Minecraft

[richeybob]

Hey me and my mates are looking for a small quiet pc to set up a minecraft server on.

Could you have expandable ram slots via USB as well as a external harddrive?

If so this would be a big help in a small way
If you get that joke

Thanks

[aceface57]

I don't think Minecraft will ever work on the Raspberry Pi, I have a friend who runs a server and it fairly eats up RAM, talking 1-2 Gigs, not to mention that it can be quite cpu intensive at times as well.

[richeybob]

But what about linux server?

[tumblebomb]

To also answer the RAM quesion. Running any sort of RAM to be accessed as you imagine is limited by the USB transfer speed. As far as I recall it would be a heck of a lot slower than the bus between CPU and onboard memory even before you factor in processing and other limitations.  You can do it but there won't be any benefits.

[aceface57]

This is the recommened specs for a ubuntu server running Minecraft (http://www.yourwarrantyisvoid......tu-server/)

System Requirements

The System Requirements for Minecraft Server have yet to be officially established however there are some guidelines that have turned up during my research into this topic.  The below is a guideline only and not an exhaustive set of requirements.  It’s perfectly fine if you don’t meet all of them however expect performance hits depending on how you use the server.


Processor: At least a 1.5GHz single core chip, whichever architecture you desire.
RAM:  At least 1.5GB FREE RAM. If you use the server for anything more than Minecraft, make sure you have at least 1.5GB free RAM at full utilization.
Disk: At least a 20Gb disk, with swap space allocated. (Using the “Use Full Disk” and “Automatically Setup Partitions” options in the Ubuntu Setup will ensure you have enough swap.  Although the game isn’t that big, the save files and caching elements will be quite large so of course the more the merrier.
Networking: 10/100 Ethernet is recommended.
Video:  Doesn’t matter. We will be running Minecraft Server in a Screen session, so there’s no need for a fancyOMGWTFBBQ video card. Save that for the rig you will play Minecraft on.

So generally way above what the PI offers.  I would love for it to be proved wrong though, would be way cheaper to run one of these instead of a dual core etc...

[tbar]

I've tried running the official Minecraft Server on a x86 VMWare server with 256 MB RAM running archlinux just to see how it would perform with limited memory. It sucked. Bigtime.

I've also tried Mineserver preview 2.0 (http://mineserver.be) on the same server and it ran ok. It's not completely done featurewise (it is a preview release after all) but I think they are heading in the right direction. The developers seems quite interested in the RPi which should help the case further.

[tbar]

Development on mineserver, as I mentioned in my earlier post, seems to have gone stale. http://mc-server.org/ seems as a more viable alternative at the moment as it is being actively maintained. I've had no problems running it under a virtual x86 ArchLinux server with 256 MB RAM.

(Some of the source revisions doesn't compile on Linux but the stable releases do.)

[ukscone]

just did a quick compile using an arm toolchain and several recent versions from the svn and no go OOB but none of the errors actually look that serious they just need someone who knows C++ to have at it and a different gcc version < 4.4 due to the name mangling changes

[tbar]

OOB? What the devil does that mean?

[ukscone]

tbar said:


OOB? What the devil does that mean?


Out Of the Box

[fadedknight]

I'd like to think that enthusiastic inde game developers will see RPi as a means to move into console development.

I mean a REAL inde console.

With the right case, a screen and a few buttons, you could have a hand held Minecraft game OOB so to speak.

I read a while back that Activision we're suggesting the next Guitar Hero (or do they make the other one) game could be platform free and just have the console built into the guitar - sort of a modern take on the Nintendo Game & Watch era.

With a cheap and ready available platform - you could sell the hardware and game for less than a game retails on the self. I don't recall (aside from seeing a russian zx spektrum once) many handheld games from the 80s being pirated too!

Is David going to port Elite for us, or will he mind someone doing it for him?

[tbar]

fadedknight said:


I'd like to think that enthusiastic inde game developers will see RPi as a means to move into console development.

I mean a REAL inde console.

With the right case, a screen and a few buttons, you could have a hand held Minecraft game OOB so to speak.


I don't think the RPi has enough RAM to run the minecraft client (1 GB is recommended according to http://help.mojang.com/custome.....minecraft-).

It would be really awesome if it was able to run well on the RPi. Especially because the primary minecraft users are the targeted demography of the RPi. I would consider minecraft the killer RPi app for this group -- just as xbmc is the killer RPi app for many hobbyists...

[ar114411]

Could clustering a bunch of RPis over a network be used to run a server?

