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Notch Announces Minecraft 'Adventure Update'
jjp9999 writes "Notch announced that Minecraft 1.7 will include the long-awaited 'Adventure Update.' In an E3 roundup on his blog, Notch wrote, 'The idea with this update is to flesh out the game a bit, making it reward exploration and combat more.' Although he added, 'We're keeping the details secret so people can get surprises,' Notch wrote back on July 7, 2010 that Adventure Mode would be one of the three game modes in Minecraft (the other two being Survival and Creative), and would include a health bar and an inventory, but would remove the player's ability to place or destroy blocks. He said the value of this is that 'people can design "challenge maps" in creative or survival mode, then share them with people so that they can try to beat them in Adventure mode.' Interestingly, Notch also announced the release of the Minecraft source code to a small group of mod developers, in his latest blog post."
Personally I've lost interested to Minecraft long time ago. It was fun back then, but meh now. But I tried Terraria with a friend and it's a similar game, but more stuff to do and some point in it. It's worth a look.
At first I was oblivious to what Minecraft was. Then I bought it. Then I played it for a while. Then I figured out there was nothing to really DO in the game. Okay, I know it's a giant sandbox and you can build stuff, but after a while, you kind of get bored of building stuff...
About a month ago, I found Terraria. The game has been in development for less than half a year, and it has more depth and more things to do, especially in multiplayer, which is just pure fun.
Any updates to Minecraft are much welcome, both in SP and MP. Hopefully there will be more crafting stuff and more things to do. Maybe it's just me, but when I play Terraria, I get this weird thought in my head - "this is what Minecraft should have been". Somehow I feel that Notch got a boatload of money and then semi-abandoned the game...
Shouldn't he rename it the LittleBigPlanet update?
You can leak memory in every programming language.
Personally, I love this game. ive grown tired of todays games and find that this one lets me do whatever i want and build whatever i dream of. I dont play with other people(never liked it in other games too) and dont play with the mobs, just peaceful mode. This game can create some beautiful landscapes and exploring to find them and then build ontop of them is very satisfying to me.
I'm not convinced the JVM is at fault here. I've seen very efficient Java games.
And very efficient Java servers. Minecraft's server is plain idiotic (uses threads! figure that). Bravo uses a fraction of the resources and it's written in Python.
That said, Minecraft is indeed awesome.
C++ is nice, but I wonder how the game would perform in GLSL? Having spent a big part of my undergraduate CS elective budget on physics simulations and advanced rendering methods with GLSL, the first thing I thought when I got the game was how much faster it would be if all the heavy lifting was done on the GPU.
I am sure Notch had his reasons for programming the whole thing in Java, I just hope those reasons weren't speed and cross-platform compatibility.
I've noticed it uses more and more memory, until it decides to free it again. You also get occasional lag spikes. I just assumed it was Java's garbage collection. I'm not sure if there's anyway you can get Java to collect garbage regularly. Games that require a steady framerate would benefit from a small amount of resource management each frame, rather than a large amount irregularly.
Who ordered that?
It is. I don't know how java's particular implementation works, but generally managed languages with garbage collection will look at how much free memory there is on the system at any given time, and only bother collecting resources that are long lived (as opposed to local scoped variables, which will get collected very quickly) if there's any kind of memory pressure.
So basically if you have 40 GB of RAM, it could wait a very, very long time until the memory is collected.
Fire up Starcraft 2 or Elderscroll while the java application is running though, and you'll see the memory get collected immediately.
Its some of those data points that the system knows about and can be difficult for the app developer to tap into, so it can be more efficient to have the system do it. Similar applies with multi-threading... a managed system may be able to decide how many threads to use better than the application and its programmer.
(uses threads! figure that). .
As opposed to?
Minecraft is sort-of-fun on its own, but the game really blossoms when you do something like run a Bukkit-based server and get a world or two going, get some of the important plugins going, and invite friends into your world. If it weren't for the Bukkit project I would have been done with Minecraft by the time Beta came out.
My greatest hope is that one day someone will bridge the gap between second-life and Minecraft and will create a game that has the flexibility and user-generated content from second-life with the simplicity and procedural block-based terrain of Minecraft. I want more blocks! I want scripted NPCs! I want Minecraft to be a MUCK!
what the hell is a 'junk character', anyway?
There is a project called Minetest-c55. It is not as featureful as Minecraft, but written in C++ (using Irrlicht) and licensed under the GPL2 (or – as I remember – at your option, any later version). You can check it out on Bitbucket.
Disclaimer: I maintain a fork called Minetest (Minetest Delta) with some added features (new block types etc.), which can be found on GitHub. Look at the screenshots.
The source of the problem here is that Notch is obviously not a GL/3D programmer. The game consists of a bunch of blocks, why in the hell does it perform worse than flashy titles like Fable 3, Prince of Persia or any other AAA title with all the bells and whistles? I understand it's doing a lot of processing, since there are a huge number of blocks to be processed. But for gods sake, a game whose graphics consist of 16x16 textures and cubes (12 triangles each!!) should not chug along like it is prone to do. It's not as if there is a large amount of AI and physics processing. The damned monsters simply make a bee line towards the character. The only thing affected by gravity are the player, entities (items, etc.), sand and gravel.
Java isn't to blame here. And that is remarkable in and of itself.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.
You haven't played with redstone or minecarts? That's the thing that has kept me playing.
