Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
It may be DRM, but it's the least intrusive DRM I've seen in a long time. Especially the part where it will still let you play even if it can't contact the server.
Which is good because those servers have gone down quite a few times. It's to the point that I turned off account validation permanently on my server because I was sick of having to turn it on and off all the time when those servers went down.
:p
But hey, at least we HAVE that option. It's actually quite nice. Not to mention you don't really need any of that to play single.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
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
Why don't you just click "play offline" when authentication fails?
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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
Become a Muzzie
play minecraft for real
I think you mean mine craft for real.
I don't own a copy of Minecraft yet. But if it's anything like Steam games were in the early years of Steam, you have to already be online in order to set the client into offline mode.
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.
Perhaps you should move from the 'early years' of Steam and actually try it again then. Hmm?
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.
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.
I'm not onto Mincraft yet either although curious what all the buzz is about.
I hate Steam- they still haven't let ME know that they got hacked and my data has been stolen- if it wern't for Slashdot I still wouldn't know.
Irresponsible company and I hate how they're taking over so when I buy games in a store thinking it will save me from having to use steam they STILL expect me to log onto steam before I can use the game.
From now on I'm going to be more carefull and won't buy anything that requires me to use steam.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
If you don't connect for a few months, the words "UNREGISTERED COPY" or somesuch appear under the version number at the top of the window. I only know this because I didn't realize that I needed to download a new launcher a few months ago, and I was wondering why I couldn't log in anymore except with the web client.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
That's still true with the latest version of Steam. If Steam cannot get online, you cannot move it to offline. I struggled with this very problem just last week: I was on a laptop away from any open wi-fi access points, wanted to demo Sanctum (a wonderful game, btw) to a friend, and couldn't launch Steam. One can play in offline mode only if you have the foresight to set yourself as offline while being online.
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.
And how the hell is Steam relevant to Minecraft?
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 only problem with their system is if you can't authenticate your copy of Minecraft you can't play on any servers. I have a local server that my wife, sisters, brothers and I play on. We all have paid for copies of the game, but when the authentication server goes down none of us can "legitimately" log on to my local server. Sure we can still play in single player mode which is better than nothing, but it's still a pain and is a reason we all have cracked copies of a game we each paid for.
Maybe your notification email isn't up to date, or it got put in spam or something. I got an email from Steam the day after the story appeared here. It was the same text that was on the forum page and the news page when Steam loads up.
You can configure your own servers to not require account validation.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
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.
I get it every time I quit a steam game too.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
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.
You have to log in once to download the client. After that, if it can't get online, it shows a big "Play Offline" button.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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/
you have to already be online in order to set the client into offline mode
This is incorrect. Disabling (or unplugging) the network connection will allow the user to set offline while launching steam. Had to do this to play something when their servers were on the fritz a few weeks ago.
Fear is the mind killer.
Really? Because the day the announcement came out Steam itself put up a big giant announcement/apology from Gabe Newell as soon as I logged into Steam.
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?
I don't go to the steam forums so didn't see the apology and have not seen the announcement from Newell when logging in regulary.
I have not received an e-mail; my account is up-to-date (had to be to change password); it is not in my spam filter.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
After that, if it can't get online, it shows a big "Play Offline" button.
Does this big "Play Offline" button work even if your router can't connect to the Internet?
So as I understand it, a desktop PC can't both access files across the home LAN and play a Steam game unless the home LAN is connected to the Internet.
I believe Minecraft requires you login once on any given computer, in order to download all its assets. Then, it will allow you to play online.
If you download the full game from somewhere else, you can also play it offline.
I think it's silly to pirate Minecraft, though. It's a fun enough game that you should pay for it. Try before you buy, if you must, but please buy it if you like it.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Actually, you can play on some servers. Not the ones with the default configuration that requires authentication though.
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.
Same here... I sign on to the Steam client (not forums) every few days. The email from Steam doesn't go into my spam filter. Nothing in the Steam client, no email. Which seems pretty irresponsible.
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.
Originally I required authentication on purpose and didn't bother configuring the vanilla minecraft server. Mainly because I wanted to be sure my siblings actually bought a copy and didn't just pirate it. My oldest younger brother is pretty bad for pirating games and normally doesn't buy anything, which I don't agree with. My youngest brother, who's in his last year of university, also pirates games, but I know for a fact he buys anything he thinks isn't a waste of money. Which I'm ok with because his eight foot bookshelf has everything on it I can ever remember him mentioning to me and then some. As far as I know neither of my sisters pirate at all, but I don't know for sure.
