Squibble: The Mind-Blowing Text Display Revolution!

Hey everyone today we’re talking a little bit about displays more specifically we’re going to be discussing text displays but I guess I want to start with using Redstone lamps you see Redstone lamps are by far the most common type of display and that’s for good reason the reason this is the

Case is because well they’re kind of basically designed for that almost they’re incredibly fast reliable always work when you want them to and they’re incredibly intuitive all you have to do is just apply a redstone power source this means that for any computer screen or really just any sort of display the

Hardware is pretty trivial you just need a flat panel of redstone lamps and some kind of wiring system to hook it all up and I understand that there’s obviously a bunch more Nuance with how you wire things up to make sure everything works I mean I clearly don’t know anything

About that I’ve just pasted in a bunch of wool and random wires but basically the big idea is when you want to display something you go with redstone lamps yet they unfortunately come with one fatal flaw and it’s that they’re just absolutely hideous the reality is

That when you take any sort of repeating pattern complexity like this and tile it over a large plane it starts to get really really ugly combined with the sort of brown colors not very contrasting well against the bright yellow spots that are created by the on lamps it’s just generally a very

Unpleasant thing to look at there are plenty of ways to actually Remedy this problem whether it’s using a panel of tinted glass to increase the contrast or actually using a texture pack to make these pixels black and these pixels perfect white but overall as a whole the

Redstone lamp is just not the best looking display block now that my harsh criticism of the redstone lamp display is over it’s time to do the most squibble thing ever and provide a solution that definitely can’t replace it and when I say that I completely mean it because this thing is clunky slow

Humongous can only display text and eats up about half the server’s performance and today’s video is going to be about how I built it and why I guess I should start with the idea the thing that inspired me the most is probably this split flap display and the reason why I

Thought it was so cool was because it allows you to display text or font with essentially any resolution the fact that we just have literal flaps covered in paint allows us to essentially make any sort of specificity we want without being hindered with Hardware limitations now unfortunately due to the very clever

Design of it we’re not going to be able to accomplish anything like this in Minecraft but the thing is is we have something close we have piston feed tapes now it’s not like feed tapes are specifically a Minecraft concept I mean people have been using tapes for about a

Century to store information this is because they’re super compact I mean you just have a roll of some kind of film or something this allows you to store insane amounts of information densely stacked together now unfortunately in Minecraft we don’t have this luxury because the reality is that any tape

We’re going to be working with is going to be inherently 1 M thick due to the fact that our block are 1 m thick however despite us losing out on the main benefit of anything tape related we still do get something super important and it’s that it is a physical display

It doesn’t use lamps or anything like that meaning we can literally build whatever we want allowing us to access incredibly cool character designs made from complex things like slabs stairs and basically anything you can imagine into a 4×4 slice we can put it onto a display and display it in a string of

Text one of the biggest falloffs of the redstone lamp toay is we’re confined to the 1×1 pixel grid that Minecraft gives us whereas in here we can use any amount of detail we’ll like and it’ll still come through perfectly clear without any level of added complexity okay that’s super cool and

All but where’s the actual machine well here’s design iteration one and you might notice that it is quite large and unfortunately this is not just a thing with design iteration one all of them are going to be absolutely huge I had to unfortunately cope with the fact that this thing was inherently

Going to be ginormous due to the fact that each and every single character consisted of five pieces of feed tape four for the text and one for including the black barrier that I’ll get into in a little bit but essentially what this means is that we have a really long feed

Tape here in fact we’re storing 255 blocks as for how this thing works it’s pretty straightforward we just move the blocks in a simple Bend so important details to consider is on the top here we’ve actually got this super cool piston feed tapel line extender where essentially we use slime blocks that are

Pulling the sides of blocks to move blocks forward in a single line without ever having to introduce any bends this is super useful for compacting the top section as for down here we have a really interesting sticky piston setup to very quickly remove this block from the front without actually having to

Intrude into this wall area where the front of the display would lie the initial character set that we were going to use was all the letters as you can see a through z and then all the numbers 0 through 9 as well as these extra symbols the initial character set

Included 51 symbols and did not include these two symbols the reason was was because I actually miscounted originally I was shooting for 50 but then I made a mistake so then we ended up with 51 and I realized that it would actually be easier to ramp it up to 53 to clean up

The design then to refigure things out and remove exactly five blocks from the feed tape actually fine-tuning any of these machines to have exactly the number of blocks we need in our entire feed tape was actually quite difficult and this is super important because if there’s ever a gap anywhere we’re going

