Vanilla Minecraft News Discussion

[EpicAaron]

The idea of adding more mob interactions is very interesting to me given Flowerchild's hardcore ecology :)

Unfortunately, the fact that dogs will now act as anti-skeleton shields just feels like a convenience addition. Cats scaring away creepers is excusable given that they don't really serve any other gameplay purpose, but a pack of wolves already acts as an effective means of skeleton fighting without the addition of a free skeleton shield.

[FlowerChild]

I dunno. Depending on how it's setup, I can see it serving as an inconvenience if your wolves are ignoring stuff that's attacking you to go chasing after skeletons.

But you're probably right in that the behavior won't exhibit that kind of subtlety and it will just serve to boost wolf power with no downside.

[Stormweaver]

I can see it now; start a vMC world, first morning watch a wolf kill a skeleton that's hiding under a tree, then stand there waiting for you to walk over, pick the bone up off the floor, and give it to him.

I like the direction they're going with this, but can't help but see the holes. If they can get their own bones, why do they become BFFs with you when you give them one?

[FlowerChild]

If they can get their own bones, why do they become BFFs with you when you give them one?

Well, I can get my own too, but I vastly prefer when someone else delivers it :)

[ryoloth]

Well, I can get my own too, but I vastly prefer when someone else delivers it :)

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[Calo290]

I can see it now; start a vMC world, first morning watch a wolf kill a skeleton that's hiding under a tree, then stand there waiting for you to walk over, pick the bone up off the floor, and give it to him.

I like the direction they're going with this, but can't help but see the holes. If they can get their own bones, why do they become BFFs with you when you give them one?

Ah but you forgot it's vMC, where mobs not killed by the player drop nothing, so this changes doesn't even drop bones for you. At least in BTW I can pick up the free wool and then run like hell.

[erikdk321]

Im pretty sure mobs still drop their loot in vMC, unless Mojang changed it.

[thekyz]

Im pretty sure mobs still drop their loot in vMC, unless Mojang changed it.

They're is a very small chance that they will drop what they wear, but the fact that they drop it all the time is FC's.

[gaga654]

They're is a very small chance that they will drop what they wear, but the fact that they drop it all the time is FC's.

The issue was whether or not mobs drop items at all when killed by non-player sources. That hasn't changed at all since experience and rare items were introduced. Mobs still drop their normal items no matter how they are killed, and experience/rare items (including possibly armor they may be wearing) only if killed by a player (specifically, attacked by a player within a few seconds of their death). Mojang did change it so that pigmen's gold nuggets and iron golems' iron bars were considered rare drops in one of the recent-ish snapshots, but that was reverted in the next one.

[thekyz]

The issue was whether or not mobs drop items at all when killed by non-player sources. That hasn't changed at all since experience and rare items were introduced. Mobs still drop their normal items no matter how they are killed, and experience/rare items (including possibly armor they may be wearing) only if killed by a player (specifically, attacked by a player within a few seconds of their death). Mojang did change it so that pigmen's gold nuggets and iron golems' iron bars were considered rare drops in one of the recent-ish snapshots, but that was reverted in the next one.

Whoops, my bad, i answered too quickly :(

[Nabetsu122]

So it seems that there is a new mob in the latest snapshot, and minecarts can go to... Ludicrous Speed!

Post: https://mojang.com/2014/03/minecraft-snapshot-14w11a/

Xisumas' video:



To be fair, this change may have reintroduced minecarts as a fast travel, but holy hell, I have reached 40 blocks/second before chunks stopped loading in for me.

[erikdk321]

This was exactly was I expected with minecarts. After horses were introduced, Mojang buffed boats so horses would feel less OP compared to boats, and now they buffed minecarts. This is atleast my opinion. I think it's almost save to say that it'll break a lot of automated builds, but I haven't tested it.
Also, "I do have an Ultimate Plan™ with endermites, but it will wait. May also include dragon egg but I haven't discussed this with the team yet." - Dinnerbone on twitter today.

[Eramus_the_5th]

Gotta say, from what I saw of the new minecart physics, the new possibility of derailing is kinda cool. Though the buff is ridiculous, they did add a downside to it. I mean, it does nothing really, considering you just need to place blocks at certain points to prevent derailing from doing anything, but at least they did something kinda neat for once.

Also, the fact that DB is actually planning a feature out both worries and excites me. Let's hope for the best, expect the worst as we always do.

[TheGreatIntelligence]

The below is nothing more than the ramblings of a lunatic. Pay no mind.

