Minecraft Forums

Quote from SenseiMarshmallow»

Well, Microsoft bought Mojang, and they'll probably make Minecraft suck so much that everyone quits. It'll be like when Microsoft bought Rareware.

Quote from Cypher_Rahl»

You're not correct.

"To make this clear: Mojang owns Bukkit. I'm personally going to update Bukkit to 1.8 myself. Bukkit IS NOT and WILL NOT BE the official API."
And
I started Bukkit, I'm going to personally see it through for 1.8. Updating it now

~Dinnerbone

Quote from Kaz_king

*cough* I was purposelessly making a retarded joke *cough*

Quote from trollsack

lol do you have a life?

I'm JTE. I joined Minecraft around nearly the beginning, way back in the Summer of 2009, when Glass Blocks and Sponges were newly implemented and the only server mods for Minecraft were simple Batch file wrappers which would read the server's text output and input bans. It's been five years since then, so please forgive me if the details of this document are a little off, or missing.

With all this eula drama blowing my way, I don't know, I guess I feel the need to write my story down so I can let go of it. I don't expect to get much attention, I'm just here to get my thoughts out.

So let me tell you about Minecraft.

Vanilla pre-Classic

Hosting a vanilla server for Minecraft was some form of Hell. There was a giant list of all public servers which anyone could use to join, absolutely no form of hack detection/prevention, no automatic map backups, and all free accounts could join and grief the extremely limited area of your map to death at any time. The most basic of gameplay building blocks were there, but that was it.

In order to manage it properly, I had to build a convoluted player trap out of bedrock I called the "frying pan" just so I could keep people from wandering off to destroy things before I got the chance to fly over and keep an eye on them. This was actually common practice at the time, and served essentially the same function as whitelisted servers.



One of the flaws of Minecraft at this point was that if a player were to walk one block away, place two blocks down where they spawned, and then hit the respawn button, it would spawn them on top of wherever they were, allowing them to break out and escape. So I had a hive of one-block-wide spaces built on top of the 'frying pan' where players who tried to break out without asking nicely would wind up trapped, essentially putting them out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The dawn of mods

Being the tinkerer I am, and knowing that indie games like to keep things nice and simple, I soon created an intermediary server Perl script, to act as a proxy between my client and my server, and set to work figuring out all of the messages passed back and forth between them. My proxy server was quickly able to perform simple modifications, such as reading slash commands (including /me), spawning idle player dummies all around the map, or allowing the placement of coal and gold ores, and even liquids.



So now we could not only build with blocks, but we could build little blockmobiles on our roads and then sit actual player characters inside them. Neat. But there was more to be done!

Using the proxy server, and with help from another early modder's research, I eventually compiled documentation of the complete networking protocol now publicly available for Minecraft Classic servers. Armed with this private research, and over the course of 26 sleepless hours, I turned my Perl script into a fully fledged Minecraft server, which could generate maps, accept any number of clients, automatically detect hackers, allow the in-place painting of blocks (and other creative tools), build trees by placing a single block (before saplings had function), and even produce custom water and lava block 'physics'. I was even able to, astonishingly enough, trick clients into re-downloading the map from the server, and therefore could host multiple maps on a single server or reload maps from the last backup on the fly. (Now we could play Spleef without having to rebuild!)

All without looking at, modifying, or compromosing any of Notch's code. Notch agreed that my server software is entirely my own creation, and I am free to do with it anything that I please.

On the forums, these very forums before they were handed over to Curse, I was heralded as the "Minecraft Hacking God" for a day or two. All of my changes were big improvements to the core function and gameplay of Minecraft itself. Even the fact that I built in a safety switch to prevent the flood of lava covering the entire server from making the server eventually freeze over near-indefinitely from the exponential growth of 'thinking' blocks was a big thing. Notch himself came to my server from IRC and flooded it with lava just to ascertain exactly how well it handles. (Answer: Not particularly well, but at least it didn't die completely and admins were still able to simply reload the map without disconnecting anyone, right?)


