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1.8.3 patch changes-Microsoft money at work

B

Bagman817

New Member
The Yogscast (no, really) detail the extensive changes in 1.8.3

Clearly, Microsoft is committed to making meaningful, top down changes to make this a better game for all of us.

Edit: The features were actually added in 1.8.2, 1.8.3 is just a bug fix. STILL, THOUGH
 
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HeilMewTwo said:
Where the hell is this mystical toilet humour that appears only to you?
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Starting with the first screen, hanging over the head of only person in the shot... proceeding for about half the video before they actually start talking about the update... quite literally 'toilet humor' considering the terminology being bantered about.
 
I've been very negative on this Microsoft comedy (oops I mean 'acquisition'), but my one saving grace was the hope that they would take the game and completely re-write it because of the sordid history between Microsoft and Sun/Oracle Java... put it into a language more acceptable to them, and fix ALL the poor design decisions like boat mechanics, etc... but it seems like none of that is gonna happen, just more band-aids atop band-aids. Shame.
 
asb3pe said:
I've been very negative on this Microsoft comedy (oops I mean 'acquisition'), but my one saving grace was the hope that they would take the game and completely re-write it because of the sordid history between Microsoft and Sun/Oracle Java... put it into a language more acceptable to them, and fix ALL the poor design decisions like boat mechanics, etc... but it seems like none of that is gonna happen, just more band-aids atop band-aids. Shame.
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Meaningful change never comes quickly; this is a fundamental law of the universe.
 
RavynousHunter said:
Meaningful change never comes quickly; this is a fundamental law of the universe.
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I dunno about the universe, but it certainly is a fundamental law in America, unless you've been bamboozled by the "hope and change" rubbish. Same old same old, two parties who both do the bidding of one master (and it ain't us)... so nothing every changes except the illusion... but I'm gonna shut up now and go back to playing video games (which is exactly why I play them) before I throw up. :rolleyes:
 
I personally don't want the game to be rewritten, for a variety of reasons. Particularly, modding things written in C# (the language Microsoft would most definitely choose) is not as fun or even marginally as easy to accomplish, as you can see for other games like Terraria. Many of the capabilities we have now would simply be lost. There's no doubt that a completely different team would be put on the project, leaving it to be an uninspired recreation without any of the original feel. There would be zero compatibility with everything that exists currently, other than perhaps third-party tools which might still be able to edit the world saves, assuming they don't rewrite that as well. And Microsoft taking such an active role in the development would likely mean other changes, such as to the EULA.

As it stands, Mojang is already slowly stripping out aspects which tie the game back to its roots. It's lost some of its charm along the way as a result. 1.8 is a particularly bad version in that respect, notably with mobs, where even after three patches they still float around on seemingly abnormal gravity, and can barely move in water. But it's not actually the gravity, it's somewhere else, perhaps in motion smoothing code for entity movement updates, because I never found the culprit before when I tried to fix it myself. I stopped bothering when the community made it clear that 1.8 wasn't where they wanted to go.

Modders' resistance to go to 1.8, where a large majority of the game is actually still the same, is a pretty good indication of the reaction we'd see upon an entire rewrite.
 
...Why would modding a Minecraft-equivalent in C# be any more (or less) difficult than Java? They're both equally easy to decompile and their syntax is pretty much identical. The only difficulty is translating from Java's libraries to .Net. I can find decompilers for either Java and/or .Net in less than 5 minutes; any idiot can do it.
 
FyberOptic said:
Particularly, modding things written in C# (the language Microsoft would most definitely choose) is not as fun or even marginally as easy to accomplish, as you can see for other games like Terraria.
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I don't know anything about programming, but I do know there are loads of mods for Terraria (the modding api certainly helps). The only reason it doesn't have more mods is because Terraria has a smaller playerbase than Minecraft.
 
