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Minecraft Is Finished
SharkLaser writes "Minecraft, the most widely known and best selling indie game in the history, is now finished. Minecraft creator Notch tweeted yesterday that Minecraft has gone gold and will be released at the end of the week at the first Minecon, a gathering of Minecraft fans. So far over 4 million people have bought the game, generating over 50 million dollars in revenue. Minecraft has also had a rapid modding community around the game, developing gems like the Millenaire mod, Builders and Tornadoes. Minecraft also brought back the interest in voxel based engines, introducing games like Ace of Spades (build, make tunnels, capture the flag FPS) and Voxatron [note: you might want to turn down your volume for this video]. It also opened up many ways for new indie developers, as Minecraft showed development can be funded solely by making something new and giving out early access to the game for those who are interested in the project. The upcoming Steam-like IndieCity-platform will also employ similar feature where, in addition to normal indie game store, players can look at unfinished projects and choose to support their development."
They've explicitly and repeatedly stated that while the 1.0 release is a major milestone, it's essentially arbitrary, and their development work on the game won't change quantitatively or qualitatively once it passes.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Does that mean that the DRM has been removed?
* I've heard some people claim that it's not DRM, but any system where I have to activate the game with an external system counts as DRM in my book.
it weeds out all the autistic man children from stuff that matters
For me, it weeds out all the stuff that matters from my inner autistic child... and I love it :)
That's what I want, because I just found an awesome seed, -6035877519343706770 and I'd like to try it with an "official" version of the game.
Try it yourself, mountain islands, two nearby villages, some deep chasms, and a readily accessible diamond chunk in a tunnel not too far away.
... the gameplay matters. Even if it is simpler then modern games the interactivity (being able to build/destroy) is off the charts since you're able to create/destroy what you want and as you wish. So that patterns never have to be the same, as opposed to modern static worlds of aesthetically pleasing art that are most always the same /w some scripted destruction in the world here and there.
Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game development, if developers weren't so clueless they should have either joined forces or complained to the government about the abuse they take at the hands of publishers.
That's the only way to know for sure.
There are some REALLY awesome mods for this game. I do a lot of videos for some of the modders, and the things you can do are basically limitless.
I believe that Notch is releasing unobfuscated source code with this release, to make things easier on the modding community (YAY!).
If you're interested in checking it out, visit my youtube channel (Shameless self plug): http://www.youtube.com/user/direwolf20
play minecraft for real
Netcraft confirms: Minecraft is Finished
I just looked up wikipedia and it lists Minecraft as a voxel based game, so now I'm confused.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
What do you mean by "finished"? I payed 14,96 euros for unlimited, endless updates. SO GET BACK TO WORK, MOJANG MINIONS!!
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Did anyone else read the headline and think "oh and here I thought they were doing well"? Perhaps saying it was no longer in beta would have been better.
Good for him (Notch).
I tire of so many crappy games that it's nice that what seems to be a pretty nice, funny, and smart guy got this far with an idea he started for fun. I haven't bought it because I don't think it's really my genre, but I'm looking forward to Scrolls.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Ever since around 2001 ish game developers have just created clones and sequels ad nauseum
I'd go back slightly further. Since the introduction of Parappa in 1997, there really haven't been any genre-making games that I remember. Even Katamari Damacy is just the old arcade game Bubbles redone as a 3D platformer.
because they allowed publishers and marketers to too heavily influence game development
Publishers and marketers hold the keys to actually reaching an audience with your game. There are entire genres where self-publication on PC is not practical, and you need a publisher in order to get your game onto a console.
A voxel is about the data more than anything else. A pixel in three dimensional space.
Think about what a "pixel" is. It's the same thing except with a 3D position. Rending voxels is the same as drawing pixels and has the same relationship.
My simplistic understanding of "voxel" is that it is a 3D version of the 2D "pixel".
You can render them, represent them, store them, compress them, do whatever you want with them, but at the end of the day a voxel is just a conceptual volume of a discrete cube of space in a Cartesian coordinate system.
