Hi citizens of Minecraft. I've been playing this game since it was nothing more than a simple sandbox and let me tell you I am impressed with this beautiful game. Unfortunately I cannot play online with my friends right now because minecraft.net is down. Well this got me thinking: Notch has his own company now, there is literally no reason the server should be down for more than a few minutes for any reason. HIS OWN COMPANY. I'm sure everyone there gets a salary, who's job is server upkeep?
This however is only one of the problems with Minecraft. Lets talk about Notch. Notch loves Dwarf Fortress, hell who doesn't? That community, however, had a problem. The community revolved around worshiping the creator, Toady, and it seems like Notch has become a big internet celebrity, just like Toady.
So what is wrong with that? Well, nothing really. Kudos for him; he made tons of money, he made possibly one of the best games of all time, and he is known worldwide (in a limited sense). He updates his game regularly, well he used to. I remember the joy I would get as nearly every week I would be surprised with new features and better stability. Something changed, I began to realize that notch is not really the best programmer in the world. A new release would break existing features, some features got cut out completely, some remained broken and unfixed for months. Why notch? Why does snow still not work? Why is the net code still horrible? (albeit better) Why... Oh hey look minecraft.net is back up. That only took an hour. Back on topic, I believe that a friend of mine sums up this problem the best.
Quote from bporgn »
...Not implementing something trivial that many people want, is irresponsible. But why would it matter if I had paid them? I paid Notch money, but somehow I'm not allowed to be upset when leagues of promises are broken, and when feature after feature, bug after bug, all with completely trivial solutions are ignored for months (or forever). Do you understand here, the problem isn't that I paid Notch money, or that I didn't pay money for this mod. The problem is people are failing to meet a baseline expectation, something that any other person in their situation would do, without hesitation or apprehension...
We paid Notch. We paid him, his company is kept afloat on the money we sent him. Why then is everyone in this forum content to kiss the soil Notch trod upon when this game is literally a buggy piece of garbage. Have you ever checked the wiki? Great source of information, particularly when it comes to bugs. Why is it that every feature has section after it naming every stupid bug that affects it. Not to say I don't, as mentioned before, love this game. Just imagine how much better it would be without so many bugs. In this build theres a bug in SMP where people will suddenly just disappear, forcing you to disconnect and join in order to see them again. Why is this even a bug? A new bug even.
MInecraft Beta is a misnomer. This is an Alpha. Dwarf Fortress is an alpha and will remain an alpha as long as new features are added. The definition of a beta states that all features are present and the only work done to the program is bug fixing. I see a ton of new features, but not a lot of bug fixing. Get on that Notch.
Now lets talk about you, yes you, the average forum user. Why is it that half the posts I see are similar to this:
Wow this is perfect. thats all i have to say. :sponge:.
(Not going to point any fingers but this is an actual post.)
or this
AWESOME! I WANT SO BAD!!!! Il pay 15 15 and 20 . PLEASE MAKE!
(also a real post)
Now it's cool and all to give notch/a modder praise, but posting a ton of emoticons after your post is not helping. Give criticism. Talk about features you like. I'll give you a if you do. Wait... I'll give you a diamond? I'm not sure I understand this habit of you guys have of endlessly "circle jerking" about everything. The problem I have with notch being a celebrity is that he has so much confidence that he seems to be unconcerned with the state of his game and you, dear forum goers, are part of the problem. I'm not telling you to change your ways, I'm just asking you to think. If you have a problem voice it. Tell Notch you have a problem. Get others to contribute. Stop empty posting. For the love of god, please stop empty posting.
The game is not finished. The game will not be finished for a long while. Stop being a troll, and understand that the game is in BETA stages. Only recently advancing from ALPHA. The game is not done. Notch generously allows us to play his UNFINISHED work. Quit your bitching, and be grateful.
The game is not finished. The game will not be finished for a long while. Stop being a troll, and understand that the game is in BETA stages. Only recently advancing from ALPHA. The game is not done. Notch generously allows us to play his UNFINISHED work. Quit your bitching, and be grateful.
Yes, Notch is so generous to become a millionaire. It's so humble of him.
