Minecraft!

[drahkon]

Bump.

 

Beta 1.5

 

* Weather (rain, snow, thunder)

* Statistics

* Achievements

* Detector rail

* Booster rail

* Performance improvements

 

More statistics and achievements will be added over time as we develop the game. They’re only stored locally at the moment, but we’ll slowly be rolling out online storing of achievements over time.

 

 

Yes, booster rails. Now I can begin crafting and using minecarts. Started a new world already. Might put some time into it tonight.

[Emasher]

The weather appears to be an uncommon occurrence. I played for a few hours this afternoon and I didn't see any.

[drahkon]

It's supposed to be kind of rare.

 

Started a new world (again ) and found this:

 

 

 

 

 

Two monster spawners (you can't see the second one) very close to each other.

Built glass around one of the dungeons to see what's going on in there. I've also collected the treasures (a saddle, two buckets, redstone and some wheat).

 

Will do the same with the other dungeon.

Edited April 20, 2011 by drahkon

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Jesus Fuck, the monsters look horrifying with that skin!

[nightwolf]

Painterly makes them look even worse *shudder*

[Dannyboy-the-Dane]

Painterly makes them look even worse *shudder*

 

Really? I find the ones above much more terrifying than the Painterly ones.

[Ville]

New rails, awesome

 

So how's the multiplayer server situation? Any server actually up at the moment?

[Dyson]

There wasn't as much demand for the server as anticipated as not many people replied to the post.. we figured there wasn't much point if we were only gonna get 2 or 3 people playing!

[Ville]

Ok, I can understand that. It's a bummer you have to pay for mp servers...hope that gets sorted at some point.

 

Hmm, maybe I can find some other server then...

[Supergrunch]

I can play now! The 1.5 update lets you play without OpenGL, so the game runs on my computer without nearly killing it.

[drahkon]

For those of you who want to try out Minecraft:

Demo.

 

90 minutes trial with everything available.

[Happenstance]

[drahkon]

Come on people.

 

Talked to Mcoy earlier. We're discussing the possibility of getting another server set up, and trying to locate the old world save.

 

Couple things:

 

- Would everyone rather start anew or use the old world save? Personally I think we'd be better off starting new but with a grand idea we can all work on whilst working on side projects - like a tunnel network that links all the buildings via the underground

 

- How many of you would actually come back and play? There's no point in us paying for the server if there's nobody to play with!

 

- Who's excited?

 

 

If there's still the possibility that Mcoy and Dyson will get another server running you should join. Where are the people who played on the old server?

 

I want this!! How about PvP?

[Happenstance]

Yeah we need all the old people back, I just cant play the game in single player anymore after finding out just how much more fun it is with a community of people.

[drahkon]

Yeah we need all the old people back, I just cant play the game in single player anymore after finding out just how much more fun it is with a community of people.

 

I love playing SSP but I'd also love to try out SMP (PvP in particular).

[nightwolf]

If Dyson changes his mind, I will still happily play on the server.

[drahkon]

Doesn't look good.

 

I'll go back to my SSP worlds then. :p I don't need you...I do.

[drahkon]

I don't like how Notch is working on things that are very unnecessary (not talking about bugfixes).

 

The maps!

 

I’m currently working on 1.6, which will be mostly a bug fix update. I will be going through bug lists (including the great one on the Minecraft wiki) and fixing as many as I can. There’s no set date for the update yet as I don’t know how long it’ll take to go through the list.

 

The only new feature that will appear is the mapping.

 

When you craft a map, you will be able to somehow select how “zoomed in†you want the map to be. It will be centered on the location where you craft it, and it will fill in as you explore the land. If you go outside the edges of the map, it will stop updating, so each map is of a specific area. (like real maps!)

 

Here’s a screenshot of a fully zooomed in map (good for town maps, for example):

 

 

And here’s a screenshot of a fully zoomed out map:

 

 

If you drop a map and someone else picks it up, they will be able to see your progress. You will also be able to (somehow) CLONE maps so that two separate map items link to the same map data. That means you can see what other players carrying the same map explores, and both you and them will show up as blinking dots or similar on the maps.

 

Currently, the map will only update if you’re holding it in your hands, but the map will kind of hide away when you’re looking straight forward. To see the map properly, you have to look down, thisly:

 

 

Any changes you make to the terrain will show up on the maps, but only once someone carrying the map gets near that area. In other words, you won’t magically get to see changes far away on the map.

 

At the moment the map doesn’t work at all in multiplayer, but that’s my next task. The code I write to support that will also be possible to reuse in the future for things like books and notes written by players, and possibly even custom paintings/hand drawn signs.

