Minecraft

[princec]

It'd be a shame to think Markus is a one-hit-wonder when he actually spent the previous 10 years making games, few of which anyone will remember. Another one of those overnight successes that took 10 years to make.

Cas

[Rorkien]

It'd be a shame to think Markus is a one-hit-wonder when he actually spent the previous 10 years making games, few of which anyone will remember. Another one of those overnight successes that took 10 years to make.

Cas

And isn't that a good reason to keep trying? I'm pretty sure everyone here loves making games. Even better if they become profitable and successful!

[xXCoderDevinXx]

Wow, October 26 2012 last comment ... ahh the gold old 1.4 pretty Scary update, when i first started playing minecraft...its gotten to complex now since 1.5 minecraft has gotten too confusing and complex.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[namrog84]

Too bad you didn't wait 12 more days and then you could have given rebirth to a 1 year old thread

 

[xXCoderDevinXx]

  i just realized i said gold old instead of good old xD well i should of waited 12 more days oh well I wonder why people haven't been posting

[opiop65]

Because there wasn't anything else to talk about and the thread died off. Seriously, was it that important that you had to necro a year old thread?

[rv3392]

WOW! And to see this is where it all started!

[kpars]

Isn't it beautiful?

Again, don't necro older threads, especially ones that are this old.

- Jev.

[opiop65]

Why don't people learn. If you don't have a useful post in a thread that isn't old, then don't type it.

[Grunnt]

To me digging up this thread on Minecraft is not so much necromancy as it is history. Minecraft is definitely part of game development history, and having a little part of it on this forum is pretty awesome (along with all the other gems that Persson and others left scattered around these boards).

Also, threads on the "featured games" board are not ordered by most recent post.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[jeb_]

In about 3.5 weeks the "official release" of Minecraft turns 2 years old. I.e. the same amount of time I've been lead developer, for what it's worth.

[opiop65]

How is it working on Minecraft? I've always wondered how cool it would be to be the lead developer on a game that has probably influenced the game industry immensely. I mean, Minecraft was the reason I started programming. I owe you all a huge thanks for the game you've made. Its honestly more than a game to me, its what introduced me to programming. And now I spend the majority of my downtime coding, and I absolutely love it.
Congratulations on the game, and hopefully it'll last for a few years longer!

[matheus23]

I have to agree, the first thing I wrote was WorldOfCube in Java, which was highly inspired by Minecraft, so I owe you both a lot.

Also, Notch's nerdyness with Redstone made me build my first ALU in Minecraft and now I'm having much fun building little CPU's in a logic simulator (logisim).

Minecraft is really, really inspiring.
Still playing actively (for almost 2.5 years now, with mods, though).

[JESTERRRRRR]

Used to play this game regularly but it was ruined for my friends and I, absolutely hate the direction its gone in. I cannot believe they added the food BS, and removed the instant healing ability. Completely killed off pvp combat, and sprint is so bad for pvp considering how laggy the game is anyway.

[jeb_]

opiop65: I think JESTERRRRRR here answers your question quite nicely Minecraft is a sandbox game that can be played in many different ways. The original inspiration for the game was Dwarf Fortress, so the development has taken a lot of role-playing and survival elements from there. Obviously every single feature has pissed off some people, regardless how small or big the change has been. I guess my skin has grown thicker over the years

It's also a crazy project to work on since it has had such a cultural impact. Three years ago I wouldn't have dreamed about partying with celebrities (I've met deadmau5 and Justin Timberlake, for example), or being regularly invited to talk at various conferences (nowadays I tend to say no to most invitations, though). I've been in Swedish National TV twice, in Swedish newspapers several times, interviewed by BBC once about the N-word appearing in the game, participated in a video documentary (by 2 player productions), participated in 2 books, awarded as one of the 100 most influential people according to TIME magazine, as well as talking in front of 7,000-people strong audiences at Minecon...