The game is not finished. The game will not be finished for a long while. Stop being a troll, and understand that the game is in BETA stages. Only recently advancing from ALPHA. The game is not done. Notch generously allows us to play his UNFINISHED work. Quit your bitching, and be grateful.
Please just be joking. If the OP's bitter sarcasm wasn't obvious to you, there is a problem. But I digress. Notch is generous for putting so much time and effort into this game. Just go back to basic ethics. It isn't right to play and enjoy a game, while simultaneously trashing its creator on a public forum.
Ahem. Anyway, I'd like to ask a question, simply for my own sake. Sorry for the break of pace.
Are there really that many bugs, and if so, on which mode? I personally am only interested in Single Player Survival Mode. Is there an amount of bugs that it interferes noticeably with gameplay? I'd really appreciate an answer before I go ahead and buy it.
To all the people that whine and moan. Don't play it. Sell your account. Get rid of it. Thats all you have to do.
Or, if you know notch isn't the best programmer, beat him. Make your own version of minecraft. Do something like fortresscraft is doing. Until then, this is what you are getting, and you posting on the forums sure as heck won't make notch change anything.
Mojang continues down this lane of teetering on the edge of are we doing it right/are we doing it wrong in terms of minecraft development, it could have some fairly funny results
these brackets (which futher enforces that the internet is full of ********)
make Mojang look like the biggest fail of the decade if minecraft dives down due to lack of attention.
L'll be sitting here saying I told you so in any case
Can...can I give you a cookie for restoring some of my faith in humanity?
/on topic
It's also not fair to tell people not to play if they are bothered by things. Critiquing the game is the point of beta. When users take it as far as the OP has, that's when there's a problem.
look erors occur minecraft was never expected to get this big. Also all those updates were due to a lack of content(No colored blocks) as it was easy to add in he added more and more content but tbh he can have a break imo. He still is working on it along with other developers in mojang(so far i only know of jeb) to be honest for an indie company its doing well (i admit i hate that there is no nether still in SMP also very little SMP mod support)
It's also not fair to tell people not to play if they are bothered by things. Critiquing the game is the point of beta. When users take it as far as the OP has, that's when there's a problem.
If I can't voice my opinions about this game and this community, what may I ask is the point? Any negativity on this forum is instantly beaten down by you guys. I'm not going to stop playing this game. As I said, I love it. Its pretty much the best game ever made.
I'm just saying that it can, and should, be better. I've seen many mod communities go down this road, they no longer exist. I hope Minecraft survives, I would be crushed if it didn't.
To Josh Knight who is sick of these posts. Don't read it. Don't open the thread. Stop paying attention to it, that's all you have to do.
Or, if you know that OP isn't the best writer, beat him. Make your own version of a complaint thread. Do something like other posters are doing. Until then, this is what you are getting, and you posting in this thread sure as heck won't change anything.
Ahem. Anyway, I'd like to ask a question, simply for my own sake. Sorry for the break of pace.
Are there really that many bugs, and if so, on which mode? I personally am only interested in Single Player Survival Mode. Is there an amount of bugs that it interferes noticeably with gameplay? I'd really appreciate an answer before I go ahead and buy it.
This is another very very common defense for not fixing the game. Personally I am the opposite, I don't care at all about SP because I find it completely boring. I'm sorry that this isn't the story for you, but it is for me, and many many other people. The number of apologetic posts on this forum is staggering, it seems everyone wants to find a way to pat the developers on the back and say "Yes, I am completely aware that this feature is irredeemably broken, but it's okay, because I don't use it! Good job Mojang!" It's counter productive and idiotic, and you should stop right now and ask yourself if you really think that's a logical excuse not to improve this game.
So lemme just take one example, of a feature that is broken and has no reason to be. As many may be aware, there's a server mod framework called Bukkit. It allows users to easily mod in functionality on the server and has a very wide range of possibilities. The community, much like this forum, is obsessed with ignoring good ideas in favor of hacky work-arounds that don't come close to realizing the feature being requested. A good example would be countless threads asking if someone has made a mod that fixes snowfall in biomes. This is something that is very possible to be fixed with or without bukkit, but it still hasn't been after many months. However, in literally every one of these threads (there are 8 of them) the thread dies after someone says "You should just use WorldEdit! It lets you spawn snow in a radius around you, which is basically the same thing." It's not the same thing. It doesn't come close, and it will never be an excuse not to fix it.