( thread )

Back then, Notch arbitrarily had a golden name hanging over his head, being a VIP and all. I was jealous, so I invented colored names for different tiers of server moderators / administrators, the server owner (me) being colored Red (my favorite color), just so I can feel special. (The reality was that admins of my server could set their name to literally anything, at any time, on the fly, color code spam and all.) If you were ever on a Minecraft server and the server admins have red names -- I started that. Notch even went and specifically made the skin-grabbing code strip colorcodes out so that it would still show the correct skin despite having a colorful nametag in the next version.

Leaving the forum

And then I announced that I planned to add fancy new game modes to my server, so you could play a giant boardgame of Battleship with Minecraft blocks for pieces, or Zombie Tag versus like mods of other games do, and so on. The moderator Zuriki didn't like that idea, and immediately did a 180, revoking my custom forum title, and even threatening to ban me from the forums entirely should my server software ever be released there (for free and open-source or otherwise). After a lengthy and childish argument, wherein Zuriki claimed I would be "stealing money from Notch", and when finding my server software was 'production ready', I simply packed up my topic and left, dropping only my email address for anyone to contact me if they want it.

Here's where my story gets muddled, people thinking that I was fighting with Notch directly despite Notch previously stating outright that I am free to do anything I like with my server software in the first place. So I made use of that and started privately selling my server software to individual buyers for around $10 each, entirely by email, advertised solely by word of mouth. I only made around 14 sales out of that, before my server started spreading like wildfire, as each server admin shared the source code with their friends to try and program new features into it together, and those people freely shared it with more people, and so on until the market was entirely saturated. I did of course use the first bit of money to pay for my Minecraft account (which at the time, offered no benefits other than a custom skin) and the rest went to a couple Steam games and buying three more Minecraft accounts for my friends. This was the first and only time I've ever been paid for anything I programmed.

Anyway, among all of this open source server sharing (after all, it would be difficult and pointless to make a Perl script closed-source), all sorts of new game modes and life cropped up. Lava survival servers, floating water stairway challenges, I was quickly changing the very community itself by allowing the first real modding to take place. JTE servers were the best. And soon it was being replicated in other languages like Python, the same tools I pioneered becoming further expanded on with spout blocks, finite water systems, and the ability for players to cross between the server's maps individually. Now everyone could have their own sandbox to play in, and challenge packs could contain multiple "levels"...

Survival Test, indev, infdev, and Alpha

Meanwhile, Minecraft had been progressing seperately, having destroyed its basic multiplayer (and probably most of its engine) to introduce NPC creatures, zombies, pigs, and so on. With the account that I purchased, I was able to follow it all, every step of the way, from the beginning, and just sort of watch how it progressed. Since there was no networking in these versions, I didn't have much work to do, and just sort of kept my silence. Seeing Notch struggle with some of this, I offered to let me help him with programming, but he turned me down, saying he needed Minecraft to "get his name out there" first. He said that maybe he'll let me work with him on his next game, after Minecraft. (Then he went and hired someone else to be a 3D model artist, and then finally established the entire company Mojang around the success and continued development of Minecraft..)

When crafting was introduced, I made the first full recipe list graphical crafting page on my website at the time, EchidnaTribe.org
By using in-game sprites and GUI elements entirely ripped from screenshots with basic image editing software, I was able to show not only how to build every tool, but even which mobs drop what resources and how to smelt for iron. At the very bottom of the list, as a sort of in-joke, since Notch had recently removed the test Apple item from existance, I put that you need to kill Notch in order to get apples. Then right next to it, since apples still needed a use, I put that if you surround an apple with gold ingots (not blocks) you would get a golden apple.

I invented the Golden Apple, guys. (Proof, scroll down to the bottom of the page under the ??? section.)

When Secret Friday Updates rolled around, Notch loved randomly implimenting "community rumors" as actual features of the game to tease and delight everyone, based on what he heard secondhand. This is how pig saddles came to be, among other things, and to this day if you look in the source code you can see that any player named Notch will have a random chance of dropping apples, even if he had none in his inventory.

