If only Notch would allow the game to load terrain/item sprites from places other than their corresponding single sprite sheets.
Those 256-sprite limits are far, far too... limiting.
A modder has already started working on fixing it, of course, but it's tough going with the heavily obfuscated code.
When the hell is Notch going to open up that danged source? :S
Also, why does he keep calling it an API? Giving people access to the source is not an API in the slightest :|
Or did he change his mind about that again?
Last I read, modders would be given NDA signed rights to the source code to make mods instead of having an API.
This is incrediblly silly.
Fundamentally, what would
you recommend Notch do? I can hardly imagine an API that could perform half the things modders have managed to implement. We're talking about custom crafting interfaces; specialized block actions each game tick; customized AI interactions. This is doubly difficult because Minecraft wasn't built with modding in mind.
Honestly, the amount of work required to implement a fully-functioning API with even a tiny subset of the potential modders have already managed to achieve would far outweigh the benefits. Releasing the source code (even in a highly-limited fashion) is an efficient means of allowing modders all the same abilities they currently have.
Mind you, backwards compatibility will still be pretty challenging (though, without changing obfuscation on each release,
some mods might not need to be updated between versions), but then again an API would require Notch to update and maintain each API call for any changed code. This would add a considerable amount of extra work to
every release, whereas releasing the source code places the onus of updating into the hands of modders instead.