phill

ಠ_ಠ You shouldn't interrupt with your fancy fancy pictures

I'm not sure you understand what a flame war is or how it differs from a disagreement. Now, as fun as discussing development cycles can be, how bout some minecraft?

Yes, that's what beta is for, not arguing that fact, however; and that seems to be were we differ on Minecrafts readiness to move to beta. After reading some of the code, specific parts that interest me, and playing the game, there are some portions of the game that are broken. In no way am I saying that he entire game is broken, or that the rest of SMP and SSP aren't worthy of beta status, just that these areas should be addressed before things move to beta. Beta, as you say, is for finding and fixing most bugs, not taking a broken aspect of a game, something you are aware of before beta, and rewriting it. I say this because labelling a game beta gives a certain expectation for its quality, and since he is charging for the beta, you should get that level of quality. I don't think any amount of time in beta would have saved WinME, the upside is that Microsoft learned something from it and the result was WinXP. Now that we are completely off topic.....Hey look, a tree, lets punch it.

I would think that the same could be said about older gamers,especially when it comes to games of their childhood. They may rate SMB3 as one of the best games ever but getting an objective justification for that belief wouldn't be easy.

Your acceptance of broken software is incredible, it is truly amazing, "oh, its ok that it deletes half my windows install, its beta software after all" hell no, that's broken as fuck garbage that should never have made it past basic testing (ie. installing the damn it). "Better then most software that leaves alpha" doesn't mean its ready to do beta, it just means it sucks less then other software. By your standards, the two pieces of software I am currently working on should be released, they work, for one, everything is implemented, the other all but one feature is implemented, one just happens to locks up from time to time because of bad communication between two components. The other lacks acceptable precision in calculations but who the fuck cares, it's good enough right? Reason there is so much shitty software out there is because developers think good enough is the same as good. As a result you get WindowsME.

I go and grab some food and the thread adds another page...So, /home being removed is understandable if his justification is to maintain the survival aspect of the game. The only other option would have been the Fallout route where conditions are put on when and where you can warp, but once again his choice. Given the modding community however, I don't think what he has decided will have much impact on those that want warps. As for being feature complete, I don't think it is, perhaps moderatly close but still not ready for beta just yet. This may be due to a difference in my defintion for what a feature is, think leaves (a feature the game has) vs decaying leaves(a feature that the game does not have) or boats and interpolation making for smooth boats. If you group all aspects of leaves or boats under one feature set and only require part of it to be implemented, then sure, all the features are there. Since the thread is slowly heading towards offtopic, I'll move onto something else. Its a feature. Crowbar activated a plug-in that attempts to remove leaves when all the logs are removed. It's obviously not perfect, but if you remove all the logs in a tree and the leaves don't disappear, hitting a few of the leaves will usually make the rest disappear.

....are you saying that a games multi-player should work just like single-player? because that's all sorts of stupid right there. As for teleporting being hard on the server, true, but so is logging on, re-spawning after you die, walking into a new chunk, or playing in general. Removing /home is just a stop gap measure, one way of hiding the problem that doesn't require fixing it.

Does it show up in the list of recent files opened?

The most recent patches may not break anything or in a few cases fix problem, but that doesn't mean they are good patches or that they address some of the larger problems with SMP. Is the best solution to a picture that keeps falling off the wall a nail through the frame? For the most part, I don't think the broken game mechanics in SMP are that big of a deal, it is the method the server and client use to handle game mechanics that is the issue. Boats work just fine, it is how the client and server handle communication with regards to boats that is broken, and to get it to work correctly, Notch and his team will have to rewrite a decent chunk of code. That's not something you would normally do in beta, sure if it came out of left field you'd rewrite the code, but this is a pretty glaring issue in the "alpha" stage. I probably wouldn't bitch so much if I hadn't paid €10 for it and if I couldn't read the code for myself. ^^this

Generally, when developing software the beta period is used to refine and polish a more or less finalized feature set where as alpha is used to implement features and make sure core features work. SSP has been walking the line between Alpha and Beta for some time, it's a pretty solid game. Now, prior to alpha, you essentially have a prototype where if anything works its a bloody miracle and that is where SMP sits right now. You can decompile java classes fairly easily and when you read through the server code, its a mess, its a bigger mess then you would normally get when decompiling java code.

ಠ_ಠ facebook....go figure. One day I will keep track of all the places he posts things.

http://notch.tumblr.com/post/2175441966/minecraft-beta-december-20-2010 ಠ_ಠ Kinda douché to charge for the beta and not promise the final release, especially considering how much "polish" this game needs. Edit: I am aware it says "all future versions of the game for free" and not "will not provide any future versions for free" but his wording gives a great deal of freedom to "not do shit".

Added markers for most of the warp points and they are more or less in the correct location. If the next map render screws the markers up, I'll just remove them all together since I have no interest in redoing them each time. Otherwise I will allow for OCR people to add markers and I will correct some of the marker locations. http://angryitch.com/Gallery/minecraft/

Fear the wrath of Crowbar Man and his mighty crowbar admin powers.

I honestly cannot figure this one out, generally, connection logic is unrelated to key-bindings, so how would one create a bug that results in this sort of behaviour? I know total ineptitude is one possibly, but I would hope that is not the case...

See, that's just not as cool as what schwaltz said

Since Crowbar updated his image, I updated mine http://angryitch.com/Gallery/minecraft/

Given some of the other stuff, I find it easy to imagine that "asking to update" hasn't been implemented yet, its the enter key not working when you log on that baffles me.

See, I thought he already had, to bad.

You know what is amazing, the Null Pointer feature notch added to the server with this last patch..... Also, my client didn't bother to ask if I wanted to update or not, is this a common feature or just me?

It's on my list of things to figure out, but I have a paper due Thursday that I really should be working on so it likely won't be for a little bit. Anyone wondering, it will be updated shortly after Crowbar posts a new png, it's mostly automated, so it's not all that hard to do.

So, I got things working, now I just have to tweak a few things like zoom levels(3-8 instead of 1-8 ) and figure out why its loading weird shit at higher zoom levels. http://angryitch.com/Gallery/minecraft/

There is an executable version of Overviewer that allows for maps to be generated in a similar fashion to what Crowbar is currently using. There are a few catches though, the first rendering takes several hours, north is down and to the left again and a 90mb minecraft map produces ~900mb worth of png so you need to use something like pngcrush to compress things a little. I am trying to get a script to work that will take the current image and slice it up into tiles for each of the zoom levels but its giving me grief, once I have it figured out I will post the results. Hey0's mod allows for kits to be made; would be nice if tools where part of one so people, or at least people that donate, don't have to carry around a dozen of each.

I just happen to stumble into the server at the right moment.

That's actually what I was attempting to imply, everyone is more or less familiar with my thoughts on Notches abilities, or lack-there-of, and a reference to beating a dead horse should give most a general picture of my thoughts on this most recent patch(es)