And they are forgetting all the 'free'-version (classic) mod builders :(
Like http://www.fcraft.net/
It depends on what you mean by "voxel" and that's pretty shaky. While voxel means "volumetric pixel" which implies that it's a rendering element, it's not really analogous to a pixel (there's a layer of transformations between voxel and screen) and even in technical papers it's often used to refer to the component parts of a volumetric representation of a some property that varies through space, rather than the technique used to visualise that property.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Notch is a man bursting with ideas, but from what I've seen, he is an atrocious project manager. The number of half-baked ideas and functions still left in the game even at 1.0 (Although as a previous commenter mentioned, this is a very arbitrary number for the game) speaks volumes about the company's attention span when implementing new features. They always seem to get halfway there, and then abandon it for the next lightbulb that lit up.
Of course, the title is praised by both computer game enthusiasts and casual passers-by across the world, and the simple but powerful idea of creativity, survival, and effort/reward are fully realized. But when bedroom coders do impressive mods in their spare time over a weekend, and the devs take months refining trivial bugs, it says to me that there is a world of possibilities missed out due to a very amateur approach to development.
Just my two cents.
The part that I like best about the Minecraft story is that the shambling masses of "me too" handout junkies have no answer to it.
"My concept is the next Minecraft, so give me money" doesn't and can't work as a pitch. If your project is the next Minecraft, funders will be chasing you because you already have a game and players, and you'll be laughing at them because you're already making money, directly, without their intervention.
Die, parasitic middle-men, die.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
It represents most of the world data as voxels, however each "voxel" represents a cube 50cm high, with typical 3-D graphics textures applied.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
While voxel means "volumetric pixel" which implies that it's a rendering element, it's not really analogous to a pixel
I'd consider voxels more analogous to texels in a texture map. The earliest commercial applications of voxel rendering used heightmaps, which can be thought of as voxel maps that are run-length encoded along the height axis. Those are almost exactly the same in practice as modern displacement maps.
Notch: Look what we have built team! Look at this beautiful creation we have made! Hours of sweat and labor finally complet*SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSBOOOM*
Notch: DAMMIT!
the best way to do it is for the video to start real quiet and for sites like slashdot to tell people they need to turn their volume way up to hear it. then without warning THE VIDEO GETS REALLY LOUD.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Voxels are analogous to sprites, not pixels.
to add mods.
Adding mods is a nightmare.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Someone griefed the hell out of it. Now they have to redo the whole f-ng thing.
When is it coming to Steam? I want to buy it, but I'm holding out.
For anyone interested in hosting their own Minecraft server(s): http://www.multicraft.org/
The amount of things you can do in skyrim is amazing. You can easily put in hundreds of hours without even touching main quest. And can replay it if you want as a totally different character with different skills.
The open-source minecraft clone, minetest, is surprisingly complete, playable, and fun.
http://c55.me/minetest/download.php
And how the hell is Steam relevant to Minecraft?
Because both Steam and Minecraft have a "play offline" button. Does Minecraft's "play offline" button work noticeably differently to how cos(0) described Steam's?
Because both Steam and Minecraft have a "play offline" button. Does Minecraft's "play offline" button work noticeably differently to how cos(0) described Steam's?
Well, there is the fact that Minecraft's button actually works every time. Steam's offline mode button sometimes works for me but I find that more often than not it just results in the "Error - cannot connect to Steam" message.
Strictly speaking, you are right, Minecraft is not in any way a voxel-based game. It uses conventional 3D graphics techniques to do what it does, which means polygons, texture mapping, vertex shaders, etc.
Making it a true voxel-based game would mean writing a graphics engine from scratch, most likely, and I can see why Notch wouldn't have wanted to do that. :)
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Well, there is the fact that Minecraft's button actually works every time.
Thank you for answering the question that I was heading for.
It's pretty amazing a game that is completely mindless and boring netted an indy developer 50+ million dollars...
I got some friends that are minecraft evangelists, have their own server etc etc. I don't get it. I bought it, played it for 30 mins and just found it pointless and tedious.