SMP

Finally, when the multiplayer mode of Alpha came out, long after scrapping nearly everything of the engine and remaking it for infinitely large worlds (a move I always felt was tremendously unnecessary and poorly implimented), it was full of bugs and problems, and split the entire community in half at the price-point, now allowing paid accounts for full servers that free accounts could no longer access. Time once again for JTE to come out and introduce things like persistent inventories and time of day locks and alternate map generators and whatnot, right? Well, not quite...

At this point, Notch kept changing up the network protocol faster than I could descipher it on my own, and this time I didn't have a random stranger leap out at me and hand me a half-finished document I could just fill in the blanks for or anything. With every new version, the client would just start crashing blatantly from the messages my server sent, and eventually I just gave up trying. Nowadays there's even full-on SSL-like encryption going on in Minecraft's networking, not just the hassle of HTTP logins to deal with.

I still have it sitting on my harddrive -- the half-finished OmniServer meant to bridge the gap between all Minecraft versions, be they Classic, Alpha SMP, or a new custom client written from scratch, with its finitely sized Classic-mode maps and day-lock in Alpha and infinitely-large segmented maps implimented in Classic, made to host all kinds of creative new arcade-like NPC-driven minigames I have a design document of, sitting forever in stasis now... It's a shame that never came to pass.

Present

I'm sure you all know what happened next. Modders started de-obfuscating the client and server's source code and making amazing new add-on packages of blocks and game mechanics, directly implimented into the server and/or client, basically all hell broke loose and the community stance on modding had shifted entirely from where it was when I introduced my little server way back when. Even before Alpha SMP was out, people were modding the Survival Test client to connect to Classic servers and spawn client-side zombies anyway.

So now we have an army of deobfuscaters, coders, and inter-dependant modders all keeping up with an endless update treadmill, because Notch never made a proper modding system for Minecraft and continued to re-obfuscate every single build because it's not a free open-source software and never has been. The community has long outgrown me, as well as the morality that drives me. In fact, the community outgrew Notch, and now it's threatening to try and overthrow Mojang as well.

Such is the modding momentum we have built from that point long ago. It all started with one awesome wandering programmer's tiny server script.

Resources:
The original JTE server distribution files, untouched since 2009 (and probably no longer functional)
The proxy tool I wrote and used to figure out the network protocol, including the original output logs.
more pre-alpha screenshots

Additional reading:
"How Blocktopia Started", history of TheOne's JTE server.
The original "JTE's 100% Custom from-scratch Minecraft Server" thread. Ancient drama, immature mannerisms, and all.
JTE's Custom Spleef Server thread, the dumbed-down and closed-source release of the server software set up for a specific limited purpose.

The community of Minecraft always called for an improvement in the fight, we all know this, and why now, after all the work that has been done to improve the fight, most of the players are hating? I can not understand, some say "It's the end of the PVP" "Better Version 1.7 for PVP" "Stop doing that," "RIP Minecraft servers" "RIP Minecraft". You prefer to continue with the Spam-Click? You prefer to take 20 hits in 2-3 seconds? Do you prefer take 50 hits in 2 seconds of players using "Forcefield"?

With 1.9, we have to use more strategy, we have to create our own way of fighting, using shields, axes, swords, potions. And that's not bad, is very good. There are many possibilities, better than keep clicking like crazy, until you have tendinitis or create corns on fingers.

What do you think about the 1.9?

NOTE: This thread is not limited in the new combat discussion (That was the central idea of the thread: "The anger of the majority of the players with new mechanical combat the 1.9"), but all discussions to 1.9 are welcome.

Story

Your car has broken down so you head to a nearby town to stay the night. You soon learn that something is going on around there. What is that man running the power plant up to? You have to explore the area to find out and stop him!

Description

Crack in the World is a short adventure map focused on story and special effects. In typical adventure fashion, you go around exploring places, talking to NPCs to gather information and items, and unlocking the next part of the story.
I would not consider this map difficult. It can be completed in approximately 30 - 40 minutes.

Features

• Awesome cutscenes and special effects
• Custom resource pack with block shapes, textures, sounds, and music
• An epic finale (no pics here so it's not spoiled ;-) )

Notes

• This map is for Minecraft 1.8.3 (no mods).
• Please turn off all other resource packs. There is a custom resource pack in the level directory so if you're playing in single player mode then it should load automatically. If you're playing on a server then the 'resources.zip' file in the level directory can be installed just like a normal resource pack on the clients.
• If you're playing on a server then you must enable command blocks and set difficulty to normal in the server config.
• The map looks best when particles are set to "All" or "Decreased" and your render distance is greater than 7 chunks.
• Multiplayer compatible for 2 or 3 players. Three players may be a bit tight on food so you're allowed to stomp on the crops.

The included resource pack contains some royalty free music. If you create a video then please make sure you abide by their licenses. If you're not making money off the video then you should be fine.

• Volatile Reaction by Kevin MacLeod CC Attribution 3.0 US
• Nothing Lasts Forever by Kai Engel CC Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported

Screenshots

Playthroughs

Go to the Videos!

The main post here was getting laggy due to all the embedded videos so I moved all the playthrough videos into another post.

I cannot imagine the migranes associated with these hate threads. Dinnerbone and Jeb won't be paying any mind to all of

these "I hate the change" topics. They do not come here anymore for one, and they are receiving death/suicide messages on

twitter. So these dead horse topics are really beating a dead horse.

Its going to stay. Like it or not. You've already bought the game so why not just stay in your comfy update version of your

choice? Another thing these people tend to overlook is that the cooldown system CAN BE TURNED OFF in the snapshot.

That way all those kids don't have to be strategic or learn new styles. They can continue the spam-click wars while the

rest of us evolve and learn. Everyone wins!

There is nothing wrong with the improvements made to combat in 1.9.

Well, there's a couple issues, but nothing that ruins it.

I hate spam clicking. I've wanted Mojang to deal with that for ages, and now they finally have.

Most people don't like change.

Well, if it's a dungeon that generates in a Mesa biome, and everyone's in the dark about it, I suppose you could call it...

*puts on sunglasses*

A black mesa.

YEAHHHHHHHHHHno.

Everyone here is arguing and I'm just sitting here with a bucket of popcorn laughing at all these people who are complaining about features that I personally think are awesome, whilst waiting for 1.9 screenshots.

What I'm most excited about are the changes to The End; bros, sign me up. I can never get enough of things to explore.

But seriously, if you're going to complain, there are dozens of threads for that already. I understand that we all have our own opinions, but all this complaining is starting to become spam (like the college stuff I get in the mail on a near-daily basis, most of it from the same colleges over and over again, just like multitudes of complaint threads all about the same feature). Those of us casual, oh, mojang's adding new stuff? let's see what we can do with this feature here gamers are really getting sick of the complaining. It doesn't matter what it is, someone out there appreciates the work the Mojang staff is putting into this game to appeal to everyone and not just those who are loudest about what they do and don't want.

You guys have to understand, they are not obligated to make these kinds of changes. They are not obligated to make this game appeal to everyone. They are not obligated to make older versions available to people who don't like the new features they add. They are not obligated to slave over computer monitors and keyboards for possibly hours a day trying to please everyone. They're not even obligated to update the game. (Not saying they're not getting paid to do all of this, but they still have free will and don't have to if they decide they don't want to.) Every time I see someone complaining it makes me think that they don't fully appreciate all the work Mojang is doing. You want to know what you can do instead of complain? Find a way to make these new features appeal to you. Think of a fun way you can use them. Make your base out of the new structures in The End, or use the new blocks to build the strangest or most eye-candy fortress you can. Tame an entire army of dogs or cats in minutes with dual-wielding. See how many enchantments you can put on arrows and go snipe some monsters with them. The possibilities, just like Minecraft itself, are endless. Find a way to accept it, or if you don't like it, just play an older version.

And guys, are you all really arguing about what the next update should be called? That's immaturity at its finest. Mojang will call it what they want to call it.

(But I will say that 2.0, 3.0, etc., implies that they started from scratch and rewrote everything, not just made changes.)

But that's just my two cents.

Lets at least wait for the snapshot to see how it works before we start that sort of thing.