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[Microcline]

(...) it was a game with a laundry list of "coming-soon" features.

I can't help finding that discussion, and specifically that sentence, terribly ironic on a bay12 forum...

I think Notch is more vulnerable to criticism on this because
(i) He released his game as a commercial product
(ii) He moved his game to completed status when it's still clearly in alpha
(iii) His rate in implementing these features has slowed greatly since the first few months
Toady, as a freeware dev who maintains a consistent rate of progress and freely admits that his game's in alpha is much less vulnerable to criticism for lofty design goals.

That said, I can't bring myself to dislike Notch or begrudge him for his success.  As much as I can complain about his questionable design decisions and less-than-professional standards, he made a decent game in a criminally underrepresented niche.  I certainly don't regret spending $13 on it, and I'm probably not alone in that ($26 is pushing the boundary of good taste, though).

[fenrif]

And I think it fully delivered on what it was supposed to deliver. Everything since has basically been gravy, and I don't begrudge his approach to that.

When you've essentially built a complicated lego set, I don't really mind if you're design principle is "lets add cool new blocks", because all I really want as far as new aspects of the game is some cool new blocks.

But the design principal was "lets add villagers and achivements and the nether and blocking and combat and criticals and redstone and hunger and survival and mod API and merge SSP/SMP and wolves and enchantment and leveling and an ending and a dragon..." and so forth. If it was just a game about building then why have survival mode, or hardcore mode? Why take out blocks like the sponge? Why did it take years to add upside down stairs? I mean if it's just about building things then wy have certain block types limited by material. You could have wooden stairs (as in not planks) or nether slabs or stone fences etc.

If the time had at least been spent fixing bugs or fixing the horrible memory usage problems with the client then it'd be understandable...

I think Notch is more vulnerable to criticism on this because
(i) He released his game as a commercial product
(ii) He moved his game to completed status when it's still clearly in alpha
(iii) His rate in implementing these features has slowed greatly since the first few months
Toady, as a freeware dev who maintains a consistent rate of progress and freely admits that his game's in alpha is much less vulnerable to criticism for lofty design goals.

That said, I can't bring myself to dislike Notch or begrudge him for his success.  As much as I can complain about his questionable design decisions and less-than-professional standards, he made a decent game in a criminally underrepresented niche.  I certainly don't regret spending $13 on it, and I'm probably not alone in that ($26 is pushing the boundary of good taste, though).

I agree with almost everything you said (I do dislike notch, but that's more to do with the whole minecon thing, and how he seems to be extremely unwilling to spend any money on minecraft than the game itself).

[lordcooper]

Does someone want to explain what exactly the minecon thing was?

[debvon]

so too the trolls notch is a game with space ships. Plz don't be grammer nazis, hes making scrolls and he also made mincraft onto the games from mojong game with a space game



My god

[Rose]

You know, if you put some effort into your sentences, I might actually understand what you were trying to say.

[fenrif]

Does someone want to explain what exactly the minecon thing was?

Notch decided his game needed a convention to celebrate it's release. Which is a perfect idea because minecraft updates always go silky smooth and never have any problems like bugs that corrupt your world. So having the entire Mojang staff in a seperate country at a party when they "release" the final version of their only source of income is a perfect idea.

Also he invited the Yogscast to attend as his keynote speakers and main entertainers, didn't pay for them or pay expenses, sold the rights to their presentation thingie to IGN without even informing them then after the con went on twitter to badmouth them.

Basically Notch shouldn't be allowed to use twitter.

[Trapezohedron]

Yeah, Notch + Twitter = PR Disaster.

And yeah, we can't hate the guy for being rich and all, but his design philosophy leaves much to be desired. Basically, if he thinks of something awesome, he adds it, then forgets about it, leaving it barren and almost useless.

Still waiting for useful nether features, like ORES.

[Neonivek]

And I think it fully delivered on what it was supposed to deliver.

You are aware that we can objectively prove this because Notch stated a long time ago what Minecraft was 'supposed' to deliver. We don't even need to enter the realm of subjectivity.

[Rose]

Surprisingly little assembler code went into this! Now to implement a BASIC interpreter for maximum Xzibit.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[lordcooper]

Yo dawg I heard you like computers...

[BigD145]

And I think it fully delivered on what it was supposed to deliver.

You are aware that we can objectively prove this because Notch stated a long time ago what Minecraft was 'supposed' to deliver. We don't even need to enter the realm of subjectivity.

It's in his Tumblr somewhere and I don't know that he ever retracted the statement that Minecraft was intended to very much be RPGish/Adventure. It is still no such thing (except mildly in mods which Notch never ever supported -> declared from the start he never looked at the mod section of the forum). I suspect this space game won't even get to the point of the original Spore TED talk and later get a feature walk back.

[DrPoo]

Stop whining about the grammar. You're only making Bay12 look bad.

And you who always makes fun of people who spell bad?
Atleast decent punctuation should be a prerequistite for posting on a forum.

[lordcooper]

*badly

[MorleyDev]

Minecraft is almost entirely single-threaded* and coded in Java. As such, your quadruple core machine with umpteen 2Ghz processors is still only give it at most 2Ghz of work (hyper-threading aside) and the actual code is none too efficient either.

Ironically** what often gets sighted as "lag" is how it has the annoying start-up lag you always get in JIT-interpreters as one of their optimisations where every time a chunk of code is encountered for the first time in a running, it gets compiled again from bytecode to computer code and the whole program comes to a stop.

As an aside, Minecraft's "mod support" is also a quirk of Java, namely you can decompile, add your own code and recompile. It's mod support in the same way knocking down a wall and building a new one is refurnishing your house.

Minecraft is still essentially a paid tech demo where the developers went "This'd be cool!" and chucked it in. In-spite of all of these drawbacks, it still manages to be something some find rather fun. They wanted to make it a 3D rougelike with voxel-based building and with adventuring, so far they got half-way there and a bit.

* I am aware some multi-threading has been added but it still uses at most 25% of my 4-core machine.*** Adding multiple threads to a design originally based around one thread is like taking a donkey and trying to get a horse out of it, the best you'll get is a mule.

** This is actually a legitimate example of irony. "A state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result". An optimisation (the appropriate result being fast code) is causing people to complain of lag (the reverse state of affairs). Now that is irony!

*** FYI, my Quadcore i7 processor with 2.2Ghz (up to 3.2GHz with dynamic overclocking) per processor and NVIDIA GT 555M graphics card does manage to squeeze out on average a few hundred FPS with Minecraft.

Hopefully Notch learnt from some of these problems, especially "Don't hoist threads into a single threaded design after-the-fact. Think concurrent from the start".

[Knight of Fools]

On the subject of Minecraft being horribly inefficient, my single processor machine is a little monster when I poke it with a stick. I can run Skyrim at maximum settings without a hitch, and even play Battlefield 3 at maximum settings. (For the sake of honesty, I did have a graphics glitch after an hour or so, but the game kept running.)

However, on Minecraft, I crash after 30 minutes at maximum viewing distance. I mean, when both a Bethesda and an EA game are outperforming a simple multi-million dollar indie game and looking a heck of a lot better, there's room for improvement.