So Minecraft is transitioning from "Minecraft Beta 1.9" to "Minecraft 1.0".
If it were me, I would have called the milestone release version "Minecraft 2.0 (because our 1.0 is twice as good as your 1.0)".
I believe it's just a bad idea to have multiple overlapping version numbering sequences. It's fine if you want to do it (as Mojang have) with a developer philosophy justification, but the *practical* implication is that you're going to spend the rest of your life explaining to confused customers why Minecraft 1.0 > Minecraft Beta 1.9, and eventually why Minecraft 1.1 Beta > Minecraft Beta 1.9, etc.
People are going to google for your product, and they're going to find links to "Minecraft 1.0" and "Minecraft Beta 1.9", and which do you think they're going to follow? Chances are a substantial portion of your customer base will install version 1.0, and then find Beta 1.9 out there along with instructions for how to download and install it (which will work over the 1.0 version returning it back to a pre-1.0 beta).
There's a reason why large airports have a LOT of signs telling you exactly where to go. Remove even one and all the tourists are going to get just a little bit more confused and some will end up in the wrong place and clog up traffic and have to go around the airport loop again increasing traffic volume etc. When you have the sort of traffic a major airport does, then every little bit that you can reduce confusion will pay back appreciably.
Doing everything you can to avoid confusing customers for any product (especially one with millions of customers) is also worthwhile, even when it requires you to do things like spell out the blindingly obvious, because otherwise they're going to phone you, and email you, and tweet at you, and gripe about you on forums, and generally consume bandwidth that you would much rather put to other purposes.
Hence, while philosophically I understand "Minecraft 1.0" prefectly, from practical experience I think it's a bad idea.
G.
Oh well, guess I'm not going to see high res virtuality in my lifetime.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Voxels are analogous to sprites, not pixels.
A VOlumetric piXEL is more like a sprite than a pixel? You learn something new every day.
Does this mean all of the blocky graphics have been fixed? I don't play any games that don't at least use shader model 3. Gameplay is secondary to graphics in my book.
For Notch's response to the "you said, clearly, that we will get any new version of minecraft for free, which thus includes the portable editions" messages.
I mean, an actual response, not just "silly reddit trolls".
Actually, it can. Take Photoshop. When you spend time in that game, it's because you have a goal. If you know yourself, you know to add additional requirements/challenges when you're bored, and divide and conquer when it becomes too hard. Now usually, you will experience a few surprises while working on your goal. And since you do the easy stuff first, it will become harder towards the end.
Voila! You’ve got a game. And pretty good one actually.
Now if the goal has some personal meaning to you, and results in learning or seeing the world in a different way in the end, the activity even becomes art.
Add in competition with others, and you definitely get a sport.
Finally, if you focus on the learning aspect, you can call it education too. (Yes, education is supposed to be fun. That's our indicator for it being worth something. Otherwise it's shit. Like school.)
Why this all fits so well? Because that's what games, art, education and sport are, and that's what their point is. :)
'lot of cyber bullying going on in Minecraft. People build then get bored, then pick on others. 'need better oversight or they will have trouble (since I paid for it).
Help eiiminate stupid speeding tickets.
In actual use, yes, they're usually more like a sprite than a pixel. If you're storing anything more than a single color per voxel, it's not at all like a pixel.
Voxels are analogous to sprites, not pixels.
I think you a confusing sprites with objects. A sprite is a group of pixels that are put together and act as a unit. 3-D objects are a group of voxels that also put together and act as a single unit.
That Minecraft happens to be using 3-D objects (aka "blocks") as descriptions of each "volume element" is perhaps where you are getting confused. The same can also happen in 2-D graphical games where an image can be comprised of multiple "sprites" or "blocks" that are stamped over and over again to draw maps, buildings, or even creatures. It isn't anything new.
"The upcoming Steam-like IndieCity-platform will also employ similar feature where, in addition to normal indie game store, players can look at unfinished projects and choose to support their development." you mean what Desura (www.desura.com) is already doing on windows and Linux?
The Internet, Wikipedia, Linux, Bittorrent, Firefox, Wikileaks, Bitcoin, Creative Commons, Netbooks, LAMP, ...
You're trying to say that since an object must have integer boundaries, voxels are like pixels.
I'm trying to say that since a voxel can contain a 3D object, the object is more like a sprite than a pixel. A pixel is a rectangle of solid, uniform color.
Minecraft happens to be using 3-D objects (aka "blocks") as descriptions of each "volume element" ... The same can also happen in 2-D graphical games where an image can be comprised of multiple "sprites" or "blocks" that are stamped over and over again to draw maps, buildings, or even creatures.
Yes, those sprite-based 2D graphical games are analogous to voxel-based 3D graphics. That's what I've been saying all along. They're basically the same. You even said so.
Traditional voxels are also uniform color (and then you apply interpolation - but that works for pixels, too).
A textured cube is not a voxel.
Traditional voxels are also uniform color (and then you apply interpolation - but that works for pixels, too).
A textured cube is not a voxel.
Name a voxel-based game that doesn't violate those requirements.
There are very few voxel games today, because it's too computationally expensive to obtain the same image quality using them on our current hardware. Historically, though, most of voxel games have been like that - to give a few examples: all NovaLogic games that used VoxelSpace (the whole Comanche series, the first few games in Delta Force series); Blade Runner; Vangers and Perimeter; C&C: Tiberian Sun; several Build engine games that used voxels for some things (e.g. Blood, Shadow Warrior); Outcast; Alpha Centauri; Hexplore.
Note that most of those (especially those that used voxels for terrain) did both color and height interpolation. However, individual stored voxels still had a single color.
Exactly, now rather than storing a color they store a texture and blend it with neighboring squares (e.g. for terrain), which is a logical extension of the original voxel which makes it look better.
It also makes it more like a sprite than a pixel, but I think you're nit-picking to say that it's not a voxel anymore.
Well, I guess if you have a cubical voxel with, say, a 10x10x10 texture, it could just as well be interpreted as 10^3 single-color voxels stacked together in a cube, with some optimization for more efficient store. So you have a point.
> Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?
Have you tried Battle for Wesnoth (wesnoth.org) ?
it's not really analogous to a pixel (there's a layer of transformations between voxel and screen)
Actually it is. The thing that is often forgot is that pixels also get quite a bit of transformation when going to the screen, they might get scaled, blurred, blended, gamma-corrected and otherwise changed before they appear on the screen. Furthermore, image formats like JPEG don't store real pixels either, they store something that can be unpacked to pixels, but not perfectly some pixels will get changes along the way. A pixel isn't even necessarily a square on the screen, as most scaling algorithm will handle it as a singular sampling point, not an area. One can even apply a texture to a pixel and blend it with neighboring pixels, that's essentially how tilemaps work.
With voxels the situation is of course a little bit complicated, as there is no native way to display 3D data right now, so you can't just "blit" a voxel set into the video memory and have something show up, like you can do with pixels. There are also plenty of different ways of storing and compressing voxels. The underlying principle is however pretty much the same, just now in 3D instead of 2D. Thus if you want to store a 256x256x256 voxel image, you can just take 256 256x256 images and be done.
I judge my Steam purchases by hours of gameplay per pound (about $1.50). Anything over 10 hours per pound is usually pretty good. Some games are in the hundreds of hours per pound. Most half-decent games manage at least 1 hour per pound. Anything below that I consider a loss. So the game has to be either amazing and long (rare - HL2 managed it), or it has to be cheap, or it has to be very replayable.
I strongly disagree. Your argument assumes infinite time. Games are cheap, time is limited.
As time available for games approach zero, price can be ignored. The only metric that matters is "amusement per hour".
I would pay a lot more for a 5-hour great game that I would for a 20-hour decent game.
I lost my sig.
...is cool! it's like C64 games got an extra dimension!
Remakes of classics like the Mario games, Space Invaders, Galaxians, Galaga, Pacman, Jet Set Willy etc would be extremely nice looking with such a graphics representation as Voxatron.