New Game: Minecraft Earth
minecraft.net
minecraft.net
[game] https://classic.minecraft.net/
[engine] https://github.com/andyhall/noa/
if anyone's interested. It's pretty weird waking up one morning to find out that Mojang built a game on your tiny solo project...
I used to be an admin on one server and split my time between building stuff and banning griefers/undoing the griefing on the main worlds to make everything pretty again. Great memories.
So it's easy to imagine a scenario where the people who ultimately released it last week weren't really aware of how much it uses external libraries - mine, and also a 3D engine called Babylon.js (who also weren't contacted).
Edit: got the mouse to switch by invoking 'b' to choose block. Going to be a learning curve, a near newbie in Minecraft.
There are plenty of ways to monetise MIT like consulting, career building, training and so on - at least for smaller scale but popular projects. Plus OP can now say that a big game studio used his project and it could be a great conference talk :]
I think this is the first time I've heard an OSS maintainer say that!
I'm literally writing this comment from an airport at a country I wanted to visit and was flown into because of open source I wrote (they paid for a vacation for a conference). I'm having a hard time complaining :]
It's not like maintainer burnout isn't real and there aren't issues in open source but we also really need to fix the culture around it IMO.
All code is implicitly dual licensed, for the right price. Only some of it explicitly so :)
A maintainer can't just re-license the whole project unless all other authors agree (or already agreed to that e.g. by accepting some contributor agreement).
Or did you mean a price high enough to just ignore the existing license?
This is a "tragedy of the commons" of sorts. If all open source projects could collaborate and choose a single license, what would it be ?
It's not a dilemma at all for those that explicitly choose the GPL over MIT because they believe in Free Software (others might choose GPL for other reasons....).
Being Free and having every user of the software retain their Freedom is the literal point of the GPL. Saying "hey, your software would be used by lots more people if we make a proprietary product out of it" is undermining the entire point of the Free Software movement....
So it's more ethical if 10 people use your software and they retain their Freedom, then it is for 10 million to use it bundled in a proprietary product.
I don't think this is possible really. Even the FSF who IMO are some of the most vocal supporters of user and developer empowerment created the LGPL to solve this very problem. Some of their software (like glibc) is licensed under the more permissive LGPL instead of the GPL to foster adoption[0].
An except from [0]:
> This is why we used the Lesser GPL for the GNU C library. After all, there are plenty of other C libraries; using the GPL for ours would have driven proprietary software developers to use another—no problem for them, only for us.
I think it is great that the default option is "hey world! Do whatever you want with this!".
Anything that promoted the free flow of information, technology, and innovation is a good thing IMO.
Absolutely. And MIT fails spectacularly on that, since it doesn't consider the behaviour of downstream dependees.
Classic is offered over the web, so only the AGPL would be relevant (or well, I'm not actually sure how GPL applies to JS apps served over the web but run in browser), and anyway, it's not like MS is making money from Minecraft classic, for a lot of people they did get something out of it: a cool game.
https://www.fsf.org/news/announcing-js-labels https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/javascript-trap.en.html
It isn't at all clear how courts will decide the case if such a case ever comes to trial.
Of course they are, it's part of the franchise so at the very least it's an advertisement for all the other Minecraft things you can buy.
When the market works, at least. So it's actually quite possible that Microsoft is being nice and "inefficient" here.
Also, I think there are probably sufficiently small decreases in expected profit ithat many large companies would tolerate.
And even aside from that, there is the possibility of a choice between options which does not have any large-enough-to-predict-or-evaluate-its-direction impact on the bottom line, and in these cases, the decision will likely be made in accordance with how some people working there prefer.
No model is perfect. I guess I should prioritize rhetorics in the future lest someone use my honesty against me.
> Also, I think there are probably sufficiently small decreases in expected profit ithat many large companies would tolerate.
There aren't. A company that accepts decreases in profit does not become large, it fails against its more psychopathic competitors.
> And even aside from that, there is the possibility of a choice between options which does not have any large-enough-to-predict-or-evaluate-its-direction impact on the bottom line, and in these cases, the decision will likely be made in accordance with how some people working there prefer.