[mobeyduck]

yes alex you could do that but 2-3 pi's equals €78

A MSI E350IS-E45 with a AMD Fusion E-350 costs about the same.

add €20 for 4gb ddr3 memory cheap.

hdd €20 and it will probably out run your 3 Pi's

€40 more than 3 bare pi's for what you would also need sd cards adapters etc.

Or an atom

Asrock AD425PV3 Intel Atom D425 1,8Ghz €60

same hdd and memory totals €100.

A hell of a lot easyer to setup, you'll have it running before mincraft isn't interesting any more

So

Possible? Probably. Not easy, but seriously interesting.

Worth it? Notreally, unless because I can/want is a good reason.

[tbar]

ukscone said:


just did a quick compile using an arm toolchain and several recent versions from the svn and no go OOB but none of the errors actually look that serious they just need someone who knows C++ to have at it and a different gcc version < 4.4 due to the name mangling changes


According to the devs at mc-server.org it should now be possible to compile OOB. They run into problems when running mc-server in the dev vm and are having some troubles debugging this because of missing gdb.... (http://forum.mc-server.org/sho.....038;page=2).

[tbar]

Have anyone with a real RPi tried running MCServer? It needs to be retrieved and compiled from their source-repository here: http://code.google.com/p/mc-server/source/checkout

[gadgetoid]

At first I laughed at the sheer absurdity of this thread, having run my own Minecraft servers before.

Then I thought... why not, it's worth a try.

Then I compiled MC Server and have it running on my Pi.

Chunk generation takes so long, though, that my connection is still hanging on "Downloading terrain" and periodically timing out. Also judging by the memory requirements calculated over at the MC Server forums ( ~50mb+ per user ) it's probably not going to be useful for anything more than a curiosity.

I dread to think what unspeakable horrors the level saving routines are going to commit on my poor SD card, but it's for science!

[gadgetoid]

Alas, the forums need more edit button!

A few hundred chunks later and I managed to connect... it spawned me in the middle of the ocean which was puzzling, but I swam to the shore and grabbed a screenie along with my SSH session with the running MC Server.

Note the 1-3 seconds between chunk generations. My Pi is overclocked to 900Mhz.

In-game, it isn't so bad. I'd probably have to play for a few hours to get a feel for the performance though.

[tbar]

Could you try again? There have been some changes recently which is expected to have a huge impact on performance...

[madmaxoft]

Hi,

I'm one of MCServer's devs, I'm quite interested to see some results of this experiment, too.

Gadgetoid, I can't see your screenshot too much, but I think I see the message "Generating chunk [...]". That means that the server has been compiled in a DEBUG setting. Could you try compiling a non-debug build? Use the "make release=1" command for building.

Also, as Tbar pointed out already, we have just passed a milestone, merged a major branch into the trunk that by far improves performance of both the chunk generator and the lighting. I believe you should be able to host a 1-person server on the RPi.

As for the SD-card writes - the chunks are stored onlyevery 5 minutes, or when the command "save-all" is given in the server console. It's a classic search for balance between memory constumption and disk IO. Of course, running it on an external HDD would be much better (not sure about transfer speeds then, though).

[normal]

has anyone tried just playing it on the RPi instead of running a server?

[xoft]

I don't think playing would be possible. With normal gameplay the vanilla client takes at least 512 MiB of RAM and who knows how much memory on the Gfx board, there's just no way to fit that into RPi.

[qlobthehorse]

I'd love to have a copy of the compiled server -- I'm receiving my Pi tonight. I can test performance with 2 people.

[xoft]

So far I haven't been able to successfully test the server compiled for the RPi. I tried in the emulator VM, but it crashes upon start, seems to be some kind of a longjmp() problem.

[tbar]

I'd love to have a copy of the compiled server -- I'm receiving my Pi tonight. I can test performance with 2 people.

It's not that hard to compile from source. To pull the latest revision from the repository do the following:

• svn checkout http://mc-server.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ mc-server-read-only

This will retrieve the latest source to the directory mc-server-read-only. Cd to this directory and execute:

• make release=1

This will produce the executable MCServer which you can run like so:

• ./MCServer

You might need to edit world.ini and other .ini-files to get it to work. Check out the wiki at http://www.mc-server.org/wiki or the forums at http://forum.mc-server.org if you are having problems.

Also remember that the RPi is only equipped with 256 MB RAM so you need to use a firmware file which dedicates as much RAM as possible to the CPU. MCServer seems to require approx 180 MB RAM for one user (and approx 50 MB per additional user)...