6 ms·

Minefold (YC W12) launches mods with more games coming soon

95 points by chrislloyd 14y ago

kennystone 14y ago
Pretty awesome, seems Minefold is evolving from a Minecraft specific service to a heroku-like platform for games (and Heroku started with just Rails, of course).
- martythemaniak 14y ago
  Yeah, I can't wait to give CS a try.
alexeischiopu 14y ago
Love the new website
elisee 14y ago
Looks like a nice, lean service, kinda reminds me of iWantMyName's approach to domain names: clean & straightforward. If you guys are interested in hosting CraftStudio servers (my Minecraft-inspired collaborative game-making platform for gamers), I'd be happy to provide some guidance. You can hit me up at elisee@craftstud.io - http://craftstud.io/ http://craftstud.io/
zrail 14y ago
Funpacks sound awesome, I'm looking forward to reading about them and the new backend services.
tptacek 14y ago
Minefold is something you wouldn't assume would be hugely lucrative unless you are the parent of a 10-13 year old kid, in which case you are kicking yourself for not putting sane pricing on top of on-demand Minecraft servers that don't require you to tech support a colo machine. I'd be a customer right now, except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him. But for the problem that colo solves for him, it's hellaciously expensive.
- danielweber 14y ago
  except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him That should be obvious, since intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic motivation. But if it were obvious, I, too, would have realized that I should have given my son a unix box to run his own minecraft server. I wonder if that would work for Christmas.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    Swear to god, what the boy wants for Xmas this year: MORE RAM FOR HIS COLO. I'm not sure whether I'm thrilled or terrified.
    - debacle 14y ago
      Just wait until he finds out about bitcoins.
      - tptacek 14y ago
        No way. Boy! In our house, we obey the rules of macroeconomics!
    - mootothemax 14y ago
      I'm not sure if the potential lag involved in European hosting would make this pointless, but there are some mega cheap-yet-reliable-enough deals out there. 32gb plus a couple of terabytes storage is available from Hetzner for 50 or 60 EUR/month, and I've been quite happy with it too ;-)
    - rdl 14y ago
      You should teach him about backups :)
      - tptacek 14y ago
        Thought about it, decided now would be a good time for life to teach him about backups.
citricsquid 14y ago
on the settings page (https://minefold.com/settings https://minefold.com/settings) there's a curious display issue. Not sure if it's the fault of Chrome (on Windows 7) or a style setting, but I'm missing the bracket opening for my username and the coin amount for Facebook invites: http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png
- chrislloyd 14y ago
  That is… weird. Investigating now.
  - swies 14y ago
    Remove the text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line from your CSS and that text will render properly again. We ran into this on Windows Chrome too. It was a pain to track down.
danteembermage 14y ago
It's not obvious from the page, is it 5 coins per minute (for a normal server) while someone is online or is it 5 coins per minute 24/7? If it's while online only this could be an incredible cost savings relative to a $5 a month server that a handful of friends sign on once in a while.
- chrislloyd 14y ago
  For "normal" servers it's only 5 coins / min is only while the sever is running. If you only play for a few hours on Friday evenings it works out to be really good :)
rwhitman 14y ago
I was thinking of signing up for this for my nephew, maybe as an Xmas gift but the pricing scheme I find kind of confusing, especially as I'd be turning this over eventually to my brother (his dad) who isn't really familiar with web hosts and might be offput by the fact its rated in terms of minutes of playtime Seeing as this is kind of geared towards kids wouldn't a much more simplified pricing scheme make more sense?
ricardobeat 14y ago
The pricing looks a bit confusing now (the straightforward $x/person before was much better imo), but I look forward to the CS:GO servers :)
- yesimahuman 14y ago
  Yea, I'm curious what's with the coin based pricing, it's incredibly complicated IMO.
tonetheman 14y ago
I like the idea but the coin pricing kills it for me. I can't figure out what it really means exactly. Maybe put an example up of what it would look like to run a few hours on the weekends? Just a thought. The idea is still a good one.
bookcasey 14y ago
Two things. In the settings "Link your Minecraft account for 400 coins" is ambiguous. Am I spending coins or getting coins? Also, look into Feed the Beast, it's a mod pack (like Tekkit) except built and supported by the developers of the mods. Many of whom feel Tekkit used their mods unfairly without their permission. http://feed-the-beast.com http://feed-the-beast.com
rdl 14y ago
It would be interesting to learn what hoops you needed to jump through to be a BF3 host. I know there are only "partners" allowed to do it; I would have hosted my own at the colo otherwise. (having <5ms ping times and decent peering or transit to everyone in the Bay Area on comcast and sonic and webpass...)
- devicenull 14y ago
  Can't say too much about the business side of it, but technically the servers are no more complicated to run then any other game server.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Yeah, it's all contractual/reseller stuff. I just wonder what is the minimum scale they'll allow. Although if a good YC company will make servers available, I'll just rent one or two. Obviously you should host voice servers too (ventrilo or whatever)
culshaw 14y ago
I love the minimal design of this, reflects what you are offering so well. Well done, I wish I played Minecraft :)
nateberkopec 14y ago
The coin based pricing is weird, but my god! It's Heroku for gaming servers! Why hasn't someone thought of this before?!
devicenull 14y ago
I'm interested to see how this is going to work when you start throwing other games into the mix. With Minecraft, updates are fairly straightforward. With some other games (CSS, TF2, etc) the update process is pretty complicated. You've got to either roll your own updater, or have a unique steam account per server. Then you've got to run the updater, and hope it doesn't crash midway through or hang indefinitely. Once you update a server, you then need to check that all the plugins installed aren't breaking the server (or need updates themselves). It's pretty straightforward to run thousands of stock servers, the difficulty comes in when you've got thousands of different combinations. Edit: I'm also noticing DayZ on that page. They're perhaps the most commercial hosting unfriendly game I've ever encountered. Good luck getting instance IDs from them.
garrydanger 14y ago
Would love to hear Dave's experiences with moving the backend from ruby to golang, can you make sure he does actually publish those blog articles?

