alt Hacker News> I should be able to give you a URL to some location, and when you click it, it opens up Minecraft, streams the blocks, and you're viewing it.
> minecraft://server/loc?w=0&x=0&y=0&z=0
Probably no real reason why not... but I think it'd make more sense to take a snapshot, upload, and then have it viewable on the web.
> And if you want to set up a server where you and your friends can interact with each other and make edits, the server should be able to stream blocks from some backing server, but copy-on-write them to your own local storage.
How is this different from just loading your world in a server and having your friends join?
> If you want to be really awesome, set it up like bittorrent, where you can share the load, so the central server isn't hammered.
BitTorrent isn't going to work. You could shard it so different parts of the world are handled by different servers. But it gets complicated and Minecraft's server software doesn't support doing this out of the box
> How is this different from just loading your world in a server and having your friends join?
Because player location, inventory, actions, are all load on the server. That's why servers have player limits.
> BitTorrent isn't going to work.
You and I are talking about different things. I'm talking about serving up the raw blocks alone.
And yes, I know, Minecraft servers don't support static file serving, or streaming from another source, or copy-on-write. I'm saying these are all nearly trivial to implement.