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[Neyvn]

As cool as Building an Igloo is, my eyes began to hurt while walking through the snow that falls 24/7...

[Yourself86]

As cool as Building an Igloo is, my eyes began to hurt while walking through the snow that falls 24/7...

Dial down the brightness on your monitor or wear sunglasses... unless it's the amount of tiny things swirling around you that make your eyes hurt.

[Neyvn]

It was the Pure whiteness of everything + the brightness + the spinny things, which caused my eyes to seem to watch each and every SINGLE one fall...

[dwarfguy2]

So what's the SFU?

[Vattic]

As cool as Building an Igloo is, my eyes began to hurt while walking through the snow that falls 24/7...

You could always open minecraft.jar with WinRAR and replace snow.png with a blank image of the same dimensions and file type. That way there should be no visible snow falling. minecraft.jar should be in "C:\Users\<YOURNAME>\AppData\Roaming\.minecraft\bin" but you can just hold the windows key and press r, paste in "%APPDATA%\.minecraft\bin", hit enter, and the folder containing minecraft.jar should open.

So what's the SFU?

Unfortunately Notch says we shouldn't bet on one. So there is a chance but not much of one.

@notch i'm going to ask a question i'm sure you get all the time, What's the chance your going to have a secret Friday update?

@Connormast12 i honestly don't know. I wouldn't count on it this week.

http://twitter.com/notch

[head]

Dammit!.

Nothing mean meant but really would like a update for MP like Mobs or minecarts..

[KrunkSplein]

I haven't been playing long enough to have experienced one of these SFUs, but based on my understanding of the community it doesn't have to be a big thing.

Biomes?  That's a big thing.  Damage in SMP?  I have no idea.  Probably better to work on the network structure first, since lag is already such an issue and timing is so important in combat.  But adding something stupid, like a new crafting recipe to make rugs out of cloth (first thing that came to my head) would seem to appease most of the (rabid, frothing) fan base.  Or hell, give the fishing pole a temporary use.  From what I gather, anything to show them he's working on the game will chill them out.

I'm not a fool, though.  There will always be bitching whether or not a change is made.  But I think there are people who are genuinely worried that Notch is going to take the money and run.

[Osmosis Jones]

Honestly, I don't see the attraction of biomes so much. While it would be cool to be able to stroll from desert to glacier, I just can't see how they are going to be able to make them transition smoothly (and logically) in an infinite plane. A much better option IMO is restrict biomes to controlling stuff like mountains vs plains, and instead have a seasonal cycle, with a snowy winter and blistering summer.

[Thexor]

Honestly, I think biomes would be really, really interesting. It would provide a good reason to explore; instead of finding more grassy hills and loose forests that look nearly-identical to what you left behind, you could find interesting areas - massive mountain ranges, vast deserts, etc.


Smooth transitions aren't dependent on an infinite plain, near as I can tell - you get some region X, some region Y, and some transition boundary X --> Y that has to be dealt with. Having an infinite plain just means you've got boundaries on all sides of all regions. Making the boundaries smooth is the problem Notch ran into last time he tried to implement biomes in an SFU. Personally, I'd be happy with a 'ragged edge' - a desert-to-grassland would have a jagged border, perhaps with a few sand tiles scattered into the edge of the grassland and, vice versa, a few grassland tiles peppered into the edge of the desert. It wouldn't look 100% smooth, but it'd be close, and I don't think smooth edges are really suited for the highly-blocky art style of Minecraft.


Seasons would also be cool, though. Summer could be more-or-less what we have now; autumn could have leaf tiles decay even while still connected to a tree; winter could have snow fall and water freeze; spring could have leaves regrow (though I guess there'd need to be some way to distinguish natural trees from "raw logs" used in construction, else your stylistic house would start sprouting leaves!).

[Neyvn]

Seasons would work a bit better then the one Season only thing, but it would have to go in a Harvest Moon season method, 30days (10 for the GC game) equals one season...

[Aqizzar]

I'm all in favor of biomes and I don't particularly care about how they're achieved.  As is, any Minecraft map you care to explore will be riddled with tessellation errors and noise.  Just walk along and beach and count how many cells randomly flip back and forth between sand and gravel, along clean lines.

It's certainly a feature Notch will have to develop and clean up before calling Minecraft "done" or even a Beta as far as I'm concerned.  As said, exploring the infinite world loses meaning when every horizon promises more green hills, plains, scrub forests, and irregular lakes.  I never find myself traveling very far, because with no way to move my spawn point, just starting a new map is more attractive than exploring to get better terrain.

[PTTG??]

Well, it's too bad it's dead. It was a fun game while it lasted.

Same thing happened to H&H. Biggish update, then small update, then a missed weekly update, then a late update, then no updates ever again.

You want my prediction, it's two more missed seecret updates, then a small item update (like, plates made from clay or something) on a tuesday or thursday, then two months of no activity, then Notch says that some guy he hired today skipped out on him with all the money, and he's too depressed to work on Minecraft, so he's putting it open source.

[/cynicism]

[andrea]

don't you think that what you said is a bit too pessimist?

at least, I doubt that he will get a thief as employee , considering the time it is taking to start the business. I don't think he is just taking random people from the street/the internet without being careful about who he is hiring.

[KrunkSplein]

On one hand, I know that there is a lot of stuff that needs to be done during the transition from 'a guy with a paypal' to 'an actual company':

• Real payment system
• Office space
• Employee hunting (hope he remembers to find someone who actually knows business)
• an actual server instead of the hamster wheel he's got now
• A hojillion forms

On the other, his product has stagnated to the point where customers are predicting its demise.  Sadly, this isn't just random doomsayer talk - it's genuine prediction based on the path of other independent games before it.

Right now, Notch has a huge customer base.  Some are staunch defenders, others attack Notch for his apparent ambivalence towards MC.  But the vast majority of people - mostly those who just discovered the game through recent press - don't know how to react yet.  They haven't been around long enough to be accustomed to the SFU, but they can see that things aren't going as normal.  If Notch misses two more SFUs (including today), I foresee a lot of abandonment.  That's bad for a game so reliant on word-of-mouth.  Conversely, if he did SOMETHING, however minor, on two consecutive Fridays at this point, he solidifies his customer base.

Anyways, that's just my $0.02.

[Calhoun]

so he's putting it open source.

Then Rejoice! You'll see more updates than you know what to do with.

Don't think that's a likely prediction though.