Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Microcline]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

worse graphics, more time to spend on improving gameplay.

I'd accept this argument if Notch were still a one-man team basement programmer, but he's got a multi-million dollar operation now.  Three of his staff members (Junkboy, Mattis Grahm, and Henrik Pettersson) are listed as being "artists", but I've yet to see a Mojang game ship with anything other than programmer art.  While there's no question that Notch struck an entertaining gameplay formula with Minecraft, the output of his studio should lead you to question his managerial aptitude.  I'm also at a loss to describe what benefit he gets from having a "boss", a "force for good", a "chief architect", and a "director of fun" on his payroll.

[Matz05]

Cobalt has pretty good art, but that is Oxeye/Mojang, so I don't know who did the artwork.

[SealyStar]

Could be really awesome... too bad Notch said it would have minimal textures (only polygons), then justified it as a "retro stylistic" choice, and not just being too lazy to make art. Come on, at least ASCII like DF is a meaningful stylistic choice.

worse graphics, more time to spend on improving gameplay.

I'd accept this argument if Notch were still a one-man team basement programmer, but he's got a multi-million dollar operation now.  Three of his staff members (Junkboy, Mattis Grahm, and Henrik Pettersson) are listed as being "artists", but I've yet to see a Mojang game ship with anything other than programmer art.  While there's no question that Notch struck an entertaining gameplay formula with Minecraft, the output of his studio should lead you to question his managerial aptitude.  I'm also at a loss to describe what benefit he gets from having a "boss", a "force for good", a "chief architect", and a "director of fun" on his payroll.

This. Mojang has several good artists, but all they do is promo and special art. All the in-game art is still Notch/Jeb's dumbass programmer art, except Scrolls (which they're focusing way too much on) and Cobalt (which was made by Oxeye).

[Fiskav]

.

[Sonlirain]

Well minecraft had low minimal sys specs so you could almost play it on a microwave oven.

No, since Minecraft is coded in highly-inefficient Java, it's actually really system-taxing. It's a common complaint.

Well i usually tend to consider games "Low spec" when they work on my 7 year old PC.

[LoSboccacc]

Well minecraft had low minimal sys specs so you could almost play it on a microwave oven.

No, since Minecraft is coded in highly-inefficient Java, it's actually really system-taxing. It's a common complaint.

Runs well on a core duo 2ghz with a geforce 8400. That's the low end of three years ago. Pretty strange definition of taxing you have.

[Thief^]

I think this is up to implementation.  People are like "Baww untextured polygons suck" but Minecraft made do with like 32x32 graphics per cube face, right?  If done poorly, you end up with a slate grey ship sitting atop a mud brown asteroid.  If done right, you can get a lot of creative graphical appeal for minimal system stress.  Tasteful use of low graphics can result in surprisingly beautiful scenes.  You don't need HD to be pretty.  And I'm not talking about abstract graphics either, like how DF shows a dwarf as an abstract ☺, but real honest-to-god graphics can be done very well using very little, if done right.

Case in point: http://www.torfrick.com/info/lab.html

[ThtblovesDF]

The B12 crew might have a slight bias to game over graphics, aye?

There is more to aesthetics then polygon count, like in the minecraft example it simply shows a world that... is nice to look at (more then enough examples on youtube), while I could look at call of duty maps, but never get that feeling of scale, size and adventurer.

[Girlinhat]

Minecraft is not very taxing on the computer.  It's rather lightweight, especially if you tone down your draw range and such.  BUT, for what it is, it runs very heavy.  If it were done in a more traditional language, you could get the same Minecraft with much much lower weight.  The thing is... Minecraft is just simple.  Even in inefficient Java there's just not a whole lot going on that taxes your system.  It's a case where complexity trumps efficiency.  You could design a calculator that runs terrible terribly slowly, but even if it took .5 seconds to run a problem people would still look at that and say "Oh it's quick!"  Maybe you could design it better and it'd only take .1 seconds to do the same thing, but people wouldn't really notice the difference.  Similarly, Minecraft runs at respectable FPS using a solid chunk of memory and CPU.  It could achieve the same FPS using lower memory and CPU, but people don't much care about that.  They just see "60 FPS is good FPS" and it's fine.

Notch has mostly relied on computers being strong rather than making his code good.  Which is not to say that his code is bad.  It's just that his code is in Java.  I doubt 0x10^c will be in Java, so we'll see what the system specs are.  I'd still bet it runs very lightweight, perhaps lighter than Minecraft depending on how much you have going on in a scene.

[Fiskav]

.

[SealyStar]

Notch has mostly relied on computers being strong rather than making his code good.  Which is not to say that his code is bad.  It's just that his code is in Java.  I doubt 0x10^c will be in Java, so we'll see what the system specs are.  I'd still bet it runs very lightweight, perhaps lighter than Minecraft depending on how much you have going on in a scene.

Actually, Notch has confirmed that 0x10c is being programmed in Java.

Because Notch claims he doesn't know any other language, and obsesses over refusing to learn them in spite of Java's obvious flaws.
The Xbox version of MC is coded in C++ (or whatever C variant), and yet Mojang adamantly refuses to backport it.

[Sowelu]

Religious flamewars don't really belong here.

[sambojin]

Not unless they're amusing and allow some easy openings for general by-standers to put much needed input into it.

I think if 0x10^c is going to be coded in a highly inefficient language, it should be java. Because that's what the guy knows how to code in. Either that or un-compiled BASIC. Or maybe as a python script. Lua scripts rock as well, and almost every game with Lua scripts rock. Not graphically, but they're good. If Notch could in someway work out how to run a python script interpreter in java that was sending calls to a Lua session that was running inline BASIC calls so that I could have my spaceship's emulated CPU run at NASA style speeds, I'd be happy. Old NASA speeds, when we first went to the moon. Something really slow and un-necessary. I mean, stuff it, I just bought a new computer and it sucks balls that the only thing that does tax the CPUs is DF. It doesn't even have polygons. I want to see that usage meter go higher than 24%. Or otherwise I'm not buying it. Because having my CPU usage meter go either too high or too low tells me just how good a game is. Didn't you know that?

[Girlinhat]

We're discussing how the game will play out.  If that doesn't belong in this thread, then nothing does.  Additionally, we're not raising any voices or throwing any punches.  Just a few gentlemen sitting about our posh armchairs with glasses of wine and large corncob pipes, stroking our metaphorical beards as we ponder the outcome of a game yet played.  Besides, it's not like we've got anything else to discuss yet.

[Sowelu]

I'll just leave this rigorous study comparing language speeds here:

http://reverseblade.blogspot.com/2009/02/c-versus-c-versus-java-performance.html

In this study, in the Windows stats, C++ is 35.8% faster than Java and 15.8% faster than C#/.NET.  However, Java also has some pretty damn solid libraries, is more easily cross-platform, and (when compared against C++) is harder to write certain kinds of bugs in.  Yes there's always still bugs, and an extremely good coder or someone with a whole lot of free time can reduce that to an equivalent number, but I suspect that a coder of Notch-level would be putting out these releases with a lot more crash bugs if it was written in C++, and they would also be a lot further apart, with a whole lot less support for different systems.

This particular Java model is also pretty goddamn easy to mod for Minecraft.  Drop a file in, you're done.  Okay, that's only meaningful because it doesn't have a better modding API, but the fact remains that Java by its very nature makes that a lot easier than it would be with C++ or C#.