Minecraft for 11 yr old

tuisginideach

My child wants to play Minecraft. I am a complete non-techie so looking for simple answers and simple instructions pls. My K9 (child protection system) on the PC crashes every time we try to open Minecraft and the only way I can use any internet site then is to turn off PC and start all over again. The laptop (which doesn't have K9) brings up dialog box saying signature isn't verified etc - Markus Persson (whose name I see highly recommended on these boards);is it ok to go ahead with that ? And is it genuinely only a building bricks game? Many thanks from a parent who is light years behind her children.

Quazzie

Its like lego on a computer. For an 11 year old I'd suggest playing it with sound off because genuinely the noises of the monsters in the game can be quiet freaky. The monsters themselves aren't but the noises are imo. Other than that the game is perfect for any age.

Unfortunately I can't help you with your other query.

tuisginideach

Many thanks for that much.

Now onto the more difficult part!

Shiminay

First of all, on behalf of gamers everywhere, thank you for being sensible about the games you let your children play on your computer

To business...

First of all, you should probably fire off an email to the K9 people about the issues you're having and see if they have a fix for it. Minecraft is hugely popular and I'm sure you're not the first person to run into this issue. With a bit of luck, you might be able to straighten it out and get up and running properly there.

To your laptop:
The "signature isn't verified" thing relates to the way that Minecraft is written. It's been created in a language called Java which for various reasons that I won't go into (but can if you'd like to know) needs a security certificate to run on computers. I'd imagine it's a case of your laptop having some different security settings to your other computer - are they both running the same version of Windows?

Now, Markus Persson (aka Notch) is the man who's written the game and because the game is still technically in beta stages (i.e. it's not finished, but is released to the world to help test it for stability and new ideas), it's not unusual that the Java certs are unsigned. It's likely that the final product, when finished, will have a properly signed cert from Mojang - the company Notch set up to let him build Minecraft and hire people to help him.

If your laptop is "mission critical" and/or has some seriously sensitive data on it, you should never be installing beta software on it anyway

There is a related issue though to the game being written in Java - it's a spectacularly terrible language to write games in (there are several solid technical reasons for this, but again, I'm not sure you need to know why). The result is that Minecraft is *very* heavy on any machine it runs on and will stutter and probably crash on any machine that isn't reasonably well kitted out. For example, my own laptop really struggles with it from time to time and it has a Dual Core AMD chip (not quite as good as the Intel equivalent, but not a million miles off), 3GB of RAM and a perfectly reasonable graphics card. RAM and graphics card are the most important features for any game.

Adding RAM is quite cheap and a quick and easy way to improve a machine - any one here could help you out if you wanted to know more about that. Graphics cards unfortunately are a messy affair Unless you've spent a lot up to obscene money on your laptop, it won't have an amazing graphics card, but the handiest thing would be to let us know what make and model it is and we'll be able to give you a fair assessment

All that said, my first port of call would be the K9 people and see what they have to say. If you could let us know what sort of specifications your computers have (or even their make and model and we can check) and we can possibly give you a better answer.

tuisginideach

Thanks for that post - I think I get the gist of it. The laptop is more for mobility than for high level work so I think I will let him try it though I doubt it will function very well. The laptop is prob the equivalent of a €2 shop one - acer aspire 5720Z windows Vista Intel pentium dual core processor T2310 - is that TMI or TLI?

I will email K9 as suggested.
Many thanks - no doubt I'll be back on here again.

Jaafa

OP minecraft is a great game but be warned in my experience it is very addictive. I personally played it for 4 months before i got bored (I'm 17) but my two younger brothers have been playing it for about 9 months everyday they can for as much as they can. Now they were fairly active gamers before this too so i don't know how it'll effect your son but its something to keep in mind.

Shiminay

The laptop won't be breaking any speed records, but if your son/daughter is happy to plug away with the occasional speed-bump slowing things down, then I'd say it should probably serve it's purpose.

d'Oracle

tuisginideach wrote: »

And is it genuinely only a building bricks game? Many thanks from a parent who is light years behind her children.

Its one of the most innocuous games I have ever played.
Its also got the nicest most creative feels of any game I have played.

And I'd like to echo Shiminays sentiment re: your doing the research on what your kids are playing. Good job. World needs more parents like you.

tuisginideach

Thanks to all of you for your help and encouragement. Jaafa, thanks for the tip-off - I'll be prepared!

steel_spine

If you run into performance problems on the laptop, I highly recommend this mod
http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/249637-173-optifog-and-optimine-hd-e-fps-boost/page__st__2280__p__6202781__hl__optifog__fromsearch__1#entry6202781

I use it myself and can give you a hand installing it if you have problems

tuisginideach

Thank you - still negotiating terms here!

cherryghost

Minecraft has been hailed as a game of all sorts.

It's a Lego game by nature, but by exploring the different aspects of the game, you can learn Maths logic and solve them on your own initiative. The game truly promotes creativity, imagination, logic, planning and much more.

My own little cousin got hooked on it last year and followed through into secondary school with Technical Graphics and is constantly top of his class. He never ever once showed any interest in architecture prior to playing the game, now its the one thing he wants to do when he grows up