Recently I’ve been a little busy organizing my music library and playing around with minecart intersections and stations in Minecraft.
Organizing my music is a little more of a deal that it would be for a lot of people, not only due to the volume, but because I like to keep the meta-data associated with each track; Meta-data such as song rating and play count. In Winamp, my media player of choice, all of this meta-data is associated to a file location and name, meaning that if you move or rename a file, all of your meta-data is lost. Luckily I wrote a tool to maintain your meta-data about a year ago. I’ve been too afraid to use it because one of the steps is to wipe all of your meta-data before you can re-load it. But my library was getting out of hand, so I finally caved and tried it out. It works great! I will be releasing the application and source code on SourceForge as soon as I get my act together. On a related note, I’m thinking of trying Mercurial instead of SVN for this project after seeing someone use it in action. As much as I love SVN, Mercurial looked really slick.
If you haven’t heard of Minecraft, now is the time to look at it. This one developer has made millions of Euros from a simple, yet creative 3D Java game. It’s a giant sandbox. I am particularly fascinated with minecart systems, probably because one of my favourite games of all time is OpenTTD. Last night, I implemented a T-intersection with a friend. The night before, I implemented a simple outbound train station that doesn’t involve chasing runaway carts. And before all of that, I implemented a 3-bay train station that will feed you a cart on-demand, without using the stacking trick. I hope to put up some videos of all of this shortly.