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Dinnerbone's Ultimate Plan(tm) revealed: Surround a dragon egg in lava and sacrifice hundreds of endermites into the lava. After you've killed enough endermites (say 600-700), the dragon egg is destroyed and the world restarts in hardcore mode. The world generation stays the same and you only keep what ever was in a selection of inventory spaces that randomizes every time the world restarts so you can never tell what you'll start with. Just hope it was that stack you diamond blocks you had on you for whatever strange reason when you went to fight the ender dragon. Also, sheep now turn demonic and shoot fireballs at you whenever you attack their brethren.

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And squids latch on to you when you come near them. Another 100% original idea from the wonderful mind of Dinnerbone.

[FlowerChild]

Dinnerbone's Ultimate Plan(tm) revealed: Surround a dragon egg in lava and sacrifice hundreds of endermites into the lava. After you've killed enough endermites (say 600-700), the dragon egg is destroyed and the world restarts in hardcore mode. The world generation stays the same and you only keep what ever was in a selection of inventory spaces that randomizes every time the world restarts so you can never tell what you'll start with. Just hope it was that stack you diamond blocks you had on you for whatever strange reason when you went to fight the ender dragon. Also, sheep now turn demonic and shoot fireballs at you whenever you attack their brethren.

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And squids latch on to you when you come near them. Another 100% original idea from the wonderful mind of Dinnerbone.

You just blowing smoke out of your ass here? It sounds like it, in which case this will just cause chaos.

Reference please, or I'll assume trolling.

[Eramus_the_5th]

So, I have played with the new minecart stuff in creative...

I didn't really get a grasp on how many powered rails it took to get to full speed, but it seems like a decent bit more than it was previously.

Minecarts will derail pretty easily, but you can either slow them down with an off powered rail (I'd recommend this, since it works better) or use iron bars on corners to put them back on the rails immediately. The latter does not seem to work when there is a player in the cart.

As well, empty minecarts do not work well with slopes once at a reasonable speed. They derail at slopes, smacking into the block next to it when it is an upwards slope, thus causing them to run backwards on the rails, and causing the downwards slopes to look really dumb and derpy. This does not seem to be an issue with minecarts with players in them.

This, out of all the things they have done recently, seems a bit more salvageable. If they fix derailing on slopes and maybe make the derailing a bit more consistent between the different minecarts/minecarts with things in them, it could actually be kinda neat.

[FlowerChild]

Can you be any clearer on how it actually helps gameplay though? Reading your description, it sounds more like an overall nerf to carts, when they're already underpowered relative to other modes of transport, rather than improving their viability, but maybe I'm missing something there.

[Eramus_the_5th]

Can you be any clearer on how it actually helps gameplay though? Reading your description, it sounds more like an overall nerf to carts, when they're already underpowered relative to other modes of transport, rather than improving their viability, but maybe I'm missing something there.

I have apparently stopped thinking of vMC in terms of the way others play... I need to not do that. I tend to always travel by nether rail line/foot, and only use boats when I don't want to swim across an ocean.

If you are frequently going between 2 places that are straight across from each other, this change is beneficial to you: the cart goes really fast now, and seems a good bit faster than horses. Anyone else gets discouraged ever so slightly by this change, since you can't turn corners at full speed. As well, anyone who is currently using rails is probably going to have to go through and change something at the corners of their rail lines. Overall, this change makes them less viable.

I guess I am just sorta interested that they are actually changing things now, regardless of how good or bad it is. I'm getting kinda tired of seeing changelog after changelog where all they add is command block stuff and tiny bugfixes.

[FlowerChild]

I guess I am just sorta interested that they are actually changing things now, regardless of how good or bad it is. I'm getting kinda tired of seeing changelog after changelog where all they add is command block stuff and tiny bugfixes.

Thanks for the further explanation man. I don't think I could bring myself to boot up vanilla these days to check for myself :)

I think horses were actually the last thing I went into vanilla to check out, and it was such a heart breaking experience that I haven't been back since.

Be careful what you wish for though. I know I used to breath a sigh of relief when they were working on more technical release, as it meant they wouldn't be messing with design (well, a short lived sigh because it also meant I'd have to deal with a lot of random architecture changes). Mojang's design decisions haven't exactly been stellar since Notch moved on.

On this one, I can see the corner thing being more interesting, however, the problem is not just horses, but also speed potions (and their ridiculously easy access being sugar based in vanilla). Setting up a rail network is a lot of effort. If it only provides minor advantages over other modes of transportation, players will shy away from them, particularly if it's their first network and they have to undergo the corresponding learning curve. This is of course a shame, as it's the one mode of transport that plays to the game's real strengths in terms of construction gameplay. When I first started playing MC, they were absolutely THE way to go but have slowly faded into obscurity due to beds, potions, and horses.

