1.8 Snapshot - Underground Biomes in Vanilla

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ahh, the yes men... the worst part of any community..

Yep. So we have the 'lead designer' (an API specialist with little design/industry experience) effectively in charge of one of the most popular/successful indie games pandering ideas to the lowest common denominator without any kind of PR staff to act as a buffer between himself and that 'community'

Then we wonder where its going wrong.
 
I'd rather see minecraft in the 2.x update (long ways off I know) get its own game engine and scrap java completely. Maybe it could allow for java based mods to be intergrated into the game still without forcing the modders to have to learn new methods. Either way when the game at its heart is a horribly optimized pile of code they shouldn't be looking at just adding more code on top of it and should just give it all a rework from the ground up.
 
Its not that, there in lies the problem. If you do a bit of research on the topic it is well documented that the entire game is built completely on java and has no game engine of its own, that is why many people get bad performance.
 
That's why I was saying it would be awesome if they were to rewrite the game from the ground up without a dependance on java but allow java based mods to integrate. Not sure if that is even possible though my knowledge of coding is basic at best.
 
Erm.

MineCraft has a game engine of its own, though it does borrow some open source components. That game engine is written in Java. If you're thinking that other languages like C are "game engines", then you're still off the mark - programming languages aren't game engines, full stop.

Porting would slow development across the board (for modders and Mojang alike - modders more so). Granted it'd allow for some platform-specific optimisations, but the cost of that would be an immense amount of time spent getting things back to where they are now. Given Mojang's current rate of progress, we'd likely be looking at five or six years, during which time everyone will just stick with the Java version because that's all there'd be mods for.

No, loading Java-based mods into a non-Java-based version of MineCraft simply isn't feasible. A non-Java-based version of MineCraft which supported Java mods would have far more "performance issues" then what we've got now.
 
If I am wrong I have no quarrel with that, however in everything I have read it points at Java/unoptimized code as the source of the strain and poor performance on many systems. My example of this would be a comparison between 7 days to die and minecraft, 7 days to die is built on the cryengine has better looking graphics and performance wise is supiorior to minecraft (granted 7 days to die doesn't use the same world generation as of yet because it is still in development it does have full physics for blocks). I look to that sort of comparison as proof of the faults of using java as a base
 
It's true that porting could net some performance improvements, but the drawbacks in other areas outweigh them far too heavily. And performance could be improved with what they've got, quite frankly... it's not like it's Java that's tying the game down to a minimum number of threads. Though I'm actually amazed how well the game runs as things stand.

Me, I just wish Mojang would limit themselves to fixing bugs, then leave the code alone entirely.
 
A "game engine" is quite a vague term. If you take any game, and split it apart into the "technology" and "game content" parts, the "technology" part is a game engine.

For example, if you started with Minecraft, and removed all the built-in blocks, items, entities, GUIs, textures, language translations, etc, then the stuff left would be a game engine, with which you could then build a Minecraft-like game. Or you could build a game that's not like Minecraft, but then you're ignoring a lot of the engine's abilities and should consider using a different engine.

If you take Crysis, and remove all the (whatever game content Crysis has), the stuff left is CryEngine 2, which you can then use to build a Crysis-like game. Or you could build a game that's not like Crysis, but then you're ignoring a lot of the engine's abilities and should consider using a different engine.

If you take the original Doom, and remove all the levels, textures, weapons, etc, the stuff left is the Doom engine (aka id-Tech 1). You wouldn't say "Doom is bad because it uses the Doom engine. They should switch to another engine," though, because the Doom Engine is just part of Doom - what you are really saying is "They should throw away half their game and re-do it from scratch."
In the same way, it doesn't make sense to say "Minecraft is bad because it uses the Minecraft engine. They should switch to another engine."

Languages are entirely different from game engines. I don't have sources, but many people have found that computation-intensive Java code runs at about the same speed as computation-intensive C code.
Also, because Java is garbage collected it needs around 20% more memory than C for equivalent performance. A bit inefficient there, but not a huge deal.
 
Perhaps I should have explained myself a little more thoroughly, I used the term game engine due to the fact that all I know about coding is the very basics and my terminology may be incomplete. I was referring to (from what I have read and the comparison between similar games) that minecraft has faults in its coding and is limited by java in itself for example being limited by only one core, and hanging on to resources instead of releasing them when it should. That was more so what I was referring to by saying it would be nice if they rebuilt using a different engine although as I have been corrected in that I should have said that it would be nice if they rewrote in a different language.
 
Java's not limited to one core. A lot of what you read about how MineCraft could be "improved" is written by people with about as much knowledge on the matter as yourself, so take it with a grain of salt. ;)
 
I think a better request would be for Mojang to optimize their code, because we all know that several things like hoppers are laggy to no end.
 
personally i hate the watered down villager trading, grab 1 librarian, make a cane farm, infinite emeralds, grab a blacksmith, infinite diamond gears, so in total now you need 2 diamonds in vanilla for an enchanting table and 1 for a jukebox then you're done needing them unless you fancy making fireworks.

hell who cares about wasting diamond stuff on the BOA4 when can just grab infinite diamond stuff anyway?
 
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I am not sure if any of those real issues are address by new Minecraft.

How about holes in the world?
I hardly remember even one village that spawned at flat place without ravines, gravels, water, caves and so on, simply saying UGLY every time.
I do not even speak about trading system, enchantment, breading, path finding, jumping caws.
 
personally i hate the watered down villager trading, grab 1 librarian, make a cane farm, infinite emeralds, grab a blacksmith, infinite diamond gears, so in total now you need 2 diamonds in vanilla for an enchanting table and 1 for a jukebox then you're done needing them unless you fancy making fireworks.

hell who cares about wasting diamond stuff on the BOA4 when can just grab infinite diamond stuff anyway?

You should watch DocM's Mindcrack series. He's been getting infinite Emeralds and Diamong Gear for a long time. No update to 1.8 needed for that.
 
Almost every resource in Minecraft (vanilla or modded) is infinite if you are willing to put in the time to set up a system to gain it. Modded definitely moreso than vanilla but when you can play the game without being able to mine at all (original superflat, 3 layers of dirt over bedrock) and cheerfully not just survive but gain a lot of resources (specifically iron, diamond gear, enchanting table, enough redstone to have pistons and a fair amount of vanilla automation) even vanilla is able to be "broken". (this was in whichever the first version that had villager trading was 1.3 maybe?)