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Notch Shows Minecraft Adventure Update
jjp9999 writes "Markus 'Notch' Persson, the creator of Minecraft, showed off some features of the upcoming v1.8 at PAX, which includes the long-awaited adventure update. The video shows off villages, which Notch says can usually be found near the player's spawn point, as well as improved graphics and a few other gameplay tweaks. Notch says he and his team plan to release the update soon, but may release it in increments, since 'there's so much we need to clean up.' Regardless, the next version of Minecraft looks stunning, with some much-needed direction to the gameplay that could rekindle interest."
This was actually live streamed by Notch on his mobile phone.
Man.. just release it so my kids will stop asking me "when will 1.8 be out". I woke up last weekend with my youngest's face about three inches from mine, saying "has Minecraft been updated?" We've had to ban discussion about Minecraft from the dinner table, it's just gets too much.
But seriously, Minecraft has been an absolute boon for tech education in our house. My young kids now have their own hosted server for playing with friends, discuss the merits of Java over other languages and have generally replaced a "consumerist" attitude to technology with a much more investigative one. And the story of Notch kicking it all off by himself inspires them. It's all good.
Now kids, go write a mod or something. Mummy and Daddy want to have a sleep-in.
A little blatant self-publicity there, but at least it's very much on-topic: the Millénaire mod (http://www.millenaire.org) already includes NPC villages for Minecraft, with NPCs that expend their villages, trade with the player, have children who get new jobs, produce new types of food and items, etc. They have a wide range of possible buildings too, and players can easily add their own plans to the mod. NPCs currently to either medieval Norman or medieval (Asian) Indian cultures.
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http://celeron.55.lt/minetest/
Furthermore, the crashes aren't due to Java inherently. Nor is the absurd resource bloat (especially with the server). The crashes and the bloat are caused by inefficient programming within Minecraft itself and abuse of resources. Think of it as "lack of application of KISS concept". Notch has admitted his design methodology equates to doing malloc(size_of_available_userspace_ram) and using that, while any programmer worth half his weight knows you only allocate what you need (and free when done).
For a good laugh, open up the JAR files sometime and ask yourself what kind of programmer would design something with that JAR structure. These problems really aren't Java's fault, they're Notch's fault, and they're exacerbated by the fact that he refuses to let other members of Mojang work on Minecraft. There was a brief period where Jakob did some work on it fixing bugs left and right which Notch had created only weeks prior -- I believe this was during one of Notch's 6-decade-long vacation spats -- and the improvements were fantastic. When Notch got back, his access was nixed. Notch only permits himself to work on Minecraft.
But hey, it's all okay, because he's a Mensa member......
i would rather he take his time and release what is ready rather than shoving it out the door "on time" half-assed fucked-over and broken, as is the typical way of many game publishers
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Not that I like Java, but having those hs_err_pid files doesn't mean that java is the culprit. Error in native code execution is. Seeing the amount of native library used by minecraft (jinput, lwjgl, openal...), they might be at fault. Or badly used. But it would be more or less the same if he's gone with another language I guess.
Maybe I dont play mine craft enough, ive only put in about hours sine the stats came in, I just hop on every now and then to put in an hour, i just dig off a main tunnel back and forth, and explore all parts of every cave system I come to, but with just having the main tunnel 60 long ( a tunnel that is 200 long splits off every 3 blocks, and I mine back tot he original tunnel from the end, so as to not waist walking backwards and forwards, so outside of digging my walking is limited to 60 blocks
I have a portal at the far end of the 200 long tunnels, and I havent mined out in the other direction, or dropped down a few layers. So far the returns been pretty good, Ive gotten of about 1:2:14 Dimond:Gold:Iron (320:640:4200), more then enough that Ive started on digging out a 200x200x2 monster trap and replacing all the blocks with in with stone for a nice visual effect as I go - goto love the OCD that minecraft brings out.
The only time I put in a decent rail road, was when I was getting stung no matter what I did with the bed bug, and teleporting 3,000 blocks away from my base when I died, I took time but I built a neitherworld rail road for that.
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You should yell at Amazon too, since the kindle .jar files are laid out the same way.
it's a typical way to make things "interesting" for someone being nosy with something like this.
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It's someone who was a griefer but them some asshole stole their 'e' for the laughs.
Minecraft is a very graphics heavy game, despite the appearance. There are bazillions of vertices being transformed. It might not need an enthusiast graphics card to run, but it certainly requires something that was released in the past five years - and even then on the older / lower-end hardware you need to cut down on the view distance and graphical quality.
I guess the textures all fit within on-chip caches though!
2) Currently mods conflict too often with each other. It obviously has to do with how Minecraft is programmed since other games don't usually have this problem.
No, other games don't have that problem because they don't allow more than one mod to run concurrently. Games where you can pile multiple mods on top of each other (Total Annihilation unit packs, UT Mutators) can end up with conflicts.
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