drive). So infinitely swappable world data is out.
Yes, and the kicker is that a hard drive is not required on the Xbox. You can't be swapping huge amounts of data to a storage device unless it meets the size and I/O criteria of a hard drive. Flash memory does not. This, I suspect, is the real issue here with world size, not the 500 MB of RAM. Games must work on the lowest common denominator (such as a 4GB console without a hard drive). So infinitely swappable world data is out.
xBoxes HAVE hard drives (a 4GB console has a 4GB Hard drive built in), mine has 120GB, and the 30+ saved MC worlds on it barely scratch the surface... just a mere sliver of consumption. Extendable or external hard drives might be what you mean, however.
But you also have cloud storage availability if you happen to be online and logged into a XBLA.
Contrary to what is said above, MC is comprised of a lot of data, and requires a lot of data to run, but really minimal data is required for Hard Drive updates. After-all, you only have to save the changes that were made, you don't have to save everything else that wasn't changed.
xBoxes HAVE hard drives (a 4GB console has a 4GB Hard drive built in), mine has 120GB, and the 30+ saved MC worlds on it barely scratch the surface... just a mere sliver of consumption. Extendable or external hard drives might be what you mean, however.
Actually, not all XBoxes have hard drives. The Arcade model did not. (not having one, I'm a little unclear on what it did about game saves)
Unlike PC games, where the buyer has to study the system specs on the box to be certain their machine can run the game, with an XBox game, with very few exceptions, if you own an XBox 360, you can play anything that comes in one of those little green boxes. And if you're playing single-player, you're not required to have an Internet connection or XBLA. (remember that one of the reasons for the outcry against the original specs for the XBone was its requirement for a 24/7 Internet connection for any games, even purely single-player games)
Contrary to what is said above, MC is composed of a lot of data, and requires a lot of data to run, but really minimal data is required for Hard Drive updates. After-all, you only have to save the changes that were made, you don't have to save everything else that wasn't changed.
I'm a little unclear on what you're saying here. I think by "hard drive updates" you mean updates to the software itself? (TU changes, that is) That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the size of game files, for one thing, and about the amount of data that must be loaded in memory at a time, for another.
If you play Minecraft on a PC, as you move around you'll sometimes see an interesting phenomenon where underground structures (caves, etc.) render, but the surface doesn't. (the second or so before the surface catches up is a good time to spot abandoned mineshafts!) That's because unloaded chunks are being reloaded into memory. This doesn't happen on the XBox 360 because chunks aren't loaded and unloaded the way they are on the PC; they're always resident. There have been arguments here before about whether the XBox can swap data in and out of memory the way the PC can, but the fact that it isn't done in Minecraft is fairly compelling evidence that it can't be, at least not smoothly (it's possible that some games are doing that "behind the scenes" while a cut-scene plays, but I'm fairly sure most of us don't want to wait 30 seconds every time we move a few chunks).
As for the 16 players thing, it's more of a bandwidth capability rather than a storage thing. The Ethernet port (and for the newer systems, wifi chip) wouldn't be able to handle 16 players at a time making changes to your map all at once, constantly sending and receiving data between 16 systems. Before you use other games like Halo or Call of Duty as an example, those games don't require the player to make changes to the world around it. Just a simple deathmatch type game, which means less variables, which is easier on the network.
- CPU : Intel P4 or its AMD Equivalent (AMD K7)
- RAM : 2GB
- GPU : Intel GMA 950 or AMD Equivalent with OpenGL 2.1 Support
- HDD : At least 100MB for Game Core and Sound Files
and the Xbox 360 doesn't meet these requirements.To expand, the game as it exists on the PC is too large and takes up too much processing power, RAM and storage for the Xbox 360. In order to create an Xbox 360 version that runs at all on the system that IT is being optimized for, the company doing the work has made some decisions... and, as Geneo points out, those decisions include not only technical considerations, but also things like differing target markets, keeping the pricing point to certain level, living within whatever restrictions/limitations Microsoft Live imposes on the game, etc. No doubt, IF a different company was doing the programming, certain different decisions may have been made and the Xbox game would have been different (That is, different things would have been smaller or missing or maybe the game would have cost $100, etc.).
The reality, however, is the still the same... the game as it is currently written for the PC takes up too much RAM, too much processing power, and too much storage space for the Xbox 360... so, the BEST non-technical answer, IMO, is still that provided by your first respondent... "It simply can't."
You (and a lot of others that have come before you) can continue to ask your question in as many different ways as you want to; but just because you don't like the answer doesn't mean it's gonna change.
This same question has been asked in hundreds of posts over the last year and a half. But you won't have to search them- in about 1-2 weeks they'll be the start of hundreds of more posts asking why the One and PS4 versions can't be like the PC.
And the answers will be the same.
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Curse PremiumAnd, except for different programming languages, publishers, and platforms (controlled/not controlled by the different entities), they could have the same features.