95 points by chrislloyd 14y ago

Pretty awesome, seems Minefold is evolving from a Minecraft specific service to a heroku-like platform for games (and Heroku started with just Rails, of course).

martythemaniak 14y ago
Yeah, I can't wait to give CS a try.

alexeischiopu 14y ago

Love the new website

elisee 14y ago

Looks like a nice, lean service, kinda reminds me of iWantMyName's approach to domain names: clean & straightforward. If you guys are interested in hosting CraftStudio servers (my Minecraft-inspired collaborative game-making platform for gamers), I'd be happy to provide some guidance. You can hit me up at elisee@craftstud.io - http://craftstud.io/ http://craftstud.io/

zrail 14y ago

Funpacks sound awesome, I'm looking forward to reading about them and the new backend services.

tptacek 14y ago

Minefold is something you wouldn't assume would be hugely lucrative unless you are the parent of a 10-13 year old kid, in which case you are kicking yourself for not putting sane pricing on top of on-demand Minecraft servers that don't require you to tech support a colo machine. I'd be a customer right now, except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him. But for the problem that colo solves for him, it's hellaciously expensive.

danielweber 14y ago
except that the boy has learned more Unix and scripting in 2 months of running a Minecraft server than he did in 5 years of me pushing stuff on him That should be obvious, since intrinsic motivation is always better than extrinsic motivation. But if it were obvious, I, too, would have realized that I should have given my son a unix box to run his own minecraft server. I wonder if that would work for Christmas.
- tptacek 14y ago
  Swear to god, what the boy wants for Xmas this year: MORE RAM FOR HIS COLO. I'm not sure whether I'm thrilled or terrified.
  - debacle 14y ago
    Just wait until he finds out about bitcoins.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      No way. Boy! In our house, we obey the rules of macroeconomics!
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    I'm not sure if the potential lag involved in European hosting would make this pointless, but there are some mega cheap-yet-reliable-enough deals out there. 32gb plus a couple of terabytes storage is available from Hetzner for 50 or 60 EUR/month, and I've been quite happy with it too ;-)
  - rdl 14y ago
    You should teach him about backups :)
    - tptacek 14y ago
      Thought about it, decided now would be a good time for life to teach him about backups.