Anyways, it thus seem rather muddy to me to both improve their speed and introduce additional downsides simultaneously given the problem is that they're severely underpowered at present. Granted, my approach would be to nerf the shit out of everything else (as I have with BTW), rather than power up minecarts to try and compensate.

[Eramus_the_5th]

Anyways, it thus seem rather muddy to me to both improve their speed and introduce additional downsides simultaneously given the problem is that they're severely underpowered at present. Granted, my approach would be to nerf the shit out of everything else (as I have with BTW), rather than power up minecarts to try and compensate.

Problem seems to be that they aren't entirely confident in their own ideas, and are perhaps afraid of community backlash. Dinnerbone, instead of just testing it out for himself as Notch probably would have, tweeted out asking if endermen picking up players would be scary or annoying, and came to the conclusion that this would be annoying, even though only like 3 people (including me) responded.

Personally, I'd be perfectly fine with it if they just stopped adding features and just added modding support/bugfixes. However, I know that isn't going to happen, so I guess I will be stuck reading changelogs with a slight hope that something good will be there, though I know there is pretty much no chance of that.

[Xeo]

Okay, I guess block Metadata is dead, in favor of using more block ids.

https://twitter.com/Dinnerbone/status/4 ... 3267064832

From what little I know about MC code, I guess this is good on some level, but it still completely changes the code architecture for not much of a gain. I love the tweet where he admits this will probably break everything related to mine craft. At this point it feels like they are compelled to change stuff to mask the fact they have no idea what they are doing anymore...

[FlowerChild]

Yeah, they've been talking about doing that forever. Was supposed to be what was to replace Jeb's partial implementation of extended blockID's ages ago.

And yes, will break pretty much everything for very little in the way of good reason. If it had been architected that way from the start, sure, it makes some sense, but doing it to an established code base? Not so much.

[Gunnerman21]

Is there even a reason? I'm really confused by this...

[FlowerChild]

Is there even a reason? I'm really confused by this...

Well, extended blockIDs first of all (of course we could have had that a couple of years ago if Jeb had just finished his code, and many mods did just that). I think the idea is to combine the metadata and blockIDs into the same value, maybe extending it to 16 bits total instead of 12 or what have you along the way. Meanwhile, as like with the stuff Dinnerbone mentions like bedrock (but applies to a lot of stuff like cobble, dirt, and a whole whack of others), regular blocks only need to consume 1 of those values, resulting in more efficient usage of data overall.

Right now, if you consider blocks being identified by both their 8 bit ID value, and 4 bits of metadata, it's as if ALL blocks consume multiple 12-bit IDs (16 of them total), whether they need to or not, and at the same time, many more complex blocks would benefit from having more bits of metadata. So effectively, you could take something like a Block Dispenser or Gear Box and give it 8 bits of metadata if you really wanted to (although that would take up a honking 256 "blockIDs" under the new system).

So, as far as data storage is concerned, doing it this way is more efficient. Whether it will result in better performance or not is a question mark for me, as I wonder whether it will result in extra processing being required on a per block basis to determine what precise kind of block each one is. Depending how the code is written, I could see it easily getting out of control.

From the end-user perspective though, it likely won't amount to a whole lot of anything. *Maybe* in the long term it will result in more interesting block designs (assuming it doesn't do huge damage to MC modding in general), but MC already has the tile-entity system that most mods make use of to achieve the same thing.

Like I said, it's not that the idea itself is bad, it's that like many other architectural changes they've been making in the never ending quest for the legendary API, the cost to existing code is likely not compensated for by the benefit, or as I put it: "theoretical wankery".

[MoRmEnGiL]

Going back to the rails thing, there is one immense advantage that rail lines have over all other modes of transport: You do not have to keep a button pressed to move :P You hop in your cart, press a button, and that's it. It might not matter to many, but it is a huge difference to me. Also, boats are still quite buggy and need water, and horses,besides from feeling completely out of place, are also buggy and cause stuttering and have issues with loading the world. Minecarts are so nice..

Also I think I like the changes, I think they make rail lines more interesting if you have an extra variable to manage in speed, instead of it being max speed or stop. You can build a line that slows on corners or slopes, then speeds up in straight lines etc. At least until the relevant bugs are discovered and minecarts are totally ruined as a mechanic. :P