If a company cannot predict whether an action is profitable, it will always decide against it and instead invest its resources in something that is.
> it fails against its more psychopathic competitors
I see no reason why choosing to lose an expected value of .01 cents total, would result in failing against a competitor which does not do so. That just doesn't make sense. It isn't like there is a ranking of "what company in this field made the most profit", and then all of them other than the top 1 or 2 are immediately destroyed each month. No, a company runs out of business when it is not sufficiently profitable. Now, if something results in their products being more expensive, or something like that, in a way that significantly changes their profitability, or other things which might slightly change their per-unit profitability, then yeah, that could make them non-viable.
But, like,
have you worked in a large company? There are certainly inefficiencies in large companies which are the result of the continued choices of individual employees, even among large successful companies. This is obvious.
Companies are not able to perfectly optimize for profitability, even if they wanted to.
> It isn't like there is a ranking of "what company in this field made the most profit", and then all of them other than the top 1 or 2 are immediately destroyed each month.
The process is not that quick, but in principle, this is exactly how markets work. The most profitable companies undercut all others, which then go under. Provided markets work, that is.
Like I said well upthread, this is a cynical and wrong viewpoint. The real world doesn't operate as an efficient market, doesn't operate over infinite timescales, doesn't have ways to exactly calculate the proftabilitiy of a decision or action.
It is overly cynical, and mostly wrong, to take microeconomics 101 theory and try to apply it to a world that doesn't fit any of the microecon 101 assumptions.
On the other hand, you can make a profit-driven motive argument for practically any action a company takes if you try hard enough, even literally giving money away.
And it doesn't have to be charity either - MS could recognize a good chance to spend an insignificant (to them) amount to get good PR in an open source community they've been trying to warm up to.
That said the author of the engine has definitely achieved something here.
Curiously, the Babylon people also didn't hear about the minecraft game until after it launched, even though their engine is being used and they're all under the Microsoft umbrella.
The FPS counter is horribly off and does not represent real life.
That said, I take no responsibility for it being laggy - the version of my engine they're using is from 2017 and I've done some performance stuff since then :D
I decided to take a long break from Minecraft after that.
This is called the tetris effect. I've had it with, you guessed it, tetris. Whenever I get a bout of addiction and play tetris for an hour at a time I get up from the computer and just start seeing the stuff around me start fitting together in an interlocking fashion.
Happened with 2048 as well, I vividly remember being stopped at a red light and feeling the car in front of me fusing the one ahead to make a bigger-numbered car. Very weird.
Happens when coding as well, in fact it is happening right now as I type this! I'm having this very strong urge to wrap all "key" words in this post [like so], in ocaml documentation syntax.
(* Brains are weird! *)
I also got this with programming at least once. I had been spending all night trying to get something with my WPF view models working (and failing). When I finally got into bed, I was having trouble falling asleep because I was just "seeing" endless lines of code scrolling through my head. I very distinctly remember thinking, "What order do I have to call these methods again to successfully enter sleep mode?" Quite a bizarre experience.
It seems pretty creative tho, and they seem to be learning a lot from it, so not too bothered. That said they are limited to 1 hour per sat and sun.
I think it's a much better use of their time than watching cartoons. Although I did get my girls into Sailor Moon and the modern run of My Little Pony. I'm a strong believer in giving kids a grounding in the Classics.
There's also a multiplayer where they can connect to servers and play with other people. That's where you might want to use some discretion, as the experience will vary from server to server.
Online/shared server modes: when they understand the evils of the internet well enough to be safe.
Setup and admin a server yourself. Watch how they play. Dont let it get too big. A dozen or two per server. Dont let them play with thousands of total strangers. That always ends in tears.
You can also just expose any client's game instance to your local LAN - that's all I do when playing with my grandkids.
There are ways of doing multiplayer on your local LAN with a single account as well by simply editing your name in a single config file per machine. Google is your friend there. :)
There are basically two version of Minecraft at this point. The "classic" Java version, and the MCPE version, which is what you get on Apple devices, Android and the "native" Windows 10 version.
