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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."
It seems Slashdot currently has currently first class editing :)
I say don't drink and drive, you might spill your drink. Before you get behind the wheel just stop and think.
Is that mm/dd/yy or dd/mm/yy?
I wouldn't want to get my dates mixed up.
Nov 11 is a holiday in most of the western world, as it is based on the ending of WWI in 11/11/1918.
http://xkcd.com/861/
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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
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
Suicidal, more like.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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?
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.