Minecraft To Officially Launch 11/11/11

tekgoblin writes "Minecraft has currently sold about 2 million copies and it's still only in beta. However, the developers have just announced that the game will officially launch on 11/11/11. The date 11/11/11 was actually chosen because it falls on the same date as other various game releases, the most notable being Skyrim."

Comments

Ah yes....

[SIR_Taco]

It seems Slashdot currently has currently first class editing :)

Re:Ah yes....

[ynp7]

tekgoblin currently the whole article.

Re:Ah yes....

[SIR_Taco]

oh.... well now it's not funny.... they fixed it

Which date?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is that mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy?
I wouldn't want to get my dates mixed up.

Re:Which date?

[ynp7]

Obviously it's yy/mm/dd! Were you raised by wolves or something?

Re:Which date?

[Afforess]

I know you're joking but....

I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.

- PS: I'm American.

Re:Which date?

[Anonymous Coward]

YY/MM/DD is actually the one that makes the most sense. It's the only one that's automatically sorted by date, even by programs that don't recognize that it's a date format.

Re:Which date?

[Afforess]

IMHO, dates should be easily human readable, not easily computer readable. Last I checked, computers served people, not the other way around.

Re:Which date?

[jhoegl]

But computers were made by humans... who serves who?

Re:Which date?

[internettoughguy]

I know you're joking but....

  I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.

  - PS: I'm American.

Agreed, but it would also make even more sense to do it big endian, that way it's in line with how we notate time ie; YYYY/MM/DD/hh/mm/ss.

Re:Which date?

[Archangel Michael]

Actually, the date format used by most seems silly. Best Date format is yyyymmdd hh:mm:ss It doesn't need fixing for anything. You need to shorten it, you can cut off end bits as needed and it still is readable. You can take out all the punctuation that makes it readable and it is just as valid. You can strip bits easily. You can sort it.

My $.02

Re:Which date?

[nprz]

Agreed, which is how it is in Japanese (and maybe other places, like Mandarin Chinese from above).

Re:Which date?

[PitaBred]

I still prefer reading them in that order. Broadest timescale to most precise.

Re:Which date?

[smisle]

For other people, I usually write the 3 letter name of the month out (nov - 11 - 11), that way no one gets confused. For myself, it's the ISO standard, all the way! 20111111

Re:Which date?

[w0mprat]

Is that mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy?
I wouldn't want to get my dates mixed up.

Huh? I thought 11/11/11 it was binary and I'd missed it by 1001 years and 11 months.

Re:Which date?

[lul_wat]

Goddamn slashdot interface is a piece of shit. Even the moderation is broken. I tried to mod you up. Fucking slashdot ffuucckkk

Re:Which date?

[need4mospd]

It does seem silly. I imagine it comes from the way we tell people dates. It's September 11th to most people in the US. Other countries tend to say the 11th of September. Us lazy Americans found out we could eliminate "the" and "of" and still communicate the date.

Re:Which date?

[grim-one]

Are you implying that YY/MM/DD is not easily human readable? I would suggest that's just because you've been trained to recognize other formats.

Re:Which date?

[Anonymous Coward]

One little, Two little, Three little Endians.

Re:Which date?

[Fluffeh]

Makes sense. That's my format of choice for anything that needs a date in a filename. Anything else (honestly) just seems stupid and backwards. I Hi-Five those wonderful forward thinkers of Mandarin Chinese!

Re:Which date?

[mcvos]

You could even eliminate the 'th'. In Dutch, we say "11 september" (we even eleminated a capital there).

Re:Which date?

[mcvos]

mm/dd/yyyy goes from smallest to largest...
months are mostly single digit while days are generally double digit and years are generally put as 4 or 2 digits. So it's possible to cut off the leading zero without it looking weird: 4/17/11, etc.

That not looking weird is because of the slashes separating the fields. 41711 as a date would definitely look weird, whereas 17/4/11 doesn't.

Re:Which date?

[Permutation Citizen]

This is still weird format. Using Unix time is much more rational. It is based on the SI unit of time, the second. It avoids the ugly mix of archaic Babylonian base sixty number system and decimal one.

Re:Which date?

[GORby_]

Well, to me, YYYY/MM/DD is the only format that is equally easy to understand for people all over the world. Without knowing where I'm from, it's almost impossible to know which date I'm talking about when I say something will happen on 09/11/2011. On the internet, this gets confusing rather quickly.

The date format is the only one I'm aware of that's commonly used where the largest unit doesn't come first (in writing). Let's try that with two others:
- time: 12 minutes and 13 seconds past 9 --> 13:12:9 for europeans, 12:13:9 for americans
- numbers: one million two thousand and 3 --> 3.002.001 for europeans, 2,003,001 for americans
Seems a bit silly, doesn't it?

Re:Which date?

[GORby_]

If you mean minutes by mm, then you are correct... if not, then I guess you got a pretty strange idea of small and large.
As far as I know (and probably the rest of the world with me), a day is shorter (or smaller, as you put it) than a month.

Re:Which date?

[Hadlock]

While it makes sense, in the long run having the month first helps with planning things. Often things have a firm deadline by the month, but the actual day on which it is finished in the month is very flexible. For historical dates, except in rare instances, months are accurate enough to follow what happened so long ago (and often so are years). Being as specific as listing the day is pedantic in most cases, particularly after the fact.

Re:Which date?

[Tom]

It is also a lot more useful for expansion.

You know, in short-term scheduling, you need the day only. So you can write "on the 12." - but then when you need to be more specific, you simply expand that to "on the 12.5." - you add more detail as required, and you always add in the same way (at the end).

It's logically consistent. Then again, maybe I just think so because I'm European.

Re:Which date?

[Kentari]

It's just a habit. I live in Europe but I use the yyyy/mm/dd for my photography collection exactly because it is always sorted correctly. As a result I read yyyy/mm/dd just as easily as dd/mm/yyyy, I only get confused with people use the irritating mm/dd/yyyy or some other variant.

Just because you're not used to it doesn't mean it isn't "human readable".

Re:Which date?

[dintech]

Mr Bergis, is that you?

Re:Which date?

[TheGhostface]

- numbers: one million two thousand and 3 --> 3.002.001 for europeans, 2,003,001 for americans

That doesn't make any sense at all.

Re:Which date?

[dwater]

define 'most'....afaik yyyymmdd is used in China, for example...that's 1/5 of the population...I hear Japan uses that too, so that's ~1/5...

ah, I see this has already been documented to some degree of accuracy : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country : DMY is 3200 vs YMD 1500

Re:Which date?

[kikito]

The yyyy-mm-dd makes more sense because chronological order matches alphabetical order.
And that's just convenient.

Re:Which date?

[kikito]

And it is also the one used in databases AFAIK.

Re:Which date?

[quantumphaze]

"/" also can't be used in filenames

Re:Which date?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unix time isn't just rational. It's an integer!

Re:Which date?

[erikdalen]

Here in sweden this is the most common format when year is included:

YYYY-MM-DD

Which is also the ISO standard for dates.

Re:Which date?

[AvitarX]

Can on Apple (was a problem for me on a form I made, Apple users would put the date with slashes in their file names).

Apple can't do ':' though.

This may have changed though.

Re:Which date?

[Jesus_666]

YYYY-MM-DD is fairly human-readable. It adheres to how numbers usually work: Biggest component goes left. Yes, it's worse when written YY-MM-DD and even worse when written YY/MM/DD but that's just people being lazy. Having a four-digit year component should tell you everything you need to know about the order of the components.

For the record, I'm from Germany where we use DD.MM.YY. For me, dot-separaton implies that ordering, dash-separation implies ISO 8601 ordering and slash-separation implies the weird American ordering.

Re:Which date?

[am 2k]

Since Japanese specifies the type of number even in dates, you never have any doubt about whether that number is a day or month or year anyways...

Btw, the official ISO date format also is yyyy-mm-dd, which I switched to for any communication. Since the colon is only used for this format as a separator, there's no ambiguity.

Re:Which date?

[Dekker3D]

Just see the millions, thousands and ones as different units.. he just put the largest unit at the back, and the smallest one either at the front (European) or in the middle (American)

Sure, it makes no sense to anyone with a bit of a brain. The same thing goes for both date formats! I say we should all move to YYYY-MM-DD, the iso standard. Barring that, at least have the size units in proper order, DD/MM/YYYY. Either way, two-digit years are sooooo 99. Srsly.

Re:Which date?

[Jesus_666]

We Germans did it without reordering anything. We say it like "11th September".

Re:Which date?

[Decorian]

What you're saying is correct, but the second is only approximately a day / (12*60^2). To quote Wikipedia: Since 1967, the second has been defined to be the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom. So the second is precisely defined. The length of a "day" however varies. It can vary due to many things including tides nearby astronomical objects and other things. The recent earthquake in Japan shortened the day by 1.8 microseconds. This may not seem like much, but combined with all the other effects and the fact that the astronomical day is not an exact multiple of the second, every few years a "leap second" is added to UTC to match up with what the earth is actually doing. The last leap second was added between 2008 and 2009 (at the end of 31st Dec 2008).

Re:Which date?

[WML MUNSON]

I prefer yyyy-mm-dd as it simplifies sorting in most common scenarios.

P.S. I'm also American ;)

Re:Which date?

[jgtg32a]

It really only seems silly when you are writing numbers down, but it is more natural when it comes to communication. When planning and talking about events the exact times usually aren't known or exact time frames aren't needed so we talk in larger time frames, months, if more information is needed we can then set an actual date. Years are tagged onto the end because they really aren't relevant most of the time, and the words next and last will cover most conversations.

Re:Which date?

[DarthVain]

I'm Canadian and I always use day, month, year.

Of course we use mostly metric up here, maybe its another metric VS imperial thing...

Re:Which date?

[Fozzyuw]

I like using ISO formatting for dates YYYY-MM-DD. Then again, I'm a programmer.

But I was curious about date formats. I knew Wikipedia would have some insight. They have an interesting global map of color coded countries that use one of the 3 formats (Y/M/D, D/M/Y, or M/D/Y).

Re:Which date?

[Chelloveck]

But Unix time is defined as having exactly 86400 seconds in a day. No more, no less. Leap seconds cannot be represented, which makes this format unacceptable for any serious long-term use. But that probably doesn't matter since time_t is going to overflow in 2038 anyway. If the Mayan end-of-epoch in 2012 or the Apophis asteroid in 2036 don't destroy us first...

Re:Which date?

[jollyreaper]

I like the European date format. dd/mm/yy makes sense, since it goes from the smallest time frame (days), to the largest. The American format seems silly.

- PS: I'm American.

While I completely agree with you on this one, I'm helpless when it comes to working with it. It's like customary vs. metric -- I can't think that way. Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, can't think that way. And yes, I think that logically Celsius makes far more sense.

The only way around such bullshit is to just teach the right way with the kids and let the old way die out. Weights and measures are like language, it's hard to pick a new one up when you've been immersed in the old one.

Re:Which date?

[hoggoth]

And YYYY/MM/DD sorts very nicely.

Re:Which date?

[Gramie2]

Don't give the Japanese too much credit: in dates the year used is often the year of the emperor's reign. For instance, this year (2011) is Heisei 23, whereas I was born in Showa 38 (1963). This is still extremely common, although they recognize our system of years as well.

Almost as horrible as their "system" of numbering houses and naming streets (i.e. most streets have no names, and houses are sometimes numbered based on when they were built, not on their location).

Re:Which date?

[baKanale]

The best part is that a list of dates in the YYYYMMDD format, when sorted alphabetically, is automatically sorted by date.

Re:Which date?

[Yvan256]

Everyone on the planet should switch to GPS + relative-to-oceans-altitude coordinates for addresses.

Re:Which date?

[Yvan256]

Nobody expects the Canadian Inquisition!

Re:Which date?

[Chris Mattern]

I tend to write dates mm/dd/yy, but when I'm using dates anywhere I expect to be handled by computer, it's yy/mm/dd,
or, better, yyyy/mm/dd, so I can just run sort over it to get it in chronological order.

Re:Which date?

[WNight]

And having your dates nicely ordered, even where you haven't bothered to sort by date, doesn't serve you?

Go and henceforth write your dates longhand "The year of our lord two-thousand and eleven, April 8th, a Friday" just to spite your computer.

Re:Which date?

[gknoy]

I would hate to be a Japanese mailman. I guess it fosters a sense of community, though...

Re:Which date?

[tlhIngan]

Can on Apple (was a problem for me on a form I made, Apple users would put the date with slashes in their file names).

Apple can't do ':' though.

This may have changed though.

This would be pre-OS X. In the old Classic days, ":" was the path separator (so you'd have "Macintosh HD:System Folder:Preferences:..."). In modern OS X times, it's a BSD underpinning (and UNIX(tm) the last few years) and thus "/" is the path separator.

Code that uses the Carbon API will use ":" as a separator, but they're disappearing now (Carbon was a classic MacOS transition API). I believe Cocoa uses "/" to keep things in line with the Unix underpinnings.

Re:Which date?

[damnfuct]

Think about it this way, when someone says "what time is it?" You don't reply: "oh it's 12 seconds, 30 minutes, and 11 hours," so wtf is dd-mm-yyyy?

stupid.

Also: ISO-8601. You get YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS and HH is 24-hour time. Use it; I did and it changed my life-perspective. Squash that ambiguity!

Re:Which date?

[damnfuct]

ISO-8601 changed my life

Re:Which date?

[damnfuct]

I like this dot, dash, slash separation you speak of

Re:Which date?

[praxis]

What's wrong with writing 04/2011 if you want to show that the day is insignificant? Or, better yet, what's wrong with 2011-04 as a shortened form of 2011-04-08?

Re:Which date?

[praxis]

I'm not sure how a language specific month code is international. What's wrong with using the ISO format?

Re:Which date?

[AvitarX]

I feel like there was some type of option to make it work with ":" in OS X (outside of the programming).

Re:Which date?

[Bing Tsher E]

I didn't have any bones the last time the wolves showed up.

rememberance day

[Anonymous Coward]

for WW1.

remember?

Re:rememberance day

[bmo]

They forgot.

--
BMO

Re:rememberance day

[AtomicSnarl]

No -- they just want their Trench Warfare bonus pack to be a nice surprise!

Re:rememberance day

[Tirhakah]

Thankyou.

Re:MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

[cgenman]

Let's just all agree to have all important things fall on symmetrical dates. "On 5/5/2011, it will be a frigidly cold -40 degrees at 0 longitude. Ex-president Bush says this has him 'Literally Chuffed.'"

Re:Release date

[cruff]

Isn't that terribly rude?

Why? It isn't like anyone owns that date. A large majority of people don't care about Minecraft or Skyrim anyway. I'm sure a bunch of numerologists have their own plans for that date.

So, uh...

[bmo]

They're going to release it on Veterans' Day (Armistice Day, Remembrance Day)

This seems... odd.

--
BMO

Re:So, uh...

[lee1026]

Nov 11 is a holiday in most of the western world, as it is based on the ending of WWI in 11/11/1918.

Re:So, uh...

[JanneM]

It's also the opening of Karnival in Germany, Singles Day in China and Pepero (Pocky rip-off) day in South Korea. Non e of which seem to produce much on an outcry.

Could move it to the day before, but then you'd collide with Panama Independence day, Ataturk Rememberance day and the Heroe's day in Indonesia. And the day after is the death day of Cornelis Wreeswijk and Percival Lowell, and the Comoro islands joining the United Nations.

Point being, you can't really pick any day without it being significant in some way - in many ways, good and bad.

Re:So, uh...

[east coast]

True but beating up on the entire western world isn't as popular around here as beating on Americans. So, even of the rest of the western or even the entire world does what someone is bitching it's just fashionable to act like only Americans do it. It's kind of like a racist claiming that only certain races take advantage of welfare and such.

Re:So, uh...

[JustOK]

you mean 1918/11/11

Re:So, uh...

[razberry636]

I think they intend to release it on Nigel Tufnel Day.

Re:So, uh...

[babblefrog]

I know! Why would they release it on corduroy day?

Re:So, uh...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Being the largest consumer market for games, you'd think they would.

Re:So, uh...

[ShakaUVM]

>>Nov 11 is a holiday in most of the western world, as it is based on the ending of WWI in 11/11/1918.

But more importantly, it's the release date of Skyrim.

Let's just hope they've finally fixed the bugs from Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout, Fallout New Vegas...

Re:So, uh...

[mcvos]

It's also the opening of Karnival in Germany, Singles Day in China and Pepero (Pocky rip-off) day in South Korea. Non e of which seem to produce much on an outcry.

It's also Sint Maarten in the north of Netherland. How are kids supposed to be going around the neighbourhood singing songs for candy, knowing that a new game has just been released? Terribly insensitive.

Re:So, uh...

[Xest]

They did the same with Call of Duty: World at War, I don't have too much of a problem with Minecraft being released on that date as it's really unrelated to war, but I felt the CoD: WaW stunt was a bit tasteless, 11/11 isn't something that should be trivialised as a marketing stunt for a game about war as it's frankly disrespectful.

Re:So, uh...

[Corf]

Not just any corduroy day -- but the most corduroy day in a CENTURY.

Re:So, uh...

[nitehawk214]

Here, this should explain it for you. Birthday Paradox

Re:So, uh...

[Troed]

Not in Sweden, where Minecraft is developed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_holidays_in_Sweden#Official_public_holidays

Back in the day, on my old TRS80 Model III

[nebaz]

I would always enter 11/11/11 as the system date. (You would have to enter the date every time you restarted). I must have been psychic.

Someone better tell Bethesda

[Dachannien]

...to reschedule the Skyrim release date. It'll be a disaster going up against the sheer awesome firepower of Minecraft!

Re:Someone better tell Bethesda

[annex1]

Likely not, as Minecraft has mostly hit it's prime. A great deal of the people that will ever buy it, probably have. Plus it's in an entirely different pricing league than something like Skyrim. Customers wanting to drop $50 on Skyrim that day, aren't going to suddenly decide to spend $15 on Minecraft instead. Might these guys catch some customers as run-off (maybe from lack of availability of other titles or from people who just don't/can't spend $50 on a game)? Sure, but I truly doubt Bethesda will need to even flinch on this.

Are you sure it is 'because' not 'in spite of'?

[robcozzens]

Notch made no mention that they picked 11/11/11 'because' other games had done so. More likely, they picked it because it is a numerically cool (and memorable) date just like why the other games and movies picked it.

Other things being equal, companies usually pick launch dates that aren't crowded.

Obligatory XKCD

[Anonymous Coward]

http://xkcd.com/861/

Re:Obligatory XKCD

[Aldenissin]

Speaking of painkillers....

Worse yet...

[gmezero]

Let's just home they get around to fixing bugs instead of shoveling features up until the last minute. I'm fear that clearly since they don't know what beta means (beta means you're done adding features and are now testing and buttoning up your code to prepare to ship) that shipped may be confused with "time to debug". Sigh... There are some seriously major architectural problems with the code and he's currently telling the community that certain single player features will never be implemented in multi-player because the code is two busted to make it work. Grrr...

Re:Worse yet...

[gmezero]

and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.

Re:Worse yet...

[Daetrin]

and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.

The comment must have been in beta.

Re:Worse yet...

[Senes]

Personally I think this is just a sign of changing times rather than Notch not knowing what he's doing. In the days of packaged software you had an alpha you tested yourself, a beta your close friends tested, and then a "final" release and that was it. This new style of development involves continually adding features until the developer gets tired of the work; we don't have to press things onto hard media and ship things out to retailers now so there's no more solid cutoff on how long you can continue working.

Re:Worse yet...

[VGPowerlord]

and I clearly can't spell to save my life tonight. grr again.

The comment must have been in beta.

Let's just hope he gets around to fixing spelling instead of shoveling paragraphs up until the last minute.

Re:Worse yet...

[ConceptJunkie]

_Nobody_ knows what "beta" means any more.

To Microsoft it means "We really want to release this, but it's too buggy even for our standards, but here, we'll let you buy it anyway."

To Firefox it means, "Time to revamp the UI from the ground up."

To Google it means, "We've released it and we know it needs more work, but we're too busy working on our next beta."

To Slashdot it means "Beta? What's a beta? We just test everything new in production."

Re:MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

[.tekrox]

No,
I agree MM/DD/YY is 'stupid' (Being Australian we use DD/MM/YY)

But there is an ISO Standard for dates now which generally follows YYYY/MM/DD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its because you the world isn't made of people that are exactly like you. You don't have to like it, but don't be so close minded to denigrate what millions other people do appreciate. BTW...check out Dwarf Fortress, i have heard the graphics in that are amazing.

Reverse shareware

[dadelbunts]

Remember the days when they would distribute like 1/3 of a game for free so if you enjoyed it you could buy it? Was the business model of try this finished game and see how you like it too generous for the gamers? I cant believe people would pay for a beta of such a badly designed game. Its fun sure, i just cant see how people would pay for a resource hog BETA version of a game, that isnt even beta its more like alpha.

Re:Reverse shareware

[ledow]

Well, I don't "pre-order" anything. But I played this game for more hours than I care to think of when I first saw it and thought "what's all the fuss about". Not so much a game as a sandbox-with-potential.

But the fact is that at no point did my computer struggle to run it. So it can't really be described as a resource hog. Yeah, the graphics aren't fabulous but I come from the ZX Spectrum era and have always held that that means nothing - and the point of the engine is that the graphics are crap to enable millions of blocks to be visible simultaneously.

And it hasn't crashed once, and even between upgrades it successfully converts my old worlds to new formats without a problem. If it had had visible problems in that area, I wouldn't have touched it until they were fixed.

Maybe I only got in on the game after such things were already fixed but to me - it's a game. Even the first version I downloaded is still on my hard drive and still a playable game on it's own. So I parted with a tiny bit of cash to show my appreciation for the game (I always used to register my shareware if I'd used it that much, too) which also got me a guaranteed update for every version of Minecraft that comes out in the future. Considering I was looking on the money more as a donation, I think that's just an extra-added bonus.

Now if I could just stop seeing blocks at night, that'd be great.

Re:Reverse shareware

[Hadlock]

I crash out constantly. But then again I am connecting to a server on another continent. Lag seems to have a strange effect on the game, especially when multiple players are crafting and building things.

Re:Reverse shareware

[dadelbunts]

You must have an amazing machine. Everyone i have played with has pointed out its a resource hog. And that inculdes people with multiple core processors. Im sure lack of full screen support and being coded entirely in java dont help. Maybe poor server design? I dont know but i dont see how minecraft should eat up ALL my ram and must be set through task manager to have highest priority.

Re:Reverse shareware

[dadelbunts]

Lol it sucks mining the same 5 blocks 30 times huh?

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[TriezGamer]

I'm not sure why this was modded insightful -- there's nothing insightful about it. It's either a blatant troll attempt (hey guys, I hate on the popular fads cause it makes me look superior!), or borne of complete ignorance.

Now, I'll be the first to admit that I was incredibly underwhelmed by Minecraft, but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures - Minecraft was never intended to look pretty, and if you went into expecting it to look pretty ... well, you're a fool.

Similarly, while the 'game' part of minecraft essentially boils down to crafting and a simple combat simulator, if you went into it expecting more than that, you must have been buying blind.

But if you want to see why Minecraft is as popular as it is, it's not hard. You just have to stop thinking of it as a game (because as a game, it is lacking), and more as a world where you can create something -- in that regard, it is much more akin to playing with legos ... with hostile critters.

It has a unique style that's easily recognizable, which makes parodies fun (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8uyxVmdaJ-w). It can generate some interesting landscapes (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwkVTuHcuHQ). And some people just enjoy making stuff (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOpkpW1tDAM).

I don't have the patience to make anything interesting, and got bored with it in about a week, but I can certainly see it's appeal.

Re:MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no -40 degrees!

-- Lord Kelvin

-1: Attempts reverse psychology on the moderators

[Michael Woodhams]

I wish this was a moderation option.

High on the Charts at Gamefaqs

[oakwine]

Number two on top 10 Games, Number 3 on top 10 Gamefaqs message boards. Just below World of WarCraft in both cases. Good indication that "the people" like it a lot! Also generates tons of videos on YouTube. It is a phenomenon.

Re:WTF is it?

[Shikaku]

No, I haven't bothered to look it up, why would I?

Your post is useless and so is mine.

Re:Wow!

[Seumas]

Does anyone actually play minecraft?

Everyone I know freaking wet themselves over how amazing everything you could built in the game looked.

Then they played for a bit and realized that 98% of the cool things you've seen were created not by playing the game, but by using the world-editor.

Most of those people have since stopped playing it.

I bought the game ages ago. I dig it. I don't play it, though. Pretty much for the same reason and because while i like a sandbox, I like some sort of motivation which the game doesn't yet have.

Still, it's a fun story to watch unfold and I'm damned envious of Notch!

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Sacrieur]

Sorry, I can't seem to hear you over my mining, I'm busy building giant golden cock & balls.

ISO 8601

[xororand]

I'm disappointed with Slashdot. Every sane person writes dates in ISO 8601 format.
YYYY-MM-DD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

Re:Wow!

[sjwt]

Or you know, you could try to create cool things in the game, makes it quite interesting when you want a 2 cubic diamond block and you need to find, mine and keep all those resources. Then think 'may I should cover that in gold, and that in Iron.

Then try building mega structures when you have to mine out below and around them. You can do a lot of that cool stuff you see, its just harder, and more rewarding.

So what did I already buy?

[MostAwesomeDude]

Also, is that whole thread-per-connection thing gonna be fixed before then? (Signs point to no, of course.)

Re:So what did I already buy?

[nedlohs]

The alpha or the beta obviously.

Re:So what did I already buy?

[tepples]

is that whole thread-per-connection thing gonna be fixed before then?

Without a proper select() that can wait for both events from sockets and events other than from sockets on Windows, what's the right way to handle multiple connections?

Re:So what did I already buy?

[MostAwesomeDude]

IOCP or WMFO are both options on Windows which are worth investigating. Thankfully, a bit ago (sometime last decade) somebody wrote a Java library called NIO (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_I/O) which provides platform-independent networking services, and somebody else included it into the Java standard library. Then, some people wrote a thing called MINA (http://mina.apache.org/) which provides even better networking services on top of NIO, and somebody else got the Apache guys to maintain it.

So yeah, there's no excuse for thead-per-connection these days. Using NIO or MINA in Java is the right way to build asynchronous servers.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[ledow]

I don't get why Farmville is so popular. That truly sucks. In the space of a week, I managed to out-class all my Facebook friends who'd been playing it for years just by doing a quick bit of maths and working out how to make money. It was dull. Yet millions of people play it so often that I've had to remove its posts from my Facebook because of the spamming.