To need to account for that in our logic later which is kind of not something I really want to do then it was just a bunch of fixing errors making sure everything’s ready trying to prevent traffic jams like down here figuring out just exactly how fast we can clock this

Thing before it starts to break and now we’re on to the worst part of basically any project like this tile ability since we’re very very deeply missing the mark on every single category when it comes to efficiency we need to make sure that we make up for it in the one category we

Can do right and that’s making it look good and making it look good means we have exactly one block of space between every single character this is nonnegotiable this is a design constraint I absolutely have to roll with otherwise this thing’s going to be a massive disappointment that means that every

Single module is only five blocks wide and since four blocks of that is consumed by basically exclusively feed tape we only have a single line of blocks to run an entire wiring system to hook up the entire feed tape and it all has to function independently that means

No cross interference between any given module I’m really going to skim through this phase of the design process because it was kind of boring but mainly we’d encounter mistakes like this one you see here I actually chose to save out on a rail here by putting a block here

Instead what that actually does is it quasi Powers the next slice over and this was originally unnoticeable until I clock them at different speeds and this just happened at just the right moment such that this piston just happens to be updated at the same time this fires

Meaning that we’re going to get some weird piston action and this P piston fires independently from all the rest and everything essentially blows up anyways after all that pain we finally end up with a working design and that is this one and I can show you it tiles perfectly by running three completely

Unsynchronized displays and they’ll all cycle perfectly even though it looks absolutely horrible that they’re going at different speeds next we kind of added the guts of the system I’m not going to get into too much of the details of how the counting system works mostly because it’s really bad and could

Definitely be replaced with something that I’ll discuss much later in the video but essentially this top circuit makes sure that it counts in intervals of five because we have five blocks per line This bottom circuit contains all the information if we want to select character 16 we put 16 items in here and

This bottom section stores the current state here we’re at zero which means this dropper is empty and now we’re going to be back in that world I showed you in the intro because at this point in the project I had Enlisted the help of two of my

Fellow friends from wavee to help me on here the wave Tech creative multiplayer server anyways I want to say that if you’re liking the video so far and you want to see other content like that make sure to subscribe check out the rest of my channel and let’s move on anyways big

Thank you to Magic and jkm because they were massive help in designing the water stream situation as well as fixing the tons and tons of errors that were going on in this counting system jkm also wrote a very nice little program that essentially allows you to take any

String you write into it and directly convert it into the numbers required to encode the text that you actually want to display on this system so what do we have now we have a text display that can display virtually any string of texts basically in any kind of length although

The server’s performance might be tanking already at 20 characters we’ve got here but there are a few problems namely one of them is the system in which the number actually reads to the letter that we’re looking for the reality is that if we want to get to

From B to C we actually have to Loop the entire system over and then we can arrive at C this is due to the fact that the counting system needs to reset back to the initial value a before actually moving on now this seemingly kind of flaw was actually a deliberate decision

I made in order to simplify the counting system because the reality is that figuring out how to get to the letter you want is a lot easier when you force the machine to reset to a known position like a however if I do end up making a second video where I remaster everything

Including the speed wiring and the counting system that will be one of the highlights of how we improve the efficiency of the design overall and then seemingly out of nowhere another wave Tech friend contacts me and says they want to work on the project 2 and

That’ll be Paradox 42 and what we worked on was essentially these tiny little things and what these things are are essentially the decimal versions of what we designed over there only they’re a fraction of the size more than twice as fast consume significantly less performance and might actually have a

Practical use in an environment outside of just fooling around I mean seriously even though we don’t get the full 53 character Spectrum these things put the other design to shame the way we put it together was so much faster with such an incredibly streamlined design that this thing runs eventually once every eight

Game ticks or at a 2.5 blocks per second rate these things are incredibly fast and tiny as hell as well as us together working on the super simple feed tape layout that we designed here Paradox also went on to create this thing I honestly have no idea how it works but

It’s a brilliant setup that allows you to essentially just go straight to exactly the number you’re looking for without having to go through any of that returning to a single state that you remember nonsense what this means is that since we have an intuitive way of

Interfacing with it as well as a bunch of other benefits such as a smaller size actually good performance and generally still pleasing display this thing could actually be used in storage systems mob Farms or even more novelty things like calculators I also wanted to briefly mention that we have a Discord server

Now so if you want to drop in check out some teasers the latest videos announcements or just interact with the community and have a quick chat with me make sure to stop by anyways if you enjoyed the video make sure to stay tuned for the possible part two where we

Remaster it and fix a lot of the design flaws that I intentionally introduced and also check out my other content if you like the kind of stuff that I make and I’ll see you next time