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[Rex_Nex]

...

Cave Story and Minecraft...

It's just natural...

But no, as far as wool colors go. There are mods that up the max block limit to some ridiculous number.

[Nilocy]

Spoiler: The Bridge (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Wall of shame (click to show/hide)

Was mucking around with MCedit today. Fun stuff you can do with it.

[Darvi]

Note that the background could only be made with a custom texture pack that used up ALL of the wool colors. Big props to the dudes that did this.

They should attempt making

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

the sacred grounds

[Farseer]

I wish Notch would update more often. Toady churns out features and updates like crazy, and he doesn't even ask money for it.

Notch releases what? One or two blocks every couple of months? Maybe a mob or two?

Either that or he could sort out the troubling differences multiplayer and singleplayer (which mean you can't play a multiplayer mod on a singleplayer server and vice versa), make mod implementation easier etc etc. It'd be great if he'd, you know, allow users to update his game like he doesn't.

He's rich now, though, so he will not.

[eerr]

How do you know he's not doing exactly that, as efficiently as possible?

[Farseer]

How do you know he's not doing exactly that, as efficiently as possible?

He's releasing useless crap consistently without updating anything major? There's a reason most people prefer to run their servers on Bukkit. =/

I think everyone would be willing to wait a few months for an update if that update resulted in better mod compatibility (which didn't necessitate hacking the game files...) and improved singleplayer and multiplayer integration. Instead of, you know, blocks that play musical notes. Or whales. Why would I care about whales?

[OmnipotentGrue]

How do you know he's not doing exactly that, as efficiently as possible?

He's releasing useless crap consistently without updating anything major? There's a reason most people prefer to run their servers on Bukkit. =/

I think everyone would be willing to wait a few months for an update if that update resulted in better mod compatibility (which didn't necessitate hacking the game files...) and improved singleplayer and multiplayer integration. Instead of, you know, blocks that play musical notes. Or whales. Why would I care about whales?

I have to agree with Farseer on this one - it's like trying to ice a cake without all the layers done first - it works and it's delicious, but there's not much... body to it.

Edit: God that analogy sucked, I probably should have said something like "It's like doing a layer and then sticking icing over that one, doing another layer then icing that one... it may be delicious, but in the end it's not a traditional cake." except it is still a cake and it sounds absolutely amazing. Now I want a thrice-iced cake. Ha! Thrice-iced! Man am I good.

[Duke 2.0]

 Remember the longer update periods Toady has gone through? The 2D-3D transition? The year-long save break update? Both highly technical and problematic updates that took forever to come out with not too much to show for it. The results were buggy as hell and not terribly polished and a lot of features didn't work. That is just the nature of working on engine and save stuff.

 It seems Notch and his crew is working on, oh my god, save and engine stuff!

 You can't always be pumping out small feature updates, sometimes you have to bunk down and take a while to release something few people will even notice anyway. He seems to be more open to his crew about adding small fun stuff here and there so future updates should have more small fun stuff to them, but this is not a bad development time at all.

[head]

Irrc, The only thing i care about is the MOD API. Then he can take long breaks for how long he want.

[Farseer]

I have to agree with Farseer on this one - it's like trying to ice a cake without all the layers done first - it works and it's delicious, but there's not much... body to it.

Edit: God that analogy sucked, I probably should have said something like "It's like doing a layer and then sticking icing over that one, doing another layer then icing that one... it may be delicious, but in the end it's not a traditional cake." except it is still a cake and it sounds absolutely amazing. Now I want a thrice-iced cake. Ha! Thrice-iced! Man am I good.

How about...

It's like a cake make of icing and sprinkles but without any cake? It's edible and it might even be tasty. But it's not as good as that cake with a good base is.

Remember the longer update periods Toady has gone through? The 2D-3D transition? The year-long save break update? Both highly technical and problematic updates that took forever to come out with not too much to show for it. The results were buggy as hell and not terribly polished and a lot of features didn't work. That is just the nature of working on engine and save stuff.

It seems Notch and his crew is working on, oh my god, save and engine stuff!

You can't always be pumping out small feature updates, sometimes you have to bunk down and take a while to release something few people will even notice anyway. He seems to be more open to his crew about adding small fun stuff here and there so future updates should have more small fun stuff to them, but this is not a bad development time at all.

Personally, I didn't mind any of them since they resulted in some pretty epic mods for those versions. Toady has had easy modding in place pretty much forever. It means people don't care since you end up with brilliant mods that enrich the experience.

Again, I didn't (and I'm sure other's didn't, either) mind that. If it's buggy as hell and you can't deal with it, go back to the last stable release with lots of mods.

