Vanilla Minecraft News Discussion

[TheGroovyWorkshed]

Can anyone think of a nice safe area of the MC design that we can all start bitching at Mojang about needing attention to try and distract them from working on more critical aspects?

If we convinced their entire team to just work on the API I'm pretty sure that would be equivalent to halting development. At least based on prior evidence.

[FlowerChild]

If we convinced their entire team to just work on the API I'm pretty sure that would be equivalent to halting development. At least based on prior evidence.

I've tried that, and I know a lot of people bitch at them as well about it. Their desire to procrastinate on it seems far stronger than public pressure in this case :\

[Rianaru]

I saw somewhere that 1.6 was going to include tons of new water mobs and stuff like lobster traps, but it wasn't official so I didn't want to post it. Now I'm afraid that that stuff might actually be included in the game -.-

[FlowerChild]

I saw somewhere that 1.6 was going to include tons of new water mobs and stuff like lobster traps, but it wasn't official so I didn't want to post it. Now I'm afraid that that stuff might actually be included in the game -.-

Oh double fuck me.

Them messing with underwater gameplay also scares the shit out of me. It's something I wanted to do myself in the past (hence the soulforged steel diving suit thing), and it is NOT an easy design challenge by any means given how water works in MC (not being able to occupy the same block as another).

Run FlowerChild! Run away as quickly as you can!

[Sarudak]

You worried they're going to screw it up?

[FlowerChild]

You worried they're going to screw it up?

I doubt either of us worries about such things anymore. I think it's just accepted as knowledge :)

[TheGroovyWorkshed]

Them messing with underwater gameplay also scares the shit out of me.

I can't find anything official pointing towards watery activities, only fan musings. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if they added a water mob to keep the suicidal squids company but I can't see it being more than a differently shaped squid (from a technical point of view) unless they are going to put some serious time into it.

[foi]

You worried they're going to screw it up?

Well standard operating procedure for Mojang is implementing a bunch of features without fleshing them out and revisiting at a later point.

Like redstone...
or minecarts...
or everything else.

They always move on to other stuff before actually finishing anything.

[0player]

To be noted Jeb has spent some time on optimizing the new lighting system and on my lappy there is a difference. (in the good way) the fps has gone up, there are no more lag spikes, block lag and my cpu fan is a lot slower ;) But what really gets me, is why the fuck was this not in the actual release?? Why did it take them releasing the update to the world to fix this one damn thing!

If he left original smooth lighting code intouched, then going from 3 us down to .6 us is actually pretty cool, given that original code clearly was not totally shitty. If it also solves lighting bugs, I'd call it great.
Also, as much as I loathe Mojang's recent design decisions, I find you remarks about "one damn thing" rather disrespectful. This "one damn thing" may've, for example, required refactoring pieces of code here and there before actually getting to optimize it (can't say for sure, haven't downloaded 1.5 yet), and optimizing is not a trivial task at all, too.
Would be cool if actual gameplay features were tested and improved with such enthusiasm, tho.

[dawnraider]

Keep in mind, though, that the light issues have been present in the game for nearly 2 years (beta 1.6 introduced them I believe). So the "one damn thing" has taken a disproportionate time to complete (as do all useful things, yet the fluff takes no time at all)

[Simurgh]

The thing about those things is that Mojang have already observed that people will fork out for the ame despite it having a great amount of "polish" i.e lighting bugs glitchy mobs etc. They add the shiney new bells and whistles to keep people talking about the game - driving new sales. Thats my take on it anyways.
Although I would much rather they concentrate on getting the back end system set up, optimised and debugged and get the mod api out. Then they could leave new content up to modders, many of whom do a much better job of adding content on the whole than Mojang, well I say many... some.. a few..

A man can dream right?

[Sage]

Jeb&Dinnerbone are not game designer part 95: In 1.5 you can combine enchanted books, so you can cheaply enchant books at level 10, and then combine them on an anvil to get better enchants. Result: the player doesn't need as much bookshelves around the table, and the only balance for vanilla enchant, randomness (which was kinda bad to begin with), is gone, and now for the 30 levels that a player could spend to get a potentially a bad enchant, he can get a precise, max level one without extra effort needed. At least, in BTW, you have to build a mob trap to do this...and just to get one type of enchant per mob ;P

[STrRedWolf]

And 1.5.1 got released.
http://twitter.com/jeb_/status/314689089347665920

[FlowerChild]

And 1.5.1 got released.
http://twitter.com/jeb_/status/314689089347665920

<finishes filing finger nails and surveys his manicure>

Guess it *might* be time for me to start looking at 1.5 ;)

[Rianaru]

Looks like people are still complaining about performance issues with custom TPs and animated TPs...anyone want to take bets on if those issues are going to be ignored or fixed with a 1.5.2 update?

[Solymr]

https://twitter.com/Kappische/status/314801099255214080

"Squiggly blobs". What.

[FlowerChild]

Looks like people are still complaining about performance issues with custom TPs and animated TPs...anyone want to take bets on if those issues are going to be ignored or fixed with a 1.5.2 update?

<goes back to working on finger nails>

[ThePuzzleMasher]

https://twitter.com/Kappische/status/314801099255214080

"Squiggly blobs". What.

It could be new slime types/AI. I hope they do this right and make slimes a real threat by not bouncing aimlessly in one direction when they don't have a target, drowning easily, and only being limited to deep caves and swamps so you will have to make defences for slimes and have to plan stuff based on moon phases...

...or not.

[MrPlatypus]

Bergensten also revealed that he's considering changing up how "Minecraft" handles health and damage for players.

"I'm leaning towards doing something radical on 'Minecraft'," he tweeted. "Changing health from 20 to 20.0 and reducing randomness of damage."

He went on to clarify the move to a decimal based health system by saying, "Because something could do +0.5 damage instead of flipping a coin to choose between +0 and +1."

Seems interesting. Im not really sure how difficult this would be from a developing standpoint, but good luck FlowerChild.

[FlowerChild]

Seems interesting. Im not really sure how difficult this would be from a developing standpoint, but good luck FlowerChild.

Nah, it's fine. I'm planning to do the same thing to hunger actually, in the release following the next one.

At present, there are items I'd like to make edible, but they're far too common to warrant a half hunger-pip in value (flowers are one example that Dave brought up), so I'll be increasing the resolution of the system in order to be able to accommodate that. It will also allow me to tweak the values for existing food relative to each other at a much finer level.

Basically the same thing, and really not a big deal. Jeb's description of it being 'radical' really warrants a "pffft" though, as it's the kind of thing that just occupies a very short line on my todo list, was pretty much an automatic decision once I started thinking about it, and which I'll probably get done in under half an hour.

Low hanging fruit that provides a bit of added tweaking potential at best. Players will probably hardly notice it.

When a developer starts going on about converting an int to a float as if it's a big deal....we've got issues.

[MrPlatypus]

Nah, it's fine. I'm planning to do the same thing to hunger actually, in the release following the next one.

At present, there are items I'd like to make edible, but they're far too common to warrant a half hunger-pip in value (flowers are one example that Dave brought up), so I'll be increasing the resolution of the system in order to be able to accommodate that. It will also allow me to tweak the values for existing food relative to each other at a much finer level.

Basically the same thing, and really not a big deal.

Glad to hear it. It sounds like it should be a great opportunity to improve the game overall. I look forward to what you do with these new possibilities.

[FlowerChild]

Glad to hear it. It sounds like it should be a great opportunity to improve the game overall. I look forward to what you do with these new possibilities.

Just subtleties man. Not at all a big deal.

[Detritus]

Nah, it's fine. I'm planning to do the same thing to hunger actually, in the release following the next one.

At present, there are items I'd like to make edible, but they're far too common to warrant a half hunger-pip in value (flowers are one example that Dave brought up), so I'll be increasing the resolution of the system in order to be able to accommodate that. It will also allow me to tweak the values for existing food relative to each other at a much finer level.

Basically the same thing, and really not a big deal. Jeb's description of it being 'radical' really warrants a "pffft" though, as it's the kind of thing that just occupies a very short line on my todo list, and which I'll probably get done in under half an hour.

Low hanging fruit at best.

Doesn't the "fat" system already function in pretty much the same way? You can have more or less than a half point in that already, can't you? The "fat" display isn't just divided up into meat and half meat, it has meat, and then a display for each fifth/quarter of the meat. Or something.

(for clarity, when I refer to "meat", I don't mean the stuff you eat, I mean the little porkchop things that the hunger bar consists of.)

[FlowerChild]

Doesn't the "fat" system already function in pretty much the same way? You can have more or less than a half point in that already, can't you? The "fat" display isn't just divided up into meat and half meat, it has meat, and then a display for each fifth/quarter of the meat. Or something.

(for clarity, when I refer to "meat", I don't mean the stuff you eat, I mean the little porkchop things that the hunger bar consists of.)

Yup, that's exactly right. Saturation was already a float (even though hunger is an int for some strange reason...but whatever), so I carried that over to fat and made the gauge capable of displaying 1/8th pips. All my food values use that same 1/8th value as a minimum unit.

It's seriously not a big deal to change over, and I'd probably put it in this next release if I didn't want to break things up a bit and handle the related food items in the next one because I already have a todo list a mile long here :)

[Detritus]

Doesn't the "fat" system already function in pretty much the same way? You can have more or less than a half point in that already, can't you? The "fat" display isn't just divided up into meat and half meat, it has meat, and then a display for each fifth/quarter of the meat. Or something.

(for clarity, when I refer to "meat", I don't mean the stuff you eat, I mean the little porkchop things that the hunger bar consists of.)

Yup, that's exactly right. Saturation was already a float (even though hunger is an int for some strange reason...but whatever), so I carried that over to fat and made the gauge capable of displaying 1/8th pips. All my food values use that same 1/8th value as a minimum unit.

It's seriously not a big deal to change over, and I'd probably put it in this next release if I didn't want to break things up a bit and handle the related food items in the next one because I already have a todo list a mile long here :)

Yeah, fair enough :) It seems a bit funky that notch didn't do that in the first place...