TestECull said:
That's not the better graphics I'm talking about. I'm talking about shrinking the blocks considerably. Right now they equate to one meter in size. How about shrinking them down to just one centimeter? Or maybe one millimeter? At this point if enough AA is spammed blocks won't even be visible.
... Oh. Okay, I'm pretty sure that won't work. For a few reasons:
1) Saving. Minecraft saves every block to your hard drive. reducing the size of a block from a meter to a millimeter would make your save files at least a billion times larger (1 meter = 1000 millimeters, 1 meter cubed = 1000^3 millimeters cubed = one billion millimeters cubed). To give you an idea, I just saved a new world, and it's the smallest it can possibly be because I haven't done any exploring. It's 1.7 megabytes. A billion times that would be about 1700 terabytes. Nobody ever has anywhere near enough space on their hard drive to even start a new game, so unless he finds some intensely more resourceful way to save, that's not going to happen.
2) Java. Minecraft wouldn't be able to handle something like that because it's written in Java, the worlds most bloated programming language. It's a wonder Java can do anything at all in 3D, so rendering billions upon billions of tiny cubes (not to mention keeping track of all of them) would be an excruciating strain on the game. That means there would be a constant thick fog about two meters (if that) in front of you, or if you rather wouldn't have the fog, there would be a framerate of about six frames a minute. I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass because I really don't have actual data but that gives you a basic idea (come to think of it, the real numbers are probably much much worse than the ones I came up with). Deformable terrain like that is difficult in fast languages, and trying to do it in something like Java is like trying to chisel a tunnel through a mountain using only a toothpick.
3) Mining. The mining dynamics would have to change, so you get a whole hundred thousand or so every time you swing a tool, rather than taking a while to get one. There are a lot of things this would affect and everything would need to be majorly rewritten and it probably wouldn't be anywhere near as intuitive as it is right now. And you might have a bit of a problem making flat surfaces to walk on. Just saying.
4) Building. How the would you build stuff if every block is a millimeter? You can't build walls like that, one millimeter at a time. You can't build anything like that. How would obsidian portals know they were built correctly? How would you have any kind of control at all over the way things are built? There would be no precision or anything, so even if you did make something perfectly, you'd never ever get it right again if a creeper blew it up. And everything would take so long to make. And there are plenty of other problems concerning building.
There are probably others but I'll stop there. It looks to me like you just want another gmod, which can't happen to Minecraft, because then it wouldn't be Minecraft anymore. Gmod is about building things with stuff that you generate, it's about physics and playing with constraints and organizing physical objects, it's about making scenes and playing them out. Minecraft is completely different. Minecraft is about deforming terrain and displacing terrain in order to build static structures like buildings and such. It's about exploring and digging and staying alive. It's about 1 meter blocks that are easy to manipulate in very precise and simple ways.
If you want it to be more like Gmod you should just go play Gmod. But suggesting Minecraft needs drastically smaller block sizes is completely missing the entire point of Minecraft. Sorry.