You can't really compare Notch to Toady in terms of update design since Toady has arcs planned out far in advance, he has a pretty strict game evolution etc etc. Toady has planned and made clear his plans. I'm not planning on playing DF until the end of the Caravan arc, really.

And, as far as I can tell, Notch is working on "underwater stuff" and "dogs". A pair of things that are easily moddable, if people wanted to. The mod community isn't as lively as it could be due to a lack of mod support on Notch's part.

I'm saying the issue is that he is ONLY doing small features. :p Look at the latest "major version updates" (1.1/1.2/1.3) and compare them with Toady's long updates. Toady basically overhauls the entire game, Notch does maybe 1% of that and most of it is entirely uninteresting.

Irrc, The only thing i care about is the MOD API. Then he can take long breaks for how long he want.

This.

I don't think Notch will ever do it because he apparently hates modders, though.

[freeformschooler]

I'm saying the issue is that he is ONLY doing small features. :p Look at the latest "major version updates" (1.1/1.2/1.3) and compare them with Toady's long updates. Toady basically overhauls the entire game, Notch does maybe 1% of that and most of it is entirely uninteresting.

This.

...is what frustrates me. I realize how silly it is to compare Minecraft to Dwarf Fortress, but let's look at the facts here.

Dwarf Fortress:
-One primary programmer, doing it in his spare time, as a pet project
-Incredibly complex engine
-Churns out new major engine and game features and bugfixes regularly (on a currently monthly basis), along with posting the status of the work on the update on his devlog.
-Attempts to retain full support on many things, incl. every new feature that comes out, for modders
-Works on donations to keep work on the game afloat, approx. a few thousand dollars a month

Minecraft:
-Several people working on various aspects of the game the game, professionally, using a professional programming scheduling framework
-Somewhat simple engine, has graphics but they're simple too
-Churns out smallish updates on a monthly or bi-monthly basis
-Only posts descriptions of what comes out with the update or when it comes out approximately at or around the time the update is released
-Little official support for modding, though plans for that in the future
-Development is funded by tens of thousands of gamers buying Minecraft access at $20 a piece

Hmm.

[Yolan]

Yeah, I was really into Minecraft a few months back for a good week or so. Lots of fun. I think it was worth the money I paid, and I don't feel at all ripped off. In that respect I'm an entirely happy customer.

but....

I could only wait for so many nigh updateless months of Notch taking international trips and twittering about how he had steak for breakfast before I started to feel disappointed. It just seems to me that minecraft has so much potential and the development speed doesn't represent that potential. I've seen lots of posts expressing similar sentiments on the minecraft forums that get a response of (you don't know about programming etc. so shut up). And that's a pretty good argument to an extent. Then you see what modders have been doing to the game...

[OmnipotentGrue]

You have to remember, even with these small indie game developers, money is a big issu-

Oh wait, it's Notch.

[poca]

Almost all the posts about Minecraft development pace seem to contain misconceptions. I'd really like to try and talk about them all in more detail because I've certainly got misconceptions of my own but I can't post much now. I've been getting my impression mostly from his tumblr posts here:

http://notch.tumblr.com/

3 months ago, I learned, among other things, that they have an blueprint, they think it'll take about a year to get to release and that they've budgeted about 50% of the developer time for whims.

We’ve written down major goals that we want to do for Minecraft release, and it looks like the release will happen sometime late this year. Hopefully we’ll be able to set a date soon.

Because I want to avoid us just focusing on reaching release, I suggested that we should dedicate 50% of the development time in Minecraft towards adding fun new stuff. Basically, any developer working on the game (two people at the moment) can just come up with something they’d want to add on a day-to-day basis, as long as the rest of the team thinks it’s a decent idea. If it ends up being fun, it gets added.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2623477410/strategy-meeting-day-results
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump-incoming

Also, about 2 months was taken for the was 4 minor Beta releases: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3.
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Version_history

That "steak breakfast" was probably actually a steak dinner he ate while in SF accepting the gaming version of an Oscar.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Developers_Conference
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/3597265965/halfway-through-gdc-heres-what-weve-done

[Farseer]

3 months ago, I learned, among other things, that they have an blueprint, they think it'll take about a year to get to release and that they've budgeted about 50% of the developer time for whims.

Too much, IMO. Especially if that time is mixed up with "real" development time.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2623477410/strategy-meeting-day-results
http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2687176736/information-dump-incoming

Also, about 2 months was taken for the was 4 minor Beta releases: 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, 1.3.

According to those posts, Notch considers the game pretty much complete (does that mean he isn't going to update mod API etc?) and he's only going to be building on current features.

The simple fact that those minor releases are considered worthy of a +.1 should tell you enough about development to be extremely disappointed.