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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?
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
Netcraft confirms: Minecraft is Finished
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
And by that standard there has NEVER been a movie with an original plot and all of the works of fiction of our lifetimes are just hackish copies of the same stories that existed thousands of years ago.
We're a culture that loves the new and sometimes the innovative. When it really comes down to it, there's not that much that's truly new (at least by your standards for video games!). I don't really like the argument, and it's kind of reductio ad absurdum, but posting on slashdot is basically just a form of email, email is basically the same as a telegraph, a telegraph is basically the same as writing a letter, and writing a letter is basically the same as memorizing a message and telling it to someone else. So were any of these things truly innovative? People have been relaying messages for tens of thousands of years!
Beyond that, I would say video games don't really HAVE to be innovative. Again, by your standards, World of Warcraft was not at all innovative. Very little in Warcraft was new, innovative, or unique (see EQ, UO, MUDS, etc). But it was all done really damn well! Sometimes excellent execution of a well-liked idea/game/plan is good enough!
You can configure your own servers to not require account validation.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
The open-source minecraft clone, minetest, is surprisingly complete, playable, and fun.
http://c55.me/minetest/download.php
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.
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.
As good as steam is, like any other distribution platform it asks for a lot from the developer. In this case, too much for notch.
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/9550850116/why-no-steam-notch
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.
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.
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.