The latter has "realms", where you can just pay to have Microsoft host it for you, and is tied into Xbox Live.
Java Edition is the one that lets you run your own server, is more moddable, and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Bedrock Edition is the one that works on Windows, consoles, and mobile. People can invite people into their own world as long as they're online. Your only private server option is Realms, which is a subscription service. (Edit: Apparently there is finally publicly-available server software for Bedrock Edition. I doubt it's very moddable though, so don't expect to be able to run a public server with all the modded tools you'd expect if you were familiar with running Java Edition servers. Also, I don't think the console versions of Minecraft can join arbitrary servers.)
The Java Edition and Bedrock edition are not cross-compatible with each other. They are fully compatible within each-other though. Bedrock Edition supports cross-play between different consoles and PC, etc.
to host an Internet-accessible server pretty easily (on a DigitalOcean droplet).
For playing with random internet people? 30 years old
holding down the mouse button to mine is creative expression?
It’s way better than automated skinner boxes that pretend to be games...
And football is just kicking a ball in a pitch, and racing games is just going in circles in a track. Obviously there's more to it than that simplistic reduction. In particular, you have to think where you mine, how you organise your explorations. Then, you can run into myriad things as you explore: caves, water, lava, dungeons, monster spawners, many types of ore and rock...
And if you don't fancy that and just want the equivalent of a bottomless box of legos, just fire up creative mode.
Never straight down. Or straight up. Ye gods, the lava.
shudders, remembering a 20 minute "conversation" about DnD crossbow rules I somehow ended up in
I agree with you, ethbro, it is a valuable life lesson. I can personally attribute most of my social successes to the ability to gauge the interlocutor and their interests, and such a skill will gain one a rep as a good listener.
I'm convinced some people instead have a mantra of "When do I get to talk again?" looping in their head whenever someone else is speaking.
Except, of course, that’s impossible; a tangential reply likely won’t even be the first reply people see in the sub-thread, after they get re-sorted by vote, so the only people who will engage with it are the people who never cared about the original topic in the first place.
Right now I'm getting seriously into Factorio, and I had this experience a few nights ago. I half-woke up and kept having these thought-hallucinations about the best method to use to optimize the way my resource refiners were feeding into my main bus, because I needed to make X% more sleep-cogs in order to go back to sleep.
It's actually kind of infuriating when it happens, sometimes it keeps me in that half-awake state for as long as thirty minutes. Been happening to me since I was a kid.
As for the "seeing blocks". I had a period where I played some form of match-3 game, and while walking around I couldn't stop imagining arranging people walking into threes.
What is really hard to believe is that one can recapture the experience or something close to it and that this is not just the expansion of a brand into a new product. Like Pokemon Go, this will likely be Minecraft's equivalent to the Star Wars Christmas Special but without the "so bad it's good" quality.
Other than that, it seems like they're making a Pokemon GO clone with Minecraft mobs (collect passive mobs and fight hostile ones).
W.r.t to your "Pokemon Go::SW Christmas Special" you're absolutely wrong, while the initial popularity didn't stick around, the game is at a very strong and profitable point and the ideas introduced in the GO app have moved into actual Pokemon titles, notable the "no fight, just throw to catch pokemon" mechanic was ported to Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee Switch remakes of Gen 1. Basically the opposite of the SW Xmas Special!
As a (modded) Minecraft player there's a lot to be excited about in this concept, but my suggestions would be
* Allow players to explore the virtual-real-world that they've visited with the phone app from a console or computer. So you can "tag" your local park, a cool bit of a forest, etc, then go home and explore a digital version.
* Allow players to build at home
The point here would be that you go out side, collect building materials, catch some passive mobs you want, then go home to take advantage of these collected goods to start a pretty build.
This would also fix UX issues because the goal of using the phone app would be moving around, collecting, interacting, NOT standing still and building.
I'd play the heck out of that, it'd be another reason to get out of the house and an interaction between phone game and console/pc game could be huge.
Which is why I won't be buying the Let's Go series... I might as well be watching TLC reality TV shows all day for all the intellectