ExpHP wrote:
I mean, I was surprised to see you make that change, because I never thought there was anything unusual about trapdoors being controlled by redstone.
Well, there's a bit of weirdness there in terms of requiring redstone to make trap doors would be rather off, as they're just trap doors and you'd expect to be able to build plenty for decorative purposes at low cost. On the other side, them being just made out of wood provides for extremely cheap gating mechanisms for automation which I always thought was way too cheap in comparison to stuff like pistons and the BD.
I was thinking about the history of redstone in MC as I was falling asleep last night, and I think one thing that has really been lost with time, particularly in vanilla, is that it used to be rather challenging to figure out ways in which to put builds together. The functionality at your disposal was extremely limited, and at most, there was generally only one way to perform a particular action. When new functionality, like the ability to control water flows was added in, it was a huge deal and opened up all kinds of gameplay potential. Pistons in particular were a big fucking deal when they came out, but with time, we've seen their functionality slowly leak into other blocks, and even their code has fallen into neglect.
Now, we have crap like just putting a bucket in a dispenser to control water flow in vanilla. So much stuff is just randomly getting dumped in without considering the consequences on gameplay (because let's be honest...Mojang isn't, and hasn't been for a long time), that there winds up being five ways to do something, so people just gravitate towards the cheapest and/or easiest and/or most compact. We see this in many different gameplay systems (horses vs minecarts for example), but I think redstone itself has been suffering greatly from it as well. I've caught many of the more recent changes in this direction (basically the stuff in the "redstone update", and some of the crazier dispenser additions before then), but I think this has been going on for quite awhile, while I was either oblivious to some it, or at a time where ripping out vanilla functionality was something I wasn't willing to do.
When trap doors first came out (and I believe fence gates too), they weren't redstone powered. They were just plain old trap doors and fence gates. Then the masses bitched, so that got slapped in there without further consideration. As far as I'm concerned though, that decreased the value of more advanced blocks like pistons, and opened up a whole bunch of sploity behavior. If I was more aware, or willing, at the time, I don't think I would have let that leak through to BTW in the first place.
The last point I want to address is the easy pressure plate systems that Morm mentioned: honestly, I've always hated those builds, to the point of getting rather ticked off when people have installed pressure plates on my doors in SMP. I've talked before about how door building is one of the things that typically acts as an introduction to redstone for people, and those things always felt like a super-cheap bypass to that to me. I never build them in my own worlds because of that, and I think my gameplay experience is richer as a result.
I realize that trick is still applicable to iron doors, but that's something I'm still putting some thought into potentially eliminating.