The reason I mention Bukkit is because of the nether. I haven't done any playing in the nether, because I have been waiting for it to be implemented in SMP, something I assumed would come with the halloween update, as was explicitly stated by Notch. But it has been months, and the Nether still isn't working. After installing Bukkit on the server I play on, I found a thread where someone made a working nether fix. This person had decided, because so many Nether fixes on the Bukkit forums did not properly implement the nether as it functioned in Single Player, that it was finally time to make a mod that implemented it the original way, with no strings attached. And they did, it was a tiny project they made in their spare time and it worked perfectly. I played in the Nether for the first time and it spiced up the game immensely. A young, "untalented" scripter made a working Nether mod in one day, in their spare time, something which the Mojang team has postponed indefinitely. In fact, the only thing the game has really managed to innovate was its wide array of bugs.
So now someone is going to tell me "What bugs? I play every day and I haven't experienced any bugs!" Well let me tell you. The most prominent bug right now applies to all "living" objects. This means any object that is not a block. Players, minecarts, enemy mobs. Quite often, some objects of this type will just not show up for a player. This bug was mentioned in the OP. In the case of players being invisible, the only way to fix the bug is for one of the players experiencing it to log out and back in. This means either the person who is invisible, or the person who cannot see their invisible friend. Well it's just a tiny bug, it can't be that big a deal, right? Well it kind of is. Because it happens often enough that one or more people will have to relog every ten minutes, if not less. I am not exaggerating, by any means. Players go invisible without knowing it for so long that we have gone on hour long expeditions, only to find that we actually had two more players with us the entire time, because they were invisible. This bug hasn't been in the game as far as I know until the most recent build, or one of them. On top of this, the game crashes at almost an equal frequency. It in fact crashes so often that in our skype channel we've taken to just saying "Bye minecraft." to indicate that we have crashed, so people don't think we are leaving the server. And if you increase your view distance to the maximum, the frequency of the crashes literally doubles. But a bug will be fixed, eventually (Someday. I don't know, and I don't expect it to be soon.), so what else is wrong with the game? Other than the bugs minecraft is perfect right?
Well not really. Any programmer (especially a games programmer) can look at minecraft and immediately recognize some issues. Glaring issues, things that almost every programmer you speak to would know to never, ever do. Let's start simple. Chunks are updated to every player in their entirety. This means that every single block in the entire 81 chunk area that is loaded around your player, is sent to you, the player, over a network connection. This means two things, first of all it means a ton of bandwidth is being wasted, more bandwidth than any other game wastes. But the other thing it means, and this is a lot more important, is that your client can locate any block within the 1296x1296x128 area around you. Without fail, you could hack your client to pinpoint any block, any player, any anything in this zone. Diamond, gold, instantly, and nothing, I say again nothing can stop the clients on your server from doing this, in Minecraft's present form. Ironically, your client doesn't even show blocks that aren't touching air. So why do we send them everything, even blocks surrounded by layers and layers of solid stone, that the player would never be able to see in any situation?
Another great example is breaking blocks. Did you know, that you don't actually tell the server anything when you begin to break a block? You only tell them when you finish breaking a block. Yes, the time it takes to break obsidian is literally a GUI hack. This is why griefers have wasted no time creating hacks that can break any block instantly. They also can repair damaged tools, duplicate items in their inventory, and place any block anywhere in the world (while they are invisible). This is because all of these things are clientside, something that no self-respecting programmer would dare doing. Notch already understands that these things can be exploited, he has been hoping that these 'god hacks' would not be made before he could implement a more secure system. But part of this is because all his previous attempts to implement a more secure system made the game unplayable.
Alright, so those are some things that are entirely game breaking. Let's look at something a bit more esoteric. For those of you not familiar with what a timestep is, a timestep is what we call the amount of time simulated for each frame (or loop) run. There are two ways to implement a timestep, fixed timestep, and variable timestep. In a fixed timestep, your program reads the timing reported by your processors clock, and waits until enough time has passed for another frame to be executed. Typically, this amount of time will be around 1/60th of a second, yielding approximately 60 simulated frames a second, each simulating exactly 1/60th of a second.
A variable timestep is a little different. A variable timestep runs no matter what, every chance the processor has to execute a game frame is taken. To compensate for how often the game is simulating, the world is instead simulated not on a discrete timestep, but the amount of time passed since the last frame was executed. This means, the faster the game is running, the smaller the timestep. With a small timestep, the physics will be more precisely calculated, and the game will only take a relatively small amount of time to process. However, when the converse is happening, when the server is running very slowly, the game will attempt to make a huge timestep, and here's where we run into problems. Physics will begin to make very large calculations, objects will tend to intersect more, and in the worst case minecarts will fly through walls, off their tracks, out of order, and just about every other hideous problem you can imagine. The issue with using a variable timestep is that this behavior will essentially be guaranteed. The game will never run at a stable speed, and the physics will consistently be inconsistent. Currently, no game with any kind of physics system (and few games period) uses a variable time step. This is because it GUARANTEES that the physics will be unreliable. Your timestep is an arbitrary value every frame, meaning it can never be rigidly determined, and will always become VERY unstable when the server is performing badly. When a timestep is changing on a value that is not uniform to the execution, the game stops being deterministic. This is what makes minecarts pass through eachother, and why they appear to speed up and slow down when they are going a uniform speed. Even if in theory the timestep will always be the right amount, in practice it will always be imprecise (There is literally a field of research dedicated to processor timing), and a larger timestep will always make physics less reliable. This means, given the same starting conditions, the ending conditions will ALWAYS be different. Minecraft uses a variable timestep. This means that minecart physics can never be predictable, they will always be at the mercy of the servers performance and they will always be unstable. Nothing you can ever do with a variable timestep will change this. With a fixed timestep, the physics always simulates the same amount of time, and given the same initial conditions the simulation will always end the same way. If the game were to use a fixed timestep, minecarts and all other game physics would never be able to perform in an indeterministic way. Given the same starting conditions, they would always execute in the exact same way. Let me reiterate, there are no games that use a variable timestep the way minecraft does, explicitly because BY DEFINITION it makes the physics unreliable.
The thing I stress is that all of these problems have simple solutions, solutions that would take less than a day to implement. This is not about the game being in development, this is not about what mode people prefer to play. This is about obvious improvements that no human being should be hesitating to implement. If you want to challenge this, you are only challenging pure, unbiased logic, and programming knowledge. If you are proud to ignore messages like the OP's and mine, you are only proud of being ignorant.
To Josh Knight who is sick of these posts. Don't read it. Don't open the thread. Stop paying attention to it, that's all you have to do.
Or, if you know that OP isn't the best writer, beat him. Make your own version of a complaint thread. Do something like other posters are doing. Until then, this is what you are getting, and you posting in this thread sure as heck won't change anything.
Hahaha. This is exactly the point. Nobody is here because they are individually tormented by the problems with the game. We all still play it. We are here because there is no excuse for these shortcomings. This thread should be the TED of Minecraft, these problems need recognition, not incessant childish logic. Please.
bporgn...my god, that has to be easily the best post I have ever read on these forums.
I will savour this intelligence while this thread is still here.
Now if only everyone else realized how broken and fail Minecraft is without resorting to SELL UR ACCT DNT PLAY LOL
Hi citizens of Minecraft. I've been playing this game since it was nothing more than a simple sandbox and let me tell you I am impressed with this beautiful game. Unfortunately I cannot play online with my friends right now because minecraft.net is down. Well this got me thinking: Notch has his own company now, there is literally no reason the server should be down for more than a few minutes for any reason. HIS OWN COMPANY. I'm sure everyone there gets a salary, who's job is server upkeep?
This however is only one of the problems with Minecraft. Lets talk about Notch. Notch loves Dwarf Fortress, hell who doesn't? That community, however, had a problem. The community revolved around worshiping the creator, Toady, and it seems like Notch has become a big internet celebrity, just like Toady.