C# applications aren't equally easy to decompile though, which is one of the biggest things against it. A Java class file is its own object, you can change one without affecting anything else in the application, because a JAR is essentially just a ZIP file. C# code is trapped inside the DLL or executable, you can't simply extract it and modify it easily without modifying the binaries themselves. This alone leads to problems, such as breaking the certificate of a signed executable, and worse if the application checks for modification. At that point you're resorting to actually cracking the application in order to mod it, where an entirely different degree of legality comes into play.

C# has an equivalent of reflection, and I think it's even possible to generate assemblies dynamically, but it's all rather convoluted and I can't imagine trying to recreate the level of functionality we have now. I honestly don't think modding would be where it is today if Minecraft hadn't been written in Java.
 
RunUO (a server emulator for Ultima Online) generates assemblies dynamically, you can learn from what they've done. Or, alternatively, just give the game a set of actual effing modding tools so you don't need to bother with that rubbish.
 
asb3pe said:
I dunno about the universe, but it certainly is a fundamental law in America, unless you've been bamboozled by the "hope and change" rubbish. Same old same old, two parties who both do the bidding of one master (and it ain't us)... so nothing every changes except the illusion... but I'm gonna shut up now and go back to playing video games (which is exactly why I play them) before I throw up. :rolleyes:
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Mojang needs to get it's internal infrastructure under control before they start making sweeping changes. I know that in the 80's, when the research lab I worked at (Cyclotomics, Inc.) went from being an associated entity of Kodak to a fully owned subsidiary it took almost a year for the organizational reporting to be finalized.
 
RavynousHunter said:
...Why would modding a Minecraft-equivalent in C# be any more (or less) difficult than Java? They're both equally easy to decompile and their syntax is pretty much identical. The only difficulty is translating from Java's libraries to .Net. I can find decompilers for either Java and/or .Net in less than 5 minutes; any idiot can do it.
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[sarcasm]
I dunno... Maybe having full access to quality, optimized gaming engines and standardized APIs makes things more difficult? :D

[/sarcasm]

I know that it has nothing to do with proprietary libraries since .Net has been turned over to the public domain, nor cross platform since MS Visual Studio currently supports Intel and Arm processors, used in PC, Apple, Linux and Android systems. The package is free (Express edition) and should be running on all major OS platforms soon (MS just dumped a ton of cash into an Android distro free of Google's App restrictions).

In fact, Microsoft has stated publically on several occasions several times that they want to utilize Minecraft as an educational model to inspire the next generation of software engineers while they're young...
 
Aye, Mono already handles cross-platform compatibility, and I know of (but can't recall its name) a working .Net Android dev kit. But, seriously, if Microsoft were going to recreate Minecraft, why wouldn't they add in modding tools? They know modded Minecraft is a rather large thing, even a cursory Google search could prove that much, and that'd get more people to buy the product, which means more money. It might cost more in terms of development, but the additional product longevity, as well as the extra appeal, would prolly more than recoup the cost of their development. Not to say that Microsoft is planning such a thing, which they likely aren't because a hands-off approach would be more profitable since it'd step on fewer toes.

I still find it funny how people were worried Microsoft would "totes ruin Minecraft forever," and yet, the only thing screwing up Minecraft is the same thing that's been screwing up Minecraft since its inception: the incompetence of Mojang.
 
It's worth pointing out that just because C#/Mono is cross-platform, that doesn't mean an application written in it necessarily is. Minecraft is a huge asset to Microsoft, I doubt they'd go to any trouble to benefit platforms outside of their own.

Minecraft is already dependent on native libraries to work. Some of these are for LWJGL, which only provides versions for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris, meaning you're SOL for any other platform unless you built your own version of the libraries. Then there's the Twitch libraries for 1.7+, which I'm fairly positive have no source code available. You could just as easily move critical code into a native library, and only include a Windows DLL version, and suddenly you've platform-locked a game despite most of it being in a cross-platform language. This is true whether you're talking about Java or C#.
 
Honestly, when I talk "cross-platform," I mostly talk about the big three: Windows, Mac, and Linux. The rest are even smaller fish than Linux.
 
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