citricsquid 14y ago

on the settings page (https://minefold.com/settings https://minefold.com/settings) there's a curious display issue. Not sure if it's the fault of Chrome (on Windows 7) or a style setting, but I'm missing the bracket opening for my username and the coin amount for Facebook invites: http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png http://i.imgur.com/lOJH5.png

chrislloyd 14y ago
That is… weird. Investigating now.
- swies 14y ago
  Remove the text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line from your CSS and that text will render properly again. We ran into this on Windows Chrome too. It was a pain to track down.

danteembermage 14y ago

It's not obvious from the page, is it 5 coins per minute (for a normal server) while someone is online or is it 5 coins per minute 24/7? If it's while online only this could be an incredible cost savings relative to a $5 a month server that a handful of friends sign on once in a while.

chrislloyd 14y ago
For "normal" servers it's only 5 coins / min is only while the sever is running. If you only play for a few hours on Friday evenings it works out to be really good :)

rwhitman 14y ago

I was thinking of signing up for this for my nephew, maybe as an Xmas gift but the pricing scheme I find kind of confusing, especially as I'd be turning this over eventually to my brother (his dad) who isn't really familiar with web hosts and might be offput by the fact its rated in terms of minutes of playtime Seeing as this is kind of geared towards kids wouldn't a much more simplified pricing scheme make more sense?

ricardobeat 14y ago

The pricing looks a bit confusing now (the straightforward $x/person before was much better imo), but I look forward to the CS:GO servers :)

yesimahuman 14y ago
Yea, I'm curious what's with the coin based pricing, it's incredibly complicated IMO.

tonetheman 14y ago

I like the idea but the coin pricing kills it for me. I can't figure out what it really means exactly. Maybe put an example up of what it would look like to run a few hours on the weekends? Just a thought. The idea is still a good one.

bookcasey 14y ago

Two things. In the settings "Link your Minecraft account for 400 coins" is ambiguous. Am I spending coins or getting coins? Also, look into Feed the Beast, it's a mod pack (like Tekkit) except built and supported by the developers of the mods. Many of whom feel Tekkit used their mods unfairly without their permission. http://feed-the-beast.com http://feed-the-beast.com

rdl 14y ago

It would be interesting to learn what hoops you needed to jump through to be a BF3 host. I know there are only "partners" allowed to do it; I would have hosted my own at the colo otherwise. (having <5ms ping times and decent peering or transit to everyone in the Bay Area on comcast and sonic and webpass...)

devicenull 14y ago
Can't say too much about the business side of it, but technically the servers are no more complicated to run then any other game server.
- rdl 14y ago
  Yeah, it's all contractual/reseller stuff. I just wonder what is the minimum scale they'll allow. Although if a good YC company will make servers available, I'll just rent one or two. Obviously you should host voice servers too (ventrilo or whatever)

culshaw 14y ago

I love the minimal design of this, reflects what you are offering so well. Well done, I wish I played Minecraft :)

nateberkopec 14y ago

The coin based pricing is weird, but my god! It's Heroku for gaming servers! Why hasn't someone thought of this before?!

devicenull 14y ago

I'm interested to see how this is going to work when you start throwing other games into the mix. With Minecraft, updates are fairly straightforward. With some other games (CSS, TF2, etc) the update process is pretty complicated. You've got to either roll your own updater, or have a unique steam account per server. Then you've got to run the updater, and hope it doesn't crash midway through or hang indefinitely. Once you update a server, you then need to check that all the plugins installed aren't breaking the server (or need updates themselves). It's pretty straightforward to run thousands of stock servers, the difficulty comes in when you've got thousands of different combinations. Edit: I'm also noticing DayZ on that page. They're perhaps the most commercial hosting unfriendly game I've ever encountered. Good luck getting instance IDs from them.

garrydanger 14y ago

Would love to hear Dave's experiences with moving the backend from ruby to golang, can you make sure he does actually publish those blog articles?