 

There’s a hard limit of 65536 unique maps per world, though, and I don’t think I can get around that without breaking the code very bad. I’m trying to figure out if the limit is high enough or if I should spend the time rewriting the code..

[Magnus]

Notch works in mysterious ways.

 

And I think maps are a good addition? They seem pretty neat.

[drahkon]

And I think maps are a good addition? They seem pretty neat.

 

There are way better "maps" out there. A lot of great minimap-mods.

[Magnus]

I don't keep up on Minecraft mods. How do these other maps work?

 

And if there are map mods, clearly people want maps in the game. So he's adding them. I don't see the problem.

[drahkon]

I don't keep up on Minecraft mods. How do these other maps work?

 

Mostly they are visible at the top right corner and act as a minimap.

 

And if there are map mods, clearly people want maps in the game. So he's adding them. I don't see the problem.

 

He will also add pistons (probably in 100 years...). A mod already out there.

 

Mojang should work on new stuff/more useful stuff or improve on already available features (powered rails, mulitplayer!!!!, new resources, more redstone thingies).

 

Yes, you could get a lot of these by mods, but they should've been in the game a long time ago.

Maps are probably a very low priority for the community.

 

I don't have a problem with the addition of maps. I only think that Notch doesn't give a crap about what the community wants most. Yes, you cannot please everyone, but why not please the majority?

[nightwolf]

I think it's better news to hear about how he plans to work with mods and mod developers rather than maps.

 

The plan for mods

After some internal discussion and general anxiety, we’ve arrived at a

plan for supporting mods. It’s still a bit vague and the details might

change after we’ve run it by our lawyers, but here’s what we want to

do:

 

* Let players sign up as “mod developers”. This will cost money (edit: no longer costs money!), and

will require you agreeing to a license deal (you only need one per

mod team).

* Mod developers can download the source code from our SVN repository.

As soon as we commit a change, it will be available to all mod

developers, unobfuscated and uncensored.

* Mod developers get a unique certificate for signing their mods. This

means players can see who made what mod and choose to trust individual

developers. The cost of signing up makes sure only serious developers

have access to this certificate.

 

The rules of the license deal will contain:

 

* Mods must only be playable by people who have bought Minecraft

* You can’t sell your mods or make money off them unless you’ve got a

separate license deal with us

* The mods must not be malicious (obviously)

* We retain the right to use your mod idea and implement it ourselves

in Minecraft. This is to prevent the situation where we have to avoid

adding a feature just because there’s a mod out there that does

something similar. It’s also great for dealing with bug fixes provided

by the community.

 

In the long term, we hope this means people will do awesome new things

with the Minecraft engine and play around with it. We want to buy

and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them

ourselves. It’s possible we might have a mod marketplace for selling

and buying mods that fans have written, or we might purchase and

integrate nice mods that fit the main theme of Minecraft.

 

[edit:]

 

Just to clear up two things:

 

The access cost won’t be prohibitively expensive, and if you make a good mod or something else based on the source code, it’s highly likely we will want to license it.

 

So modders finally know where they stand, I think it's a great idea, it's pretty much the same thing as now, except now Notch has more control, which frankly, if people didn't see coming, then that's just silly.

[drahkon]

So modders finally know where they stand, I think it's a great idea, it's pretty much the same thing as now, except now Notch has more control can earn more money without actually working

 

Exactly.

 

We want to buy and/or license good mods and/or total conversions and sell them ourselves.

 

I bet they will be selling them at higher prices than what they have paid to buy them, which is pretty clever from a businessman-perspective. Even selling them at lower prices is lucrative because they sell them more than once (obviously).

 

 

What Minecraft needs (and what the majority of the community wants) is a better multi player.

• more stability

• easier access
  

• some kind of lobby
  

• a friend system
  

 

I assume it's kind of hard to program stuff like this (no idea...) but why not put 80% of working time into these features and release some minor updates (which add one or two small things)/bugfixes every week/two weeks?

 

People (in the Minecraft forums) always complain about other people complaining about how Notch works. But I agree with the former. In the alpha status the game got updated regularly and the updates were useful.

Since beta the frequency and quality of updates has declined. Which is sad. I always thought that Mojang would be different to a lot of other developers.

Edited April 27, 2011 by drahkon

[Magnus]

I'm not sure if you're complaining about them potentially licensing mods and selling them or not.

 

 

I'm one of those people who don't really care about multiplayer. I also never install any mods for games (with the sole exception of mods that fix bugs/add content that was deleted by the original developers). So basically I'm fine with the way Notch is currently working.