So things have been pretty crazy!

[Grunnt]

So things have been pretty crazy!

Yeah the ways of public hypes are unfathomable... I hope you manage to have some happiness and fun in all of that

[xsvenson]

It's been said that there are 2 vocal minorities, that represent only about 10% of the players:
* Those who really really like the product
* And those that really don't like it
The rest just use or don't use but are quiet about it

As it is human nature, to focus on the bad things for improvements (cause good things are good, there is no need to change them), people take the negative commentaries personally and get hurt. So yeah, there is always the vocal minority who can ruin Your day, so a thick skin is pretty much a requirement, especially in a project, that's as large as minecraft.

[matheus23]

Oh btw, I really liked the 1.7 snapshot. I now get 120 FPS (capped, I guess), and the new rendering techniques are cool. The mipmapping and Linear filtering for distant textures makes it look much better, too!

Back in 1.4.7 I have only had ~50 fps.

Nice work on that!

[Longor1996]

Oh wow. I absolutely forgot about this Thread.

@Jeb:
May I just ask you about what you think of Cubic-Chunks?
And with that I do not mean the mod for it.
I am talking about the system itself, and if you ever thought about it.

We are not in a Minecraft-Forum here, so I thought its a good idea to ask here, because there won't be thousands of people reading it instantly and making big news out of it. Also we are all mostly developers here, so we can talk about technical stuff as much as we want.

I would really like to hear an answer.

Edit here:
Important: I am not asking to implement cubic-chunks into Minecraft. I just want to know what you (and maybe the other Mojangster's) think about it.

Have a nice day, and good luck with developing MC.

- Longor1996

PS: Poor you must handle so much hype... I couldn't ever handle that many people at once without going all crazy.

[jeb_]

The current world format in Minecraft is inspired by the Cubic Chunks mod in the sense that parts of the world are completely unloaded if they're empty. The old format had chunks that were 16x128x16 blocks, and the new format has 16 cubic chunks of 16x16x16 blocks that allows players to build up to 256 without adding much memory or performance overhead (empty chunks are not loaded).

This system was chosen as an acceptable simplification. Placing blocks under 0 didn't add any real gameplay value, and placing blocks way up in the air made lighting and heightmap calculations (for rain particles etc) a lot more tedious.

It's not a bad technique, but maybe something more suitable for space building games.

[Longor1996]

The current world format in Minecraft is inspired by the Cubic Chunks mod in the sense that parts of the world are completely unloaded if they're empty. The old format had chunks that were 16x128x16 blocks, and the new format has 16 cubic chunks of 16x16x16 blocks that allows players to build up to 256 without adding much memory or performance overhead (empty chunks are not loaded).

This system was chosen as an acceptable simplification. Placing blocks under 0 didn't add any real gameplay value, and placing blocks way up in the air made lighting and heightmap calculations (for rain particles etc) a lot more tedious.

It's not a bad technique, but maybe something more suitable for space building games.

I think I can agree on the thing with the space-game.

The problem with the heightmap calculation was that it get's a lot more complicated and resource-intensive, even if you implement a "lazy"-heightmap implementation, that updates the height-map as chunks are generated and visited. Right?

In the end its just these problems here:
- Heightmap Calculation/Generation/Updating
- Sky-Lighting calculation.

If these are the only problems, then I can fully understand why you wouldn't want to implement it.
And as long as there isn't a solution to it that give's the same(or better) performance than the current system with the above given problems, you won't ever implement it.

I got my answers. I am happy.

Have a nice day jeb_!


- Longor1996


PS: {mcfan-mode-on} YAY, I talked to jeb. {mcfan-mode-off}. Thats enough to make my day.
PPS: Some people on minecraft-forum.net are constantly trying to find a solution for the above given problems. Maybe one day they find one... maybe not!

