Raspberry Pi 2 Model B and MinecraftEdu

[bryantenglish]

Dear Colleagues!

I am an English teacher based in Hong Kong.

What if I bought, say, 8 of these and installed MinecraftEdu on them...1 would act as the Server and the others would be for the students.

Does anyone have any experience doing this? Can the new machine handle it?

I would appreciate any thoughts!

Kind regards,

Tony Bryant

[DougieLawson]

There isn't a server version available for the RPi (without lots of funky hacking). And the Minecraft Pocket Edition can't connect to any server anyway.

You get a very old, never updated, single user creative mode version with a python API.

[bryantenglish]

Thank you for your reply!

I knew the situation with the old machine(s).

I was hoping that we may be able able to run the full MC on the new hardware...it should be powerful enough...it seems like it?

If we were running the special version of Windows 10...?

[DougieLawson]

You've got the wrong end of the stick about Windows 10.

It is NOT a desktop with a GUI. It's an Internet of Things development environment.
https://dev.windows.com/en-us/featured/ ... am-for-IoT

[bryantenglish]

I'm not sure what you mean.

I know it's a modified version of Windows 10 but of course it will have a GUI and desktop.

That aside, the new Raspberry is a lot more powerful.

I'm actually looking for answers from people who have got their hands on one.

Thanks!

[DougieLawson]

I know it's a modified version of Windows 10 but of course it will have a GUI and desktop.

I think you're wrong. It's the IoT build so WILL NOT have any traditional GUI.

[bryantenglish]

Okay...

Let's forget Windows 10...

The new Raspberry Pi hardware seems adequate for running MineCraft.

Can anyone see why it couldn't be installed...the full version, not the pi version?

Thanks.

[DougieLawson]

Because the full version includes native code that only runs on X86/X86_64 processors and your RPi has an ARMv6 or ARMv7. Without access to the source code for Minecraft it is 100% impossible to port it to the ARM processor architecture.

[FuzzyToothpaste]

Because the full version includes native code that only runs on X86/X86_64 processors and your RPi has an ARMv6 or ARMv7. Without access to the source code for Minecraft it is 100% impossible to port it to the ARM processor architecture.

That's ridicolous! Minecraft is written entirely in Java and is distributed in the form of a jar. It is a completely processor and OS independent executable. I honestly don't know how well regular Minecraft will run on the Raspberry Pi 2, but I'd give it a try. I think it has the processing power to do it in Raspbian. Just make sure you get a good JVM, which is best done by installing the default-jre package with the command

Code: Select all

sudo aptitude install default-jre

. You can then go to the Minecraft website, download the .jar form of the launcher, and try executing it. If your JVM doesn't show up as a program that can run .jars in your file manager, run

Code: Select all

java -jar /Path/To/Minecraft/Jar & exit

to run it. Then again, your JVM might not take advantage of the multiple cores of the Raspberry Pi, so it might not run well at all. If you want, you can do this with a single Raspberry Pi 2 (I know for a fact it won't work on a Raspberry Pi 1, even if it is a B+), and tell us the results, as I am too curious about Minecraft's performance.

[lostlogik]

Well I've run a Minecraft server on a Pi, for both PC and Pocket editions of the game, so I can vouch for it being possible. The issue that arose recently was the legal spat over the spigot jar but a work around was found.

I've just got my Pi2 and will be hoping to get that up and running as a server soon, with suitable speed improvements.

[ghans]

Minecraft is not 100 % Java since it uses LWJGL for graphics. Guess what LWJGL uses to utilize OpenGL acceleration ?
Native code via JNI !

So you have 2 options :

1) Somehow replace the bundled LWJGL with a custom version which runs on
the PI and uses OpenGL ES instead of regular OpenGL (funnily this might be forbidden through the EULA)
2) Replace only the native code in the bundled LWJGL and use a OpenGL to OpenGL ES translator like glshim.

In both cases pray to the heavens that Micecraft doesn't use features completely unavailable on OpenGL ES directly or indirectly through LWJGL.

ghans

[topshed]

The first thing my boys insisted I did when I brought home my Pi2 was install a full Minecraft server on it. I used the vanilla server from Mojang (as opposed to Bukkit) and it does work....

BUT

It is fair to say that performance is not great, Although we could get 3 users connected, the server would fail to keep up and crash unless we set the view-distance down to 5. This is quite limiting and to be honest we soon gave up and reverted to our normal server (running as a virtual machine on an iMac).

I plan on downloading the Ubuntu image (http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewt ... 56&t=98997) which may be faster and offer better performance.

[bryandowen]

Try Cuberite (www.cuberite.org). It's a free Minecraft server written in C++. This isn't a scientific assessment, but (on a Raspberry Pi 2) it's roughly twice as fast, uses about 1/3 the RAM, and is infinitely more stable than running Spigot server. No Java VM required! You can write mods in Lua. It has a built-in HTTP-based administration console. (Point your browser to http://<Pi-IP-address>:8080. I beat my head against the wall for the better part of a day trying to get Spigot to run on my Pi 2 without crashing, and finally found Cuberite.

[caryste]

Well I've run a Minecraft server on a Pi, for both PC and Pocket editions of the game, so I can vouch for it being possible. The issue that arose recently was the legal spat over the spigot jar but a work around was found.

I've just got my Pi2 and will be hoping to get that up and running as a server soon, with suitable speed improvements.

I've seen a very similar way of solving it, and it worked perfectly, it wasn't even that slow.