1. No support. This has been a one-man project for me, and I do prefer that. I can work in teams but for hobbies I like to do things alone. That sort of has a drawback, however. I don't know if my ramblings about the Elohim has really generated interest in it. Maybe it's just taking up electronic space and I'm talking to electronic air, I wouldn't know otherwise. Also, because I haven't been able to secure a stable server where others could help, I've been doing the grunt work of laying block after block down. It does get boring after a while, especially when I have to remove huge amount of blocks that were incorrectly placed. I don't know, maybe if I had a team that I could give design commands to and perhaps join in, then it'd be quicker.
2. Incomplete plans. Of the twenty-one planned decks on the ship, I have seven of them actually designed on paper. Other things, even crucial ones - like medical facilities, engine rooms, etc. - are all undesigned and unplaced. This is generally a demotivator for me. I like having things planned out ahead of time which gives me a concrete, visible goal I can work to. Lack of completed plans doesn't provide me that goal.
3. Lack of time. It's crunch time in college, work is starting to take up more time, etc. By the time everything else is done I'm too tired to desire focusing on anything, including the ship.
4. Lack of commitment to the project. As a result of no plans, time, or support, what is there to make me stick to the Elohim? I don't want to continue on an aimless venture, as I have a desire to do productive, meaningful things with my time.
5. I'm swept from one idea to another and am incredibly prone to give up at the first sign of trouble. Minecraft World has been on hold because I couldn't figure out how the heck to design Yusaria City. For the reasons stated above I've paused on Elohim. I was occupied by the SMP server (now not so much). This is a general pattern in how I operate.
I may return to the project some day if conditions are right.
On another note, I was just walking around a Classic map randomly generated and set to Huge. I noticed there were cave systems underground and I explored some of them. I can tell that Notch had already did some nice work in making these things, but there definitely has been major improvements in the terrain generation algorithm because the kind of world and caves I see in Classic are not at all nearly identical to what Beta's stuff is.
Also, one of my hobbies which has fallen aside in the past year or so is programming for the TI-83+/84+ calculators. Well, some time ago I was helping someone who also programmed for those with some coding and it got my creative juices flowing. He had made a very simple copy of Minecraft (check it out here) and I did some browsing of the code. There was a significant bottleneck in the code which I succeeded in remedying with a single line of code. He updated the game and I earned a special thanks in the readme :D.
It made me think: what if I wrote a Minecraft for the TI? This other person's game is intended to be more storyline-based. I could write a sort of counterpart game which would try to emulate Beta. I've already done some significant brainstorming on how it would work. I have plenty of programming experience under my belt (two shells and two games at least) so I would find that maybe 70% of the code wouldn't be a hassle but the remaining 30% would be a challenge to implement. It would be very unlikely for me to make it in 3D given the limited processing power of these devices and the sort of mathematical gymnastics that would be required. Let's not forget the small screen sizes.