So what is wrong with that? Well, nothing really. Kudos for him; he made tons of money, he made possibly one of the best games of all time, and he is known worldwide (in a limited sense). He updates his game regularly, well he used to. I remember the joy I would get as nearly every week I would be surprised with new features and better stability. Something changed, I began to realize that notch is not really the best programmer in the world. A new release would break existing features, some features got cut out completely, some remained broken and unfixed for months. Why notch? Why does snow still not work? Why is the net code still horrible? (albeit better) Why... Oh hey look minecraft.net is back up. That only took an hour. Back on topic, I believe that a friend of mine sums up this problem the best.
Quote from bporgn »
...Not implementing something trivial that many people want, is irresponsible. But why would it matter if I had paid them? I paid Notch money, but somehow I'm not allowed to be upset when leagues of promises are broken, and when feature after feature, bug after bug, all with completely trivial solutions are ignored for months (or forever). Do you understand here, the problem isn't that I paid Notch money, or that I didn't pay money for this mod. The problem is people are failing to meet a baseline expectation, something that any other person in their situation would do, without hesitation or apprehension...
We paid Notch. We paid him, his company is kept afloat on the money we sent him. Why then is everyone in this forum content to kiss the soil Notch trod upon when this game is literally a buggy piece of garbage. Have you ever checked the wiki? Great source of information, particularly when it comes to bugs. Why is it that every feature has section after it naming every stupid bug that affects it. Not to say I don't, as mentioned before, love this game. Just imagine how much better it would be without so many bugs. In this build theres a bug in SMP where people will suddenly just disappear, forcing you to disconnect and join in order to see them again. Why is this even a bug? A new bug even.
MInecraft Beta is a misnomer. This is an Alpha. Dwarf Fortress is an alpha and will remain an alpha as long as new features are added. The definition of a beta states that all features are present and the only work done to the program is bug fixing. I see a ton of new features, but not a lot of bug fixing. Get on that Notch.
Now lets talk about you, yes you, the average forum user. Why is it that half the posts I see are similar to this:
Wow this is perfect. thats all i have to say. :sponge:.
(Not going to point any fingers but this is an actual post.)
or this
AWESOME! I WANT SO BAD!!!! Il pay 15 15 and 20 . PLEASE MAKE!
(also a real post)
Now it's cool and all to give notch/a modder praise, but posting a ton of emoticons after your post is not helping. Give criticism. Talk about features you like. I'll give you a if you do. Wait... I'll give you a diamond? I'm not sure I understand this habit of you guys have of endlessly "circle jerking" about everything. The problem I have with notch being a celebrity is that he has so much confidence that he seems to be unconcerned with the state of his game and you, dear forum goers, are part of the problem. I'm not telling you to change your ways, I'm just asking you to think. If you have a problem voice it. Tell Notch you have a problem. Get others to contribute. Stop empty posting. For the love of god, please stop empty posting.
Now everyone ignore me and call me a troll.
+Up
And I've the same background really, played since no sound in creative and now I want my money back.
Quote from Embrausre »
The game is not finished. The game will not be finished for a long while. Stop being a troll, and understand that the game is in BETA stages. Only recently advancing from ALPHA. The game is not done. Notch generously allows us to play his UNFINISHED work. Quit your bitching, and be grateful.
This however is only one of the problems with Minecraft. Lets talk about Notch. Notch loves Dwarf Fortress, hell who doesn't? That community, however, had a problem. The community revolved around worshiping the creator, Toady, and it seems like Notch has become a big internet celebrity, just like Toady.
So what is wrong with that? Well, nothing really. Kudos for him; he made tons of money, he made possibly one of the best games of all time, and he is known worldwide (in a limited sense). He updates his game regularly, well he used to. I remember the joy I would get as nearly every week I would be surprised with new features and better stability. Something changed, I began to realize that notch is not really the best programmer in the world. A new release would break existing features, some features got cut out completely, some remained broken and unfixed for months. Why notch? Why does snow still not work? Why is the net code still horrible? (albeit better) Why... Oh hey look minecraft.net is back up. That only took an hour. Back on topic, I believe that a friend of mine sums up this problem the best.
