Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Advanced Circuits
The creators of Minecraft did something interesting when they designed the redstone sys-
tem:theymadeitpossibletomimicthebinarylogicsystemthatisalsoattheheartofevery
integrated circuit that runs your electronics. It's nowhere near as crazily complicated as
today's CPUs, and it's more like a breadboard of wires studded with vacuum tubes, but the
basics are there. Let's take a look at some prototypical logic gates and how they're used to
do actual useful things.
NOT Gates, aka Inverters
NOT gates take an input value and flip the output value. For example, if the incoming cur-
rent is on, the output of the NOT gate is off. If the current is off, the output is on. Redstone
torches act like this. By default, they supply a current, but if the block they are attached to
is powered by another source, the torch flips off. NOT gates are also known as inverters
because they invert the current.
We'vealreadyusedaninvertertoflipthecurrentfromthetorchwithabuttoninthesliding
doors example. They have many other uses, though. For example, two inverters in a row
act as an amplifier, just like a repeater (see
Figure 9.19
).
FIGURE 9.19
Inverters as amplifiers: the foremost inverter pair is a more compressed
version of the furthest set (two inverters in sequence).