I don't get why WoW is so popular. I never hear anything but complaints about it, and certainly never play games on a subscription basis. And people still tell me they are pissing about £40-50 a month on the damn thing for years at a time.

I grew up with a ZX Spectrum. Maybe you're from a different era. Let me give you a hint. Graphics mean NOTHING. Not even worthy of mention. Not even an "it doesn't even look good", like that's the last saving grace of a crap game. If you count graphics in your evaluation of a game, you're the wrong target for most games. Hint: In a year's time, *every* game's graphics will look crap compared to today's. Does that mean the older games have somehow got "worse" without changing?

A game is either fun and absorbing or not. I spent most of last week playing Altitude (PC) and Batty (Spectrum) with my girlfriend. We didn't care that it wasn't 3D, or high-res, or anti-aliased. It literally did not factor in at all. We honestly spent more times looking at ZX Spectrum colour clash. Didn't mean we didn't enjoy it though. I don't think my girlfriend even noticed that the Spectrum *had* colour clash.

As for "not fun", no you don't see yourself laughing at it, or entertained. But what it does is absorb you. That's a really tricky thing to achieve in a game. Some games are endless restarts of the same chapter, but some manage to absorb you so much that you don't even realise that's what you're doing.

Minecraft is a sandbox game. It's about people building a little virtual world of their own like we were promised for the past 50 years. It's similar to the 3D Construction Kit "game" of many years ago - very few people can make something impressive but everyone enjoys having a go and making their virtual world, even if the graphics are atrocious by modern video card standards. That hardly matters - it's just fun to tinker. 3DCK was literally dithered polygons (and only about half-a-dozen at a time on the Spectrum!) when I first looked at it but immediately thought "whoa, that's something I want to tinker with". There was also something called VU-3D on the Spectrum. Go look it up. I spent hours tinkering with that. Not a "game" as such, in the same way that Minecraft isn't a game.

I play Minecraft - not masses but I've had a couple of long sessions on it, alt-tabbing back and forth between the Minepedia and the game. I actually prefer it without the monsters at night, which some would say is the only interaction in the game.

It's just nice to build a little world and explore it. I actually quite enjoy the times when I've done a big build job and my "character" walks out of the house, down to his little jetty that I made (deliberately facing West), gets in a boat and has a little paddle towards the sunset. And then he turns around, sees the distant light of his little home in the dusk and sculls back on home.

And more annoyingly, I keep finding myself thinking "if only you could craft X or collect Y" and wondering how to go about programming it (I have resisted the temptation to look at the code thus far and, anyway, my Java is rusty - if it's easy to add new things, I'll never escape the damn block-universe).

It doesn't matter how "fun" it is. Personally, I'm pissed off with Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 at the moment because of the constant restarts from checkpoints. The game is fun, when it flows and absorbs, but otherwise that's just a chore. Whereas Minecraft - you can even be "immortal" if you don't have the monsters at night or fall off a cliff (though finding string is always a problem then, which means my character can't fish from his

Re:WTF is it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Your post is useless and so is minecraft.

See what i did here?

Re:Release date

[JosKarith]

Suicidal, more like.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Arashi256]

You sound like such a pompous jackass, I'm surprised anyone would want to talk to you anyway. Seriously? You dismiss people who don't profess to like exactly what you do? Facebook, Minecraft or Twitter usage doesn't automatically make someone unworthy of conversation, especially since all these things are pretty popular. I'd stay in the basement if I were you. You're obviously not ready for the real world.

Stability

[CFBMoo1]

They might want to look in to Windows stability a little more. The game has been crashing regularly for me when I'm running it under Windows 7 through the executable. I get black screens of death basically and have to restart it. Now under Ubuntu the game has never crashed on me. In Ubuntu I run it directly from the JAR file unlike Windows. I've not tested running the JAR file directly in Windows yet to see if I'd have the same results there. Too busy building in my Ubuntu partition saves. >_>

Re:Stability

[Nominei]

turn down the view distance. If you run the game in windows with view distance set to "far" it gets unstable. Turn it down to "Normal" and you should be perfectly stable in Windows.

Re:Stability

[ThatMegathronDude]

Update your video driver.

Re:Stability

[MaxBooger]

You are running Windows 7 64-bit. Upgrade Java to 64-bit and you should be fine.

Re:Wow!

[somersault]

interesting when you want a 2 cubic diamond block and you need to find, mine and keep all those resources. Then think 'may I should cover that in gold, and that in Iron.

You have a strange definition of "interesting".. Minecraft looks okay, but I'd be more interested in doing stuff like the rollercoasters or playing about with the physics stuff, rather than just building a big block.. to me the game looked like a 3D version of LittleBigPlanet (but with flabbergastingly shitty graphics).

Re:Wow!

[Jesus_666]

Well, things like "I need a 13x13x13 meter stone cube" make for decent starting points. You then use that to build your actual structure. On a server I played on we had something that looked like a pretty decent replica of a Cylon basestar. It turned out to be the foundation for someone's house.

I'll be in a different world on 11/11/11

[Sait-kun]

Same release date as Skyrim...

I doubt I will play much of anything else for at least for a few moths =D

Re:MM/DD/YY vs DD/MM/YY

[MichaelSmith]

Not even if you use antimatter?

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[itsdapead]

It's complete crap. It's not fun. It doesn't even look good.