We paid Notch. We paid him, his company is kept afloat on the money we sent him. Why then is everyone in this forum content to kiss the soil Notch trod upon when this game is literally a buggy piece of garbage. Have you ever checked the wiki? Great source of information, particularly when it comes to bugs. Why is it that every feature has section after it naming every stupid bug that affects it. Not to say I don't, as mentioned before, love this game. Just imagine how much better it would be without so many bugs. In this build theres a bug in SMP where people will suddenly just disappear, forcing you to disconnect and join in order to see them again. Why is this even a bug? A new bug even.
MInecraft Beta is a misnomer. This is an Alpha. Dwarf Fortress is an alpha and will remain an alpha as long as new features are added. The definition of a beta states that all features are present and the only work done to the program is bug fixing. I see a ton of new features, but not a lot of bug fixing. Get on that Notch.
Now lets talk about you, yes you, the average forum user. Why is it that half the posts I see are similar to this:
Wow this is perfect. thats all i have to say. :sponge:.
(Not going to point any fingers but this is an actual post.)
or this
AWESOME! I WANT SO BAD!!!! Il pay 15 15 and 20 . PLEASE MAKE!
(also a real post)
Now it's cool and all to give notch/a modder praise, but posting a ton of emoticons after your post is not helping. Give criticism. Talk about features you like. I'll give you a if you do. Wait... I'll give you a diamond? I'm not sure I understand this habit of you guys have of endlessly "circle jerking" about everything. The problem I have with notch being a celebrity is that he has so much confidence that he seems to be unconcerned with the state of his game and you, dear forum goers, are part of the problem. I'm not telling you to change your ways, I'm just asking you to think. If you have a problem voice it. Tell Notch you have a problem. Get others to contribute. Stop empty posting. For the love of god, please stop empty posting.
Now everyone ignore me and call me a troll.
Yes, Notch is so generous to become a millionaire. It's so humble of him.
...
EDIT at Abnegation: Sooner or later you'll see Notch putting his name on everything like Trump. xD
Did not read entire post. Disregarded.
love,
shankypoo
Mod edit: User warned. Spammy post and not contributing.
It was situational irony.
Please just be joking. If the OP's bitter sarcasm wasn't obvious to you, there is a problem. But I digress. Notch is generous for putting so much time and effort into this game. Just go back to basic ethics. It isn't right to play and enjoy a game, while simultaneously trashing its creator on a public forum.
Ahem. Anyway, I'd like to ask a question, simply for my own sake. Sorry for the break of pace.
Are there really that many bugs, and if so, on which mode? I personally am only interested in Single Player Survival Mode. Is there an amount of bugs that it interferes noticeably with gameplay? I'd really appreciate an answer before I go ahead and buy it.
A lot, right?
I'm not saying Notch is perfect, but server upgrades take time too, and we keep pushing the servers minecraft.net runs on waay too high a lot.
Or, if you know notch isn't the best programmer, beat him. Make your own version of minecraft. Do something like fortresscraft is doing. Until then, this is what you are getting, and you posting on the forums sure as heck won't make notch change anything.
http://mojang.com/
Like this merchandice
and
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/global/ ... tandings/5
these brackets (which futher enforces that the internet is full of ********)
make Mojang look like the biggest fail of the decade if minecraft dives down due to lack of attention.
L'll be sitting here saying I told you so in any case
Can...can I give you a cookie for restoring some of my faith in humanity?
/on topic
It's also not fair to tell people not to play if they are bothered by things. Critiquing the game is the point of beta. When users take it as far as the OP has, that's when there's a problem.
If I can't voice my opinions about this game and this community, what may I ask is the point? Any negativity on this forum is instantly beaten down by you guys. I'm not going to stop playing this game. As I said, I love it. Its pretty much the best game ever made.
I'm just saying that it can, and should, be better. I've seen many mod communities go down this road, they no longer exist. I hope Minecraft survives, I would be crushed if it didn't.
Or, if you know that OP isn't the best writer, beat him. Make your own version of a complaint thread. Do something like other posters are doing. Until then, this is what you are getting, and you posting in this thread sure as heck won't change anything.