I have a minecart track with 5 stations that are all linked via serial communication via redstone. The current implementation can support up to 8 stations (3 bit station ids). I can go to one station, set in another station id using levers and press the send button. After about 2 seconds, a little piano note sounds and it's time to jump into the minecart and be automatically transported to the station I dialled in.
I'm working on a modified transmitter and receiver circuit that will allow n-bit station ids. It's tricky getting it compact enough because of the odd way redstone works, but that's part of the fun for me.
I don't therefore I'm not.
It certainly could be something in OS X's Java implementation. The Java-based PS3 Media Server has the same problem on OS X; it releases very little of its memory. Streaming long bits of HD content becomes a RAM problem quickly. In both cases this could be a case of not releasing asset memory due to programmer error. But I'm not really sure this a Java issue -- look at Firefox 4+ on OS X. It has massive memory leaks: it seems to never let go of HTML images, as well as Flash videos. I have to restart Firefox more than once per day now.
Read the updates.
Minecraft sucks up a LOT of cpu and RAM, it's true, but I'm eeking by on OS X with only 2 GB of ram, (256 mb of which is dedicated to the graphics card...)
The secret graphics setting the "performance: blah" switch (formerly the fps limit switch). Setting it to "max fps" will cause it to go way overboard with the chunk updates. It'll deliberately use all the cpu you've got for something. Your day-night transitions will, of course, be super fast as a result, but my suspicion, bolstered by what you just said, is that it will also fill the RAM information about all those hidden blocks around you out to .. as far as you have RAM to support....
My machine has only 2 GB max ram, and It always uses it right up to the limit (even though I use power-save mode) If I'm not careful, It'll start paging, which is what really kills the performance.. Do you have a similar experience despite having 8 GB of RAM?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I'm happy just building shit. Just make building shit easier. (maybe build in some of the mod capabilities...)
Me too. Sometimes, after a long day of work trudging the brain through a bunch of technical or stressful stuff, it's somehow relaxing just to break blocks and stack them somewhere else. I can even do it with a beer in the other hand.
If you want to build something, you can build it. If you just want to saunter along with no tangible goal for awhile, that's ok too. The stuff you collect will fuel the building later.
My biggest complaint is that I wish there was an easier way to dump large quantities of stuff into bins or your 'on person' inventory. You know, one or two clicks and "all cobblestone goes into the storage bin". Two more clicks and "you pick up all pickaxes".
Well that and lava. I've lost so much cool stuff by falling into lava lately.
do() || do_not();
Bug Fixes:
Fixed new item duplication bug
New Bugs:
The item duplication bug was not actually fixed; items placed in a furnace can still be taken out of a furnace and duplicated infinitely by right-clicking (although it
appears the newly duplicated item will not function). Also, bug with cloned items being picked up after death wasn't fixed too.
When using a furnace and placing items into it, as soon as it's activated all items minus 1 are ejected and must be placed back in the furnace in order to use it.
Lighting is not always updated when digging new holes/tunnels, placing torches or setting blocks on fire (in both nether & normal world).
Tall grass can grow on dirt with no grass on it.
Shift-clicking something into a full chest from inventory or from chest into full inventory crashes the client.
It is now impossible to row a boat in 1 block deep water.
Sometimes (tested while in a boat on water, and when floating in water) while viewing a map the game will switch to a "saving chunks screen" then end on a black
screen.
When quitting game the "Saving Chunks" progress bar does not appear sometimes.
When loading a world and standing in a cave less than 4 blocks high, the player gets some initial damage (at least the damage sound appears).
"Out of memory" error. Often appears after the "blocks don't disappear" bug.
The following bugs only occur in new chunks generated in 1.6.2:
Some chunks don't get dark at night (and vice versa; some chunks stay dark during the day).
The textures don't load on some chunks (The blocks are present but with transparent textures).
Some blocks don't disappear after being broken; it appears as if the block is still there, but can be passed through.
Every time we get any sort of content update, we quit playing for a week as Notch puts out a few several new minor version updates to get the game to only have slightly more bugs than it had before the update, and then he gets bored and moves on to slowly working on another content update and mostly posting on his Twitter account about what video games he is playing all day and his experiences flying around the world on private jets and hanging out at the Playboy mansion.
Meanwhile, they announce two new versions of the game on two new platforms and those of us who put forth money to support an indie developer in return for future updates wonder how we got duped out of our money.
So you'll have to forgive me if I find it hard to contain my enthusiasm for the "Adventure update."
It doesn't chug for me but then again I built my PC for gaming.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The problem is that garbage collection takes time. Making it collect smaller chunks every second would create a smoother experience than having it do one massive collection every half hour. Arcen Games struggled with that in AI War where they create and destroy lots of things all the time leading to lengthy garbage collections if they don't happen frequently.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
There are two main types of players, those who just want to build and those who want to adventure. I'm in the latter camp, I build a basic home and then go spelunking. Currently Terraria fills my needs much better than Minecraft does.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Require several days sleep/rest after sustaining too much battle damage
That's just a waste of time, not much happens in Minecraft when you aren't around and staying indoors just means nothing happens outside.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I wanted to make a comment about your own nickname but you decided to be an AC.
I am not devoid of humor.
I don't really have any performance issues either, but that complaint is by far the most common I've seen. Then again, the Minecraft community is full of serial complainers.
Celebrity worship is a poor substitute for Deity worship and costs more to boot.