Timesink, part 4: A way to get around

YEAH. THERE ARE SPOILERS HERE.

While I've been planning the placement of cities and their architectural styles, I had a vague idea of how I'd like to see players get from one city to another, but there really wasn't an existing mechanism in place.

I guess I should explain a bit about multiplayer Minecraft for those that don't know anything about it.

Mojang, the company that makes and sells Minecraft provides a server people can use to set up multiplayer games. But the truth is that it isn't very good. There's a server made by a group of enthusiasts named Bukkit. The appeal of Bukkit is that anyone can make plugins to extend the server, and the range of plugins is quite extensive at this point. There are plugins which allow admins to protect their worlds from goons, provide new ways for players to craft items, and even change the basic game mechanisms.

One of those mechanisms are "nether portals". These portals are meant to allow players to move to a different world which is sort of a hell-world. Lot's of fire and lava. For a long time, though, portals did not work on multiplayer servers and plugin designers seized upon the fact. Pretty quickly plugins emerged that allowed players to use portals to teleport from place to place on servers. Eventually portals worked as designed, but the teleportation-style plugins stuck around, most of them having a Stargate theme to them.

None of them allowed one to enter an address of the destination gate, which is really what I had in mind. I'm not a Stargate fanboy, but what I really wanted was a way players could somehow enter coordinates into a teleportation device. Just a few days ago, I discovered a plugin that fit what I was looking for. Appropriately named "Gates".

An example of a Stargate-inspired teleportation device on a Minecraft server.

Gates allows one to make gates and set how to dial them by placing items into a chest. In Stargate parlance, the chest then serves as a "dial home device" (dhd). After setting the items necessary to each gate A, one can teleport from gate B to gate A by placing the correct items, in the correct order, into the chest in front of gate B.

To translate x,y coordinates on the server into items in a chest, I came up with this realationship: the first row of the chest is what's used to place items, and there are 9 potential spots. Therefor, the first 4 spots would be for x, the middle spot left blank, and the last four spots for y. Specifically, the first 3 spots would be for x, the fourth spot would be a multiplier for x, fifth blank, spots six to eight(inclusive) for y, and the 9th spot the multiplier for y.

Perfect. To tone down the Stargate theme a bit, I thought I'd go for a more alchemical feel when it came to the items used to dial locations. Here's what I'm going to try:


Air (blank spot)=0
Earth (a dirt block)=1
Water (a bucket of water)=2
Fire (a bucket of lava)=3
Clay (water+air)=4
Brick (earth+fire)=5
Snow(water+air)=6
Cobblestone (water+fire)=7
Animal (an egg)=8
Plant (a sapling)=9

Ten items to be used in entering teleportation coordinates.

With these items, I have the digits 0 to 9, and can define numbers. For example, 102 would be a dirt block, a empty space and a water bucket. To get values greater than 999, then multiplier space would be used. I haven't decided what the x10, x100 and x1000 items will be though.

Another thing I want to include is a musical element. Minecraft allows one to make note blocks. These blocks can be activated in game by pressing buttons, so my hope is that I can set things up so that when a player presses a gate's button, it makes some hidden note blocks play. The notes played would correspond to the coordinates of the gate the player was at. So, by pressing the button and hearing the notes, the player could figure out the items needed to teleport _to_ the gate they are at. It'd also give them the x,y coordinates for their current location (see the previous post).

To help the player figure all this out, imagine that each city the player could find had a park or museum in it. There, the player could see small pillars that had items displayed above them.

An example of how items could appear.

Maybe there are even signs helping the player understand what number the object represents. And if the objects are placed in a circle, hidden note blocks could be chiming from under each item in a sequence.

Next post, hopefully more architecture shots.