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.
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!
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.
[quote=“jeb,post:442,topic:33567”]
Yeah the ways of public hypes are unfathomable… I hope you manage to have some happiness and fun in all of that
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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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!
[quote=“jeb”]
Yeah the ways of public hypes are unfathomable… I hope you manage to have some happiness and fun in all of that
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.