But that's not gonna happen.
The consoles will never be exactly like the PC anymore than the PC will end up being like the consoles.
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Retired StaffA fully explored PC world could have 921,600,000,000,000,000 blocks to it. To give you an idea of the scale of that number, if every person alive on Earth (from newborns to the elderly) when I started writing this were to draw an equal share of the blocks on paper, each person would have 129,391,704 blocks to draw. If they worked drawing blocks 16 hours a day, every day, and they could draw 10 blocks a minute (after all, a lot are air; that would just be a big square) it would take each person 2,216 years to draw his or her share of the blocks. (and that's every person on Earth) That's a LOT of data for the computer to keep track of, and for each block, remember, it not only has to keep track of what type it is, but also whether there's a tile entity on it -- torches, redstone dust, whatever. That quickly becomes an obscene amount of data.
The PC swaps chunks out to disc when they're not being used. (and sometimes it loses them, which a while back made me very grateful for my backups, as the chunk it lost was the one with my storeroom in it!) The XBox, at least as I understand it, can't do that; it has to keep things loaded all the time. So the size of the map is limited by how much data it can keep in its RAM -- and it's got fairly limited RAM compared to a modern computer. Remember, it's an 8-year-old computer. There are probably Minecraft players who weren't even born when the first XBox 360 came out. It's only got 512 MB of RAM. And that is a whopping limitation for a data-intensive game like Minecraft. The guys at 4J are doing a good job with the resources they have, but that data limitation is a big one, and it's not one that's easy to overcome, given the system's limitations.
The tl;dr version: Too much data.
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints
If you simply just want a non-technical answer, Tamorr's is probably the best you will get.
It is actually far easier (data wise) to do a HD VR landscape that you cannot modify, than it is to keep track of several quadrillion 'blocks' of data that may or may not be in certain places & orientations and render them all individually and correctly. couple that with MOB spawning, MOB AI and pathing, Player world interactions, automated redstone effects, etc. it starts to add up really fast.
My biggest worry with 360 Minecraft at the moment is that I jumped in while the bus was slowing down. I'm hoping there's still many more strong and regular updates to come and that I'm not expected to unboard the 360 bus and jump on another vehicle to see anything new.
lol.
Technically no. More like the Shear number of blocks is a lot to render... Rendering a block is easy... It is rendering the mass amount of block within the world as individual parts that makes the system strain a bit... Well one main reason...
Right. It's the Mass Effect...
Yes, and the kicker is that a hard drive is not required on the Xbox. You can't be swapping huge amounts of data to a storage device unless it meets the size and I/O criteria of a hard drive. Flash memory does not. This, I suspect, is the real issue here with world size, not the 500 MB of RAM. Games must work on the lowest common denominator (such as a 4GB console without a hard drive). So infinitely swappable world data is out.
xBoxes HAVE hard drives (a 4GB console has a 4GB Hard drive built in), mine has 120GB, and the 30+ saved MC worlds on it barely scratch the surface... just a mere sliver of consumption. Extendable or external hard drives might be what you mean, however.
But you also have cloud storage availability if you happen to be online and logged into a XBLA.
Contrary to what is said above, MC is comprised of a lot of data, and requires a lot of data to run, but really minimal data is required for Hard Drive updates. After-all, you only have to save the changes that were made, you don't have to save everything else that wasn't changed.
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Retired StaffActually, not all XBoxes have hard drives. The Arcade model did not. (not having one, I'm a little unclear on what it did about game saves)
Unlike PC games, where the buyer has to study the system specs on the box to be certain their machine can run the game, with an XBox game, with very few exceptions, if you own an XBox 360, you can play anything that comes in one of those little green boxes. And if you're playing single-player, you're not required to have an Internet connection or XBLA. (remember that one of the reasons for the outcry against the original specs for the XBone was its requirement for a 24/7 Internet connection for any games, even purely single-player games)
I'm a little unclear on what you're saying here. I think by "hard drive updates" you mean updates to the software itself? (TU changes, that is) That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the size of game files, for one thing, and about the amount of data that must be loaded in memory at a time, for another.
If you play Minecraft on a PC, as you move around you'll sometimes see an interesting phenomenon where underground structures (caves, etc.) render, but the surface doesn't. (the second or so before the surface catches up is a good time to spot abandoned mineshafts!) That's because unloaded chunks are being reloaded into memory. This doesn't happen on the XBox 360 because chunks aren't loaded and unloaded the way they are on the PC; they're always resident. There have been arguments here before about whether the XBox can swap data in and out of memory the way the PC can, but the fact that it isn't done in Minecraft is fairly compelling evidence that it can't be, at least not smoothly (it's possible that some games are doing that "behind the scenes" while a cut-scene plays, but I'm fairly sure most of us don't want to wait 30 seconds every time we move a few chunks).
The golden age: it's not the game, it's you ⋆ Why Minecraft should not be harder ⋆ Spelling hints