Minecraft and ??

 The Code Club is looking for some engaging project material, so we're going to start collecting environmental data (microbits, esp8266, DS18B20, SHT3X, CO2 sensors), behaviour survey data (Google Forms, Sheets) and other data (Openweather.org, the RPi weather project when it works), and hopefully collating it all in an internal web site. 

Part of this will be about the school's environment, in-room data being collected and hopefully displayed and analysed. Maybe we can do something about the litter problem too!

Some of the CC members are keen Minecraft players, and I wondered if it would be possible to get Minecraft involved in displaying data. It turns out that Minecraft is a Minefield, with two different game implementations (Java - Windows/OSX/Linux; Bedrock - Windows/XBox/PSx/iOS), and loads of concepts to get one's head around. Of course, MC is a client/server architecture multiplayer game, so maybe the client isn't important, only the server, which we can get copies of. However, note that the server provided at that link is only compatible with Java Edition.

The Fandom Minecraft wiki has lots of useful analysis of the MC architecture and so on. It turns out that the desktop/tablet/console "client" actually has both client and server components:

• Client component handles movement, display etc., as you'd expect, as well as various server functions that operate locally to reduce the required network bandwidth, and which sync with the server when they can
• A server instance, hosted on the local device, which provides the local worlds, and which behaves like the actual server
• Remote server for multiplayer interaction, which is hosted on another computer

I've actually paid money (£35!) for the full Mac OSX version, to try some of this out. I note that the single player game allows its server to be opened to other LAN-originated players, so you could do multiplayer from a desktop "client" server if you wanted to try something.

To be continued...