I'm up for it, Neil.

The two servers known to me:

No, it's down. It will stay down until a decently playable server is released. Once that happens, I'll buy a budget dedicated server with at least 2 gigs of ram.

As for passing around a saved game, I'm down for that. I don't think we should really be worried about playing "X number of days". I say, just play for how you want for one or two "real" days, then pass the save file onto someone else.

Why do you hide such things in spoiler tags? Does not compute....

What if two people try to update the same chunk?

I'm suddenly imagining a giant cobblestone tower being melded with a wooden temple because two people built in the same place.

Using source control to distribute a world would work if there was a set turn list and each person updated their local copy before playing. I suppose it would be more streamlined than manually zipping a world, sending it to the next player on the turn list, having that player extract & replace the world, and so on and so forth.

But, as Neil pointed out... if I decided to work on the world after my turn (or before my turn) all bets are off that something terrible doesn't happen.

Meh, seems like it may be more trouble than it's worth. Unless it was turn based there wouldn't be much point to building anything worthwhile for fear of overwriting/corrupting it. Plus it looks like Notch is fixing up the chests, so a usable multi-player probably isn't too far away. Just my 2¢.

EDIT: Oh, and someone PM the server address, I've been looking forward to seeing whats going on .

Perhaps you could use a marking system. Each player gets a way of marking an area he wants to work with so others know where not to play around.

I leave the details to you.

Is anybody familiar with the world format(s)? Text is often automatically merge-able because of it's nature. Typically, it suffices to base the merges on line-based differences. With a binary file, you no longer know of a given boundary to merge on. All that you know is that the file was A and now it's B. I highly doubt Notch is storing the world data as text. At least, not all text. It would be considerably more wasteful and really the worlds are probably too large and complex to edit by hand anyway. I see no real value in text worlds. Assuming Notch is using binary for the things that matter, Git will be unable to merge worlds. It will also be impossible for a human to review changesets to make sure that somebody played by the rules. You might as well just use a simple "stick" mechanism. Whoever has the stick, or latest zip, gets to play. Come up with a schedule, like was done for the translation exercise, and only pass the zip on to the next player. Or just post them to the forum and use the honor system.

Updated the server. Not sure what happened, but it wasn't even running... My personal stdio log isn't very reliable so there's no real indication of what happened... Let me know if you try to connect and can't.

Isn't it that behavior that makes it a fence...?

Exactly. It's the same height as everything else I can jump over, so naturally it annoys me that I can't jump over it.

I go on once in a while, but no one is there at the time, and I just go to one of my personal worlds instead.