This is another very very common defense for not fixing the game. Personally I am the opposite, I don't care at all about SP because I find it completely boring. I'm sorry that this isn't the story for you, but it is for me, and many many other people. The number of apologetic posts on this forum is staggering, it seems everyone wants to find a way to pat the developers on the back and say "Yes, I am completely aware that this feature is irredeemably broken, but it's okay, because I don't use it! Good job Mojang!" It's counter productive and idiotic, and you should stop right now and ask yourself if you really think that's a logical excuse not to improve this game.
So lemme just take one example, of a feature that is broken and has no reason to be. As many may be aware, there's a server mod framework called Bukkit. It allows users to easily mod in functionality on the server and has a very wide range of possibilities. The community, much like this forum, is obsessed with ignoring good ideas in favor of hacky work-arounds that don't come close to realizing the feature being requested. A good example would be countless threads asking if someone has made a mod that fixes snowfall in biomes. This is something that is very possible to be fixed with or without bukkit, but it still hasn't been after many months. However, in literally every one of these threads (there are 8 of them) the thread dies after someone says "You should just use WorldEdit! It lets you spawn snow in a radius around you, which is basically the same thing." It's not the same thing. It doesn't come close, and it will never be an excuse not to fix it.
The reason I mention Bukkit is because of the nether. I haven't done any playing in the nether, because I have been waiting for it to be implemented in SMP, something I assumed would come with the halloween update, as was explicitly stated by Notch. But it has been months, and the Nether still isn't working. After installing Bukkit on the server I play on, I found a thread where someone made a working nether fix. This person had decided, because so many Nether fixes on the Bukkit forums did not properly implement the nether as it functioned in Single Player, that it was finally time to make a mod that implemented it the original way, with no strings attached. And they did, it was a tiny project they made in their spare time and it worked perfectly. I played in the Nether for the first time and it spiced up the game immensely. A young, "untalented" scripter made a working Nether mod in one day, in their spare time, something which the Mojang team has postponed indefinitely. In fact, the only thing the game has really managed to innovate was its wide array of bugs.
So now someone is going to tell me "What bugs? I play every day and I haven't experienced any bugs!" Well let me tell you. The most prominent bug right now applies to all "living" objects. This means any object that is not a block. Players, minecarts, enemy mobs. Quite often, some objects of this type will just not show up for a player. This bug was mentioned in the OP. In the case of players being invisible, the only way to fix the bug is for one of the players experiencing it to log out and back in. This means either the person who is invisible, or the person who cannot see their invisible friend. Well it's just a tiny bug, it can't be that big a deal, right? Well it kind of is. Because it happens often enough that one or more people will have to relog every ten minutes, if not less. I am not exaggerating, by any means. Players go invisible without knowing it for so long that we have gone on hour long expeditions, only to find that we actually had two more players with us the entire time, because they were invisible. This bug hasn't been in the game as far as I know until the most recent build, or one of them. On top of this, the game crashes at almost an equal frequency. It in fact crashes so often that in our skype channel we've taken to just saying "Bye minecraft." to indicate that we have crashed, so people don't think we are leaving the server. And if you increase your view distance to the maximum, the frequency of the crashes literally doubles. But a bug will be fixed, eventually (Someday. I don't know, and I don't expect it to be soon.), so what else is wrong with the game? Other than the bugs minecraft is perfect right?
Well not really. Any programmer (especially a games programmer) can look at minecraft and immediately recognize some issues. Glaring issues, things that almost every programmer you speak to would know to never, ever do. Let's start simple. Chunks are updated to every player in their entirety. This means that every single block in the entire 81 chunk area that is loaded around your player, is sent to you, the player, over a network connection. This means two things, first of all it means a ton of bandwidth is being wasted, more bandwidth than any other game wastes. But the other thing it means, and this is a lot more important, is that your client can locate any block within the 1296x1296x128 area around you. Without fail, you could hack your client to pinpoint any block, any player, any anything in this zone. Diamond, gold, instantly, and nothing, I say again nothing can stop the clients on your server from doing this, in Minecraft's present form. Ironically, your client doesn't even show blocks that aren't touching air. So why do we send them everything, even blocks surrounded by layers and layers of solid stone, that the player would never be able to see in any situation?