I'd post a witty reply to this blatant trolling, but I'm trying to build a glass tower underwater so I'm too busy collecting sand...

Thank you for letting me know that I'm not having fun, though.

Remembrance Day???

[Layzej]

Remembrance Day? That seems in poor taste. I hope they will consider a different launch date for allied nations.

Re:Remembrance Day???

[gknoy]

Think of the Remembrance Day monuments you could build in Minecraft.

Re:Remembrance Day???

[WNight]

Are you like this (pissy when others don't show appropriate respect to your traditions) all the time?

Looks great, but will it be ready?

[applematt84]

The game looks fantastic from the trailer ... but will it be ready by 11/11/11?

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[TheDarkMaster]

The fun of the game is to create things, not destroy them as is done in an FPS. And about the graphics, a game don't need to have crysis-like graphics to be fun. Have you ever seen such a crazy guy who made a real scale NCC-1701 ENTERPRISE on Minecraft? That would be quite impossible in other games. I can build a entire city in real scale, this is quite interesting to creative people.

Skyrim Delayed -- Devs Playing Minecraft

[FoolishOwl]

I expect many fans of one game would enjoy the other. I'm more likely to buy Minecraft than Skyrim this year, but mostly because my desktop is old and feeble.

By the way, last time I looked at the Minecraft site, it had sold over a million licenses. Isn't that a colossal success already?

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[itsdapead]

but saying it has poor graphics is like saying your novel doesn't have enough pictures

Spot on.

More to the point, I don't think it would work with better graphics - the whole point of the game is that the entire world is made of 1m3 blocks, and you can move any of them. Maybe the blocks could have hi-res textures when seen close up - but I suspect that would be incongruous. The 1980s computer game feel works for me (and things like square clouds, sun and moon match the completely whacky physics).

Its about time we had another game that makes good use of vast, stylized, pseudo-random worlds rather than human-designed maps with only wallpaper in the distance. I think the last one was Elite...

Re:Wow!

[slackbheep]

I run a private server for a couple friends and I. It's a great deal of fun to have group builds and long term projects without any set goal. It's not for everyone however. I knew a lot of kids who didn't like Lego, either.

Re:Wow!

[Stachybotris]

Huh. I've made my own motivation. For example, I ended up in an environment with several floating islands. So I took it upon myself to climb to the top of the nearest hill (actually mine my way up through it) and then start building bridges to link the islands and mountaintops together. Then line the bridges with safety rails, pave them, and set up waypoints so that I could always find my way back 'home'.

Re:Release date

[Guspaz]

They've already sold an estimated $33 million worth of Minecraft with very little costs. Furthermore, nothing will actually change on release date; the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date. It's just a development milestone target. I don't think "suicidal" applies here.

Leap seconds

[tepples]

Using Unix time is much more rational. It is based on the SI unit of time, the second.

The UNIX timestamp is based on UTC. UTC is based on atomic time plus an offset to keep the Prime Meridian facing the Sun every 86400 seconds. Earth days are slightly longer than 86400 seconds, and UTC is periodically adjusted to match the planet's actual rotation by adding leap seconds (e.g. 23:59:60). Such a leap second has the same UNIX time as the second after it. So yes, a split into day and second can be justified.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Sectoid_Dev]

It's not a game for everyone. I play it casually, probably 3,4 times a week for an hour or so each time. It requires an active imagination and setting your own goals. Much like the Sims, you'll get quickly bored with it if you're looking for a lot of game play. Once you learn how to make the couple of items you need to survive, it's easy to reach a level of security where you're not worried about dying anymore(unless you get pushed into a pit of lava by a cow). The rest is all about invention & exploration. Personally I would welcome some more RPG elements to simply give me a reason to care about discovering more gold or iron. The game is what you make of it and I wish more games did that.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Skidborg]

Just have to chip in and say that game was amazing. I used to spend hours flinging dynamite with the forklift at unsuspecting minifigures and building gigantic towers that made my CPU grind to a halt.

oh wow!

[MalikBetton]

im so excited!!!! hhmmmm not.....

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Skidborg]

I'm not going to mod you down, but the reason it is so popular is because it is a sandbox game, a genre that may be unfamiliar with if your first qualifier for a game is that it "looks good".

Re:Release date

[ciderbrew]

I liked Oblivion, I just didn't like the Grind and the level up system. What was the point of levelling up with everything goes up with you? I'm sure this has been covered before.

Re:Release date

[demonbug]

They've already sold an estimated $33 million worth of Minecraft with very little costs. Furthermore, nothing will actually change on release date; the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date. It's just a development milestone target. I don't think "suicidal" applies here.

What!? They promised me when I bought the beta that it was going to cost more when officially released! Those lying nordic scumbags!

I had fun with Minecraft for a month or so, then just stopped playing it. Don't know why. Maybe I'll check back on the official release date to see if they've made any interesting changes.

Re:Wow!

[somersault]

Buy it? When I played it (something like 5 years ago) it was free!

I think I'll stick with LittleBigPlanet for now thanks, not quite prepared to waste money on a gaming PC again yet..

Re:Release date

[Mikail]

They've been making interesting changes continually, and will keep doing so until the official release. There's usually a new feature or mechanic worth checking out added every month or so. The nice thing is once you've purchased it you get all the updates, so you've got nothing to lose by checking it out again.

In my country it is written as d.m.Y

[roguegramma]

d/m/Y would just confuse me more, since I connect the slash with the english date format.

So I think that d.m.Y is better, or Y-m-d (again notice the different separator). The latter makes files sort correctly by date if you sort by name.

