30 April, 2011

feed me no lies, breathe through the years

More Minecraft.

(from the Minecrafting album)

This is another OpenGL error, though one that's not as common. This one persisted strangely for everyone who happened across it, though, not just me; so this may have been an OpenGL error on Hank's actual server, not my local Minecraft client.

It's essentially the same thing, but instead of the 'slice' of missing ground, everything goes away--ground, passive mobs, trees--and some of the upper-level monsters, as well, disappear, leaving just the deep spawns to remain visible.

(From the Minecrafting album)

It all started with a mysterious forest fire. We never did find out what started it. But I got frozen in place, and for once, relogging didn't help. I would relog, and be in the exact same place. It was frustrating and surreal.

In this shot, additionally, in trying to get a clear shot of the forward floating land sections, with the trees ablaze, I pressed F5, not F1. And I forgot I had F3 pressed. F3 checks your local FPS. The red bar with the spikes on the bottom left? That's my local FPS. Translation, since this pic doesn't retain the numbers: I had partially disconnected from the server, then rejoined, then spiked high on lag, then dropped again, then kept spiking.

(from the Minecrafting album)

For a bit, it was moderately entertaining--I'd watch animals walk by on air, and watch the progression of fire. I remember I kept getting asked if I could see a surface breach of lava anywhere. I said no.

We never found one.

(from the Minecrafting album)

And there is literally nothing below the floating land with this particular error--occasionally small mobs of wandering monsters, but other than that, nothing--it reflects exactly the sky behind it because, in that moment, the server is convinced that bit of land has simply ceased to exist.

(from the Minecrafting album)

All I could do was stand there and watch the trees burn.

Well, and snap pictures.

(from the Minecrafting album)

Then the sun started to go down. I panicked--trapped, unable to move, with monsters. I was significantly away from the base, I had found a clay deposit, and lots of wood and dyestuphs; I really didn't want to die and lose everything.

(from the Minecrafting album)

Shadows grew thick under the trees and I began to hear the moans and hissing of evil things approaching. Hank asked for my land coordinates--something F3 also lets you know in Minecraft--and I read them, doing everything I could to move. I managed to move partially across the large gap--and froze in place again. And that's when we realized Hank--functioning in godmode, as server admin--couldn't teleport me back to the spawn base.

With nothing else to do then, I disconnected, Fawkes disconnected, and Hank restarted the server. When it came back, I came back--under the one surviving tree in a very sunny morning. Laboriously I made my way back to the base, chopping down random burned trees as I went, while Hank checked to make sure his server was responding to the game as it should be. Once he was sure, he ported me back from wherever I'd been.

Weeks later, he finally explored to the point of finding those several meadows where the fire had decimated everything in sight. To this day, there's no clue why it started--no surface lava breaches, I hadn't been carrying a flint and steel, and--at that point--there was no weather.

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