Another great example is breaking blocks. Did you know, that you don't actually tell the server anything when you begin to break a block? You only tell them when you finish breaking a block. Yes, the time it takes to break obsidian is literally a GUI hack. This is why griefers have wasted no time creating hacks that can break any block instantly. They also can repair damaged tools, duplicate items in their inventory, and place any block anywhere in the world (while they are invisible). This is because all of these things are clientside, something that no self-respecting programmer would dare doing. Notch already understands that these things can be exploited, he has been hoping that these 'god hacks' would not be made before he could implement a more secure system. But part of this is because all his previous attempts to implement a more secure system made the game unplayable.
Alright, so those are some things that are entirely game breaking. Let's look at something a bit more esoteric. For those of you not familiar with what a timestep is, a timestep is what we call the amount of time simulated for each frame (or loop) run. There are two ways to implement a timestep, fixed timestep, and variable timestep. In a fixed timestep, your program reads the timing reported by your processors clock, and waits until enough time has passed for another frame to be executed. Typically, this amount of time will be around 1/60th of a second, yielding approximately 60 simulated frames a second, each simulating exactly 1/60th of a second.
A variable timestep is a little different. A variable timestep runs no matter what, every chance the processor has to execute a game frame is taken. To compensate for how often the game is simulating, the world is instead simulated not on a discrete timestep, but the amount of time passed since the last frame was executed. This means, the faster the game is running, the smaller the timestep. With a small timestep, the physics will be more precisely calculated, and the game will only take a relatively small amount of time to process. However, when the converse is happening, when the server is running very slowly, the game will attempt to make a huge timestep, and here's where we run into problems. Physics will begin to make very large calculations, objects will tend to intersect more, and in the worst case minecarts will fly through walls, off their tracks, out of order, and just about every other hideous problem you can imagine. The issue with using a variable timestep is that this behavior will essentially be guaranteed. The game will never run at a stable speed, and the physics will consistently be inconsistent. Currently, no game with any kind of physics system (and few games period) uses a variable time step. This is because it GUARANTEES that the physics will be unreliable. Your timestep is an arbitrary value every frame, meaning it can never be rigidly determined, and will always become VERY unstable when the server is performing badly. When a timestep is changing on a value that is not uniform to the execution, the game stops being deterministic. This is what makes minecarts pass through eachother, and why they appear to speed up and slow down when they are going a uniform speed. Even if in theory the timestep will always be the right amount, in practice it will always be imprecise (There is literally a field of research dedicated to processor timing), and a larger timestep will always make physics less reliable. This means, given the same starting conditions, the ending conditions will ALWAYS be different. Minecraft uses a variable timestep. This means that minecart physics can never be predictable, they will always be at the mercy of the servers performance and they will always be unstable. Nothing you can ever do with a variable timestep will change this. With a fixed timestep, the physics always simulates the same amount of time, and given the same initial conditions the simulation will always end the same way. If the game were to use a fixed timestep, minecarts and all other game physics would never be able to perform in an indeterministic way. Given the same starting conditions, they would always execute in the exact same way. Let me reiterate, there are no games that use a variable timestep the way minecraft does, explicitly because BY DEFINITION it makes the physics unreliable.
The thing I stress is that all of these problems have simple solutions, solutions that would take less than a day to implement. This is not about the game being in development, this is not about what mode people prefer to play. This is about obvious improvements that no human being should be hesitating to implement. If you want to challenge this, you are only challenging pure, unbiased logic, and programming knowledge. If you are proud to ignore messages like the OP's and mine, you are only proud of being ignorant.
Hahaha. This is exactly the point. Nobody is here because they are individually tormented by the problems with the game. We all still play it. We are here because there is no excuse for these shortcomings. This thread should be the TED of Minecraft, these problems need recognition, not incessant childish logic. Please.
I will savour this intelligence while this thread is still here.
Now if only everyone else realized how broken and fail Minecraft is without resorting to SELL UR ACCT DNT PLAY LOL
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And I've the same background really, played since no sound in creative and now I want my money back.