Re:In my country it is written as d.m.Y

[praxis]

Why would you be confused? The English do actually use d/m/Y.

OT: /. interface gripe

[orgelspieler]

I know. ever since the change any time I try to click on a link in a post, Slashdot takes me to the parent post. Very bizarre. Same thing happens when I try to moderate. If I don't click and drag down to the right moderation the first time, it takes me to the parent post.

Re:Release date

[IorDMUX]

Hence the amazing TES Editor, subsequent amazing mods (Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, Francesco's Leveled Lists/Creatures Mod, Martigen's Monster Mod, FCOM, etc.), and amazing community support and efforts which address this issue in their own ways.

To me, at least, that is what TES has been about since Morrowind: A platform on which to build and a sandbox in which to play. I never understood the appeal of purchasing Oblivion on the PS#, it seemed to me to be voluntarily crippling the game.

Re:Release date

[AdamWeeden]

the game will be sold for the same price before and after that date

That is not the case. The price in Alpha was 10 Euro (50% off), the current price in Beta is 15 Euro (25% off) and the price at release will be 20 Euro.

Re:Wow!

[TheCRAIGGERS]

Yes, it does cost a whole $10 now... but that's pretty cheap in "price to see a movie" terms.

Either way, that $10 gets you a ton of improvements over what the free original gave you.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[cheesecake23]

Graphics mean NOTHING. Not even worthy of mention. Not even an "it doesn't even look good", like that's the last saving grace of a crap game.

I strongly disagree. Top-rate graphics is a large component of the strange magic that lifts a game from 'very good' to 'absolutely f*cking brilliant'. BUT the graphics don't have to be pretty in the conventional sense, as long as they have *charm*.

Minecraft graphics has charm. World of Goo graphics has charm. Plants vs Zombies graphics has charm.

The have so much charm they become stunningly beautiful, just like a certain girl I know.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[Pentium100]

Graphics mean NOTHING

They mean something, well at least to me.

When I play a game, I like to be able to see and recognize things easily. For example, compare Half Life (the first one) to Wolfenstein 3D. Wolf3D gives me a headache after a bit of playing, probably because the graphics are too pixelated it is difficult to see, even though the game is quite simple and it is possible to recognize things (mainly because there are only a few types of objects and they look quite differently), or maybe it is because the areas look almost the same. OTOH, Half Life does not run on a 286.

While Minecraft is a good game, I like it better with the HD texture pack. If someone made a game that was like Minecraft but with high quality graphics (textures and models), I'd probably switch to that game.

Of course, good graphics do not mean that the game will be good, but if the game has good graphics I am willing to tolerate a worse game, while if the game does not have good graphics, it should be a very good game in other areas for me to play it.

Also, good 2D is better than crappy 3D (since good 2D means I can see things better than with crappy 3D), so if you want your game to run on a 286, you probably should stick to 2D.

It's the same as with movies. 1080p does not make a bad movie good, but it makes a good movie better. Also, VCD or lower resolution (VHS is OK, if the actual quality is close to the best that VHS offers) makes me want to not watch the movie (even though it's good), since it becomes difficult to see and recognize things, so my requirements for the very low resolution movie are much higher than for a movie in 720p or more.

Nah, consistent is consistent.

[danaris]

It is also a lot more useful for expansion.

You know, in short-term scheduling, you need the day only. So you can write "on the 12." - but then when you need to be more specific, you simply expand that to "on the 12.5." - you add more detail as required, and you always add in the same way (at the end).

It's logically consistent. Then again, maybe I just think so because I'm European.

I'm American, and I think the European format is more consistent and sensible. If I weren't surrounded by people using the American format, I'd probably use the European one all the time.

Perhaps it's not the "European" part that makes you look at it that way, but the "geek" part?

Dan Aris

Re:Wow!

[FiloEleven]

I play it. For me, building things is one of the less interesting aspects. The part I'm most interested in is exploration. The world generator is very good at making interesting places to explore, especially underground. Almost without fail after half an hour of cave exploration I stumble upon huge sets of catacombs full of water and lava flows and dangerous groups of monsters (often with me at a disadvantage due to terrain). I love trying to light up cave systems and getting quite lost despite my best efforts to mark the way out, then eventually stumbling upon a previously explored section or finding a new exit.

I like exploring caves in real life, too, which is probably why I get so much enjoyment out of it. I only fire up the game once every few weeks, but when I do I usually lose 5-6 hours to it over the course of a day or two. It's certainly held my interest enough that I've gotten more than my money's worth with it, and since I'll be getting all future updates for free it was quite the bargain.

Re:Minecraft SUCKS!

[brkello]

Everyone likes their own type of game. You power gaming farmville isn't how you "out class" people. People just like setting up their farm and showing it to others. Doesn't matter that you make more money, have a bigger farm, etc. People just want to build something that is appealing to them. Not my type of game, but there is nothing wrong with that.
 
WoW is a hugely popular game. You hear complaints because there are a ton of people playing it, and usually the most unreasonable people are the loudest. Most people are too busy enjoying the game to even bother posting. Subscription fees are nothing if you look at what you are getting.
 
Quite frankly, I know Minecraft isn't a game for me. It is too much like Farmville in that it isn't really a game. I like games that have story or present me with well defined challenges. In this game, you just create your own challenges. Just not my thing.
 
In any case, I don't think any of the popular games suck, they just aren't my thing. I think people who judge other based on what they play are pretty messed up.