Similar experience here. I have a few particularly memorable experiences of dealing with the fallout from the September reboots. Although to be truthful this is partly due to the fact we were moving office and I had people jubilantly packing up around me as I worked to keep things afloat.
Not wanting a repeat of this we have migrated as many services we can into autoscaling groups, and automated all resource creation with CloudFormation.
Also of note is a mod called Computer Craft, that adds Lua programmable computers and devices into the game (touchscreens, turtles!) as well as a set of APIs for interacting with various aspects of the game.
Yes, that's what most people tend to use for programming these days.
Although I personally have never enjoyed it as much as the famous Redpower 2 mod, which had computers as well, with 6502 assembler and Forth. It was less forgiving than Lua, but somehow more fitting the genre (of construction set, that is); programming in Lua feels almost like you could program the thing in Java and put it in a new block.
I also liked the logic gates and other stuff that came with RP2, I think that's good for kids to play with as well. Too bad Eloraam stopped developing RP2, it was the best mod for Minecraft ever.
(Also, CC computers seem to reset on world reload, while RP2 computers were persistent. They are also dirt cheap compared to RP2, and their runtime behavior is not well specified. I just kinda feel that CC computers break the fourth wall of the virtual world, in several different ways..)
I have similar preferences to you, and RedPower is one of the mods I enjoyed the most. Fortunately, Eloraam has recently started working on RedPower again.
Ah yes I miss Redpower. Was a _very_ polished mod which felt less magic (in a good way) when playing.
About that fourth wall. I know some who take this as a very strange kind of opportunity. For instance:
- SQL databases hooked up to sorting contraptions to manage inventory.
- Arduino/rpi to receive input/output from the game over the HTTP API. Think - controling doors with physical buttons, routing in game player detectors to LEDs. Lots of opportunities here.
The main advantage of computer craft is turtles, programmable robots. You can automate all sorts of things in the game and it's fun. Automating things with redpower is possible, but takes massive complicated contraptions and great feats of engineering.
One was used for mining, other for paving, and third had attached two 7x5x7 trailers, one was mobile house with basic facilities and the other was mobile Thaumcraft 2 lab.
But most things can be automated quite easily with frames, and I find it more intuitive - you just look at it and see what it does when it's done.
I also later designed a fully programmable factory using RP2, Buildcraft crafting table and a conveyor belt.
I am glad to hear that Eloraam started working on RP again. I hope I will be able to design von Neumann machine in RP, eventually (that's my ultimate goal, but there are several blocks still missing in RP, so it's not yet doable). At the very least, next time I play I want to have a full base on a moving platform (may be of several independent "trucks"), so I could easily move all stuff I have somewhere else in the world. :-)
Hey, lead dev of learntomod here.
I have spent many, many hours using Computer Craft, it was one of our inspirations for building our product. I'm glad to see it's still in wide use.
ComputerCraft isn't working with the newest versions of the core Minecraft game (1.7.2/1.7.10). There's another mod, OpenComputers, that does similar things: http://oc.cil.li
(I've assembled a custom modpack for Minecraft, and had to learn a lot about mods in the process. One of these days I need to look more at how mods are written. They're written in Java, of course, like Minecraft itself; some use Scala as well. I have a bunch of starred repositories on GitHub to look at...)
This would be great. I actually was searching for something like this only a week or so ago.
In my current role I have been doing a lot with Elastic Beanstalk. Many cool features are non obvious and/or not clearly documented. Especially in the case of extending its functionality with various hacks and recipes.
By now I have a fair accumulation of notes on this stuff, would happily pour this into a wiki.
> A lightweight but functional Scala-native IDE with builtin sbt support would be absolutely awesome for a pure-Scala project.
This would indeed be wonderful. I have been using Scala as my first language of choice for some time now and personally feel that Scala is still held back a bit in terms of tooling. Please consider this!
Its very different from DJing. Instead of controlling music with algorithms, you are _create_ music with algorithms on the fly, so to speak.
For example, you might define a sine wave oscillator, and control it with a markov model that holds chains of possible notes. Then you integrate this with other processes and variable and so forth.
If you are interested, check out the Supercollider language, Its great fun!
Exactly. If you'd like to try it yourself without devoting MANY hours to Supercollider, try [ChucK](http://chuck.cs.princeton.edu/). Unlike DJing there are no samples or external gear, but "real-time synthesis, composition, and performance".
I went to the algorave in Brighton. Was the recommended field trip for a Generative Creativity modules im taking as part of my degree. In my opinion the spectacle of coding IS as intrinsic to the performance as the musical output is.
I dont think it really does it justice to compare it to more traditional DJing/controllerism. Generally the kind of music from livecoding is qualitatively pretty different.
This work is really aesthetically pleasing. Nice one!
Programmatic art generally falls under the domain of generative creativity. A field that draws inspiration from topics as varied as biology and architecture.
I would recommend 'Generative Design'. http://www.generative-gestaltung.de/ (There is an English edition)
A really beautifully designed book. Great to leaf through for inspiration, but also has decent example code for a variety of techniques.