Up until the last major authentication server outage I used the simple vanilla server with the default settings, but after the outage my youngest brother convinced me to move to the Bukkit server so we could install some mods. So of course I actually spent the time to configure the server this time and found out how to configure it so authentication wasn't needed.
All that being said, I understand the idea behind DRMs, but for those of us that do buy products, the DRM can be a major pain in the ass. This isn't the first time I've gotten a cracked copy of something that I had bought because the legit copy wouldn't work and I was too lazy to call, or didn't get anywhere with, customer support. My older sister was one of the ones that had a DVD player mysteriously stop working in a fairly new PC (2 years old) after installing Spore, and because of the crap service and deniles we both got from EA, we no longer by games from them. As far as I'm concerned Indie developers are the only way to go now. Large company's couldn't give a rats ass about what happens to you, your computer or the product once you've handed over money to them so I don't typically buy any thing that's not from an indie developer. Besides I've long moved over to Linux since I've stopped buying from large developers, the indie devs seem to be much better at providing Linux compatible versions of their games.
I doubt they sent those emails to everyone. I certainly haven't received one. They may have put everyone in a big queue and trickled mails out to avoid getting blacklisted by spam filters or something, and you were near the top of the list. Or something happened and people got skipped or something.
In my experience, yes. It's available anytime Steam can't connect to the mothership.
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.
Yes, that's what "offline" is. It wouldn't be a very good "play offline" button if it required you to be online.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
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.
I have not received an email from them yet, but whenever I set it up on a new PC they have to email me a new code to put in... so I know they have my email. (Also, the Spam folder has no steam mails.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
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".
Replaying the same missions with a different character with different skills is really still the same game. I don't understand why people think that this is a "replay angle." The only "replay" Diablo 1/2 had was the fact that you had to find specific attributes on weapons and those were fairly hard to find. It was still the same quest, same levels (even though they were randomized) in the same order. Replay in that game was farming. Does Skyrim have different quest lines that branch from the very beginning and take you to places in the world that the other quest lines do not? If not, you're still playing the same missions, killing the same people (or doing the same FedEx quests) to get to the same ending(s). I don't understand how that's "replay value."
Fallout 3 touched a bit on the multiple branching quests based on your choices, but you still eventually ended up going to the same place in the end.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
It wouldn't be a very good "play offline" button indeed. Here's a thread for you: http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2526808&cid=38059660
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. :)
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.
You got an e-mail if you were registered on the forums.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
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 could look at the diablo replayability thing being more varied forms of different difficulty levels. The different classes played differently and so fit different play styles. Playing a class that doesn't fit your play style can easily make the game more challenging and that's not even touching the skill choices within each class.
From my understanding Skyrim does have branching quest lines that alter either the end outcome or open/close availability of other quests and other gameplay avenues. The simplest example that comes to mind is in the first town you will likely encounter, where you meet two men who will give you conflicting quests. Whichever npc you finish the quest for will offer to be your follower, while the other will give you the cold shoulder, dialog options are different and whenever you come near him he'll have something unpleasant to say to you.
I don't know how deeply implemented that kind of thing is in the game over all but it's fun never the less. I've barely done any of the main quest line and I probably already have 30 hours spent in the game. I didn't play the other Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim seems like it's Fallout 3 in a fantasy setting with much improved graphics. I've actually kind of wished for a system like VATS since my computer can barely handle Skyrim on lowest settings, even with some ini tweaks.
Not having tried it for myself, I imagine you could disconnect from the LAN when starting the game, and then once steam has started in offline mode, reconnect to the LAN.
With a wireless LAN that might be as simple as a few mouse clicks. But it's still ludicrous that we'd have to do that to play a game that has already been authenticated and is resident on the system.
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.
I didn't play the other Elder Scrolls games but Skyrim seems like it's Fallout 3 in a fantasy setting with much improved graphics.
You've got the cause and effect wrong - Fallout 3 was Oblivion in Fallout setting, and Skyrim is a sequel to Oblivion.
That said, Skyrim is a fair bit better than Oblivion, and close to Morrowind, in time-to-play, replayability and sheer fun.
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.
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.