[opiop65]

Actually, one thing I always wanted to know. How do you handle empty chunks/air blocks? I've always wondered because it seems keeping air hocks would hog a lot of memory and it would be a waste of precious processing power. I don't really know how to combat this as they're still hold, and I still need them to do calculations, but they're useless for anything else.

[Longor1996]

Actually, one thing I always wanted to know. How do you handle empty chunks/air blocks? I've always wondered because it seems keeping air hocks would hog a lot of memory and it would be a waste of precious processing power. I don't really know how to combat this as they're still hold, and I still need them to do calculations, but they're useless for anything else.

Looking at the decompiled code, I can say that they send a flag with the chunk-packet which determines if the packet contains any chunk-data or none.
Its that easy to do. (You still have to check if the chunk is empty before you send the packet)

Edit: Pseudo-code example time!

1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15

## SERVER TO CLIENT SEND FUNCTION OF CHUNK ## - Prepare chunk data for fast compressed sending. - Determine if the chunk is empty by some means. - IF chunk.isEmpty DO   - Send Byte 0  -ELSE   - Send Byte 1   - Send Chunk Data (in whatever form you want) ## CLIENT CHUNK RECEIVAL ## - Read Byte - IF read-byte EQUALS 0   - Create new Chunk and fill it with Air  -ELSE   - Create new Chunk and fill it with data from the Packet.

Its fast AND easy to implement.

- Longor1996

[opiop65]

Right, I know that, but air in a chunk that isn't completely air, how do you do that? I guess it really wouldn't be that big of a deal, but I don't know!

[Longor1996]

Right, I know that, but air in a chunk that isn't completely air, how do you do that? I guess it really wouldn't be that big of a deal, but I don't know!

If a chunk is just 90% Air, it will be sent.
If a chunk is 100% Air, it will not be sent.
If a chunk is 0% Air, it will be sent.

As an if statement:

1   2   3   4

if(Chunk.containsOnly(AIR))   isEmpty = true; else   isEmpty = false;

Don't try do cut out the Air sections out of the single chunks, thats unecessary and a waste of time.
Just check if the chunk consists only of air, and if that is, the chunk is empty.

If your chunk is just 4096 blocks, and each Block takes up some bytes (1-4), it doesn't really matter if you try to cut out the single Air section out of that chunk. If each block would take up 8 bytes or something bigger, then you should consider cutting out unecessary sections of air, or compress the chunk at runtime.

- Longor1996

[MineCrak]

I just want to say thank you to Jeb for having had the courage and foresight to completely redo the Minecraft chunk system when he put out Anvil.

I understand the position he was in and why he chose to do it the way he did at that time. Because of that everyone now gets to take for granted the Double Height that they now enjoy and which prior to that many swore could never happen. And it was classy when you gave a shout out to Robinton, author of the Cubic Chunks Mod, back when you released Anvil.

btw: Jeb, is Grumm still working on upping the height to 2000 and adding 3D Biomes? Even without a complete cubic chunks work-up that would take Minecraft to a whole other level, as well as allowing people to build 1:1 scale replica buildings and such without height mods.

Again Jeb, Thanks!

[jeb_]

Yes, Grum is still working here!

What you are talking about, I believe, is the now abandoned project to rewrite the client. The intention was to better separate game logic from rendering, and looking into a more efficient way of handling chunks. The project was abandoned because it didn't really lead anywhere... just a lot of work.

The idea is not completely dead, though. As we're working on making the game suitable for modding, we have to decide on where to put the API's boundaries. For example, should a mod be able to modify how chunks are stored, or should the game always assume the current system? I guess we'll see...

[rv3392]

Jeb_, can I have your thoughts on my first and new unreleased game.
The post is: http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/better-camera-controls/31022/view.html

p.s don't mind the better camera controls title

[supercapacitor]

Minecraft dev team still posts on JGO? Awesome!

Jeb_, any plans for 2.0?

[Jimmt]

You guys should be here as programmers, not mc fanboys. Treat him like any other jgo member.