Minecraft

[Maniacal]

Link to video.

 

[KaiserElectric]

1.8 might be pushed to next week, which I would rather have than several bug fix patches.

Also 1.8 trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYoO9XkCCHg

The end of it is... is.... I'm going creative mode only forever.

I won't. I like building, but there's a certain appeal to collecting the materials yourself and building with the threat of a creeper sneaking up behind you.

 

[mythmonster2]

Meh, I've always preferred Creative; that's why I got into Minecraft in the first place. Yeah, there's an appeal in gathering resources yourself, but when my newest megaproject needs a large amount of blocks, it just becomes tedious and boring.

 

[Skwink]

Since I only play on Croxis's server really, I can't remember the last time I actually gathered stuff. I love the Shop.

 

[Rub'Rum]

"Ok" - Notch

Spoiler :

It was the pigs having 3d snouts. Wow I would never have noticed without his new blog post...

 

[Maniacal]

Someone posted a picture of snouts on creepers. It looked silly.

 

[croxis]

Patch delayed to the 12th

 

[Civ'ed]

I assume the patch is 1.8?
5 days seems ok.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Of course. Every person in game development knows people love getting new releases, major updates, and new content to play with on Mondays and Tuesdays. It's obvious.

I think everything I ever waited for in the gaming industry has been released on a Monday or Tuesday. You have a full week-end to prepare yourself to not have time to play until the next week-end. It's pretty fun.

 

[Maniacal]

They don't usually work weekends.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Exactly, so, you know, work a whole week with the aim of releasing something at the end of the week. Instead of working the whole week until there is just a tiny thing left to do that you do Monday morning and immediately release it Monday morning?

If you're worried about them having to patch immediately post release: if even *I* have to work on a week-end in the line of work I do, I'm pretty sure they can do it two or three times a week with key release dates

 

[croxis]

The reason why is that if there is something wrong with a Friday release, you have to work over the weekend to get a fix out

 

[Rub'Rum]

It's kind of what I said in paragraph 2.

 

[JtheJackal]

It's kind of what I said in paragraph 2.

Not everyone has the same work schedule as you.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Not everyone has the same work schedule as you.

Oh really? Well I just learned something.

Edit; what I meant is that my work schedule is actually very mundane, but that even *I* end up sometimes doing a bit of a week-end stint.

 

[croxis]

How does that make any logical sense? Because you sometimes work on the weekends means they have to?

 

[Rub'Rum]

No, it doesn't mean that. It's just the way I'd function if I had my company. "Guys so you have a very normal 40 hours work week, but since I release things on fridays, expect 3-4 week-ends a year which you can take later as mid-week vacation". That'd be how I work especially with a small company. It's already better than "hey you guys love to be game developers so work 90 hours a week and don't complain whoo hooo" which we see in the business these days.

But I don't have my game company. So who cares.

 

[croxis]

It isn't a smart move from a business perspective if it is a buggy update. It is much better to release during the week with fewer users encountering issues and then releasing the required fixes, then to release friday and have all users encounter the issues. Bad PR.

 

[Rub'Rum]

Ah it's true. We have come to expect buggy games on release. I forgot about that. Ain't it fun to be a modern gamer. I wish my bosses were like us gamers 'n fanboys.

 

[Newbunkle]

From Notch's Tumblr:

Game development is fun. There’s programming, design, testing and just plain good old silliness. Here’s a brief snapshot - a retelling of what I did this weekend!

I was putting in a few extra hours on Minecraft this weekend, refactoring code so biomes could directly decorate the terrain themselves rather than having the terrain check the biomes manually. That type of work is mostly just busy work, so it wasn’t very interesting from a design perspective, but it was very rewarding form a programming perspective. Things were starting to fall into place, and biomes became much “cleaner”.

One of the results of that was the first draft of a swamp biome, which I posted a screenshot of. I got crazy amounts of great feedback on how to make it look swampier (it kinda looks like a happy grove at the moment), and almost all of them are entirely doable by only changing the SwampBiome.java class. Feels good!

While testing the biome code, I started running out of food in the game and started hunting animals. Cows would just stand there, looking at me as I mashed them over and over to get their precious loot, so I figured I’d just make that mechanic a bit more fun. Four lines of code later, and animals now flee randomly after taking damage. Hunting animals suddenly became a lot more fun and morally questionable as pigs would storm off grunting and chicken (or whatever the heck they are) would jump into ravines. But the real fun came later on.

Someone tweeted me about a joking campaign to add 3d modeled snouts to the pigs in Minecraft, so I did. While doing so, I groaned at how the Cube class has an “addBox” method that actually means “replaceBox”, and how it really should be a “Shape” class with an “addBox” method that actually does what it says. Right now every box in a model has to be individually animated to match the part it’s attached to, and there’s no grouping or hierarcy. This is the reason why the horns on the cows are in the wrong location sometimes. I didn’t fix the code for this, as I was running out of weekend, but I made a mental note to fix it asap.

Reddit loved my pic of a pig with a 3d snout. I got sooo much precious link karma.

Back to doing some further testing. I was exploring a forest biome, hit upon a river cutting through it, and walked over a small hill. On the other side, a wolf was chasing a sheep, but the sheep was running away. I didn’t have this in mind when I wrote the code to make mobs flee, but it ended up giving me an unexpected experience of having some kind of echo system of competing behaviors in various animals, and it just felt.. nice. It made me realize we should explore more mob to mob interactions, and have more chaotic competing behavior.

I’m doing a high priority secret project this week (a prototype for a future possible project), but I already have at least three things I want to work on as soon as I get back on Minecraft work next week.

The reason it&#8217;s still fun is you. The community. Thank you. <3

Mob interactions sound fun. I like the way the wolf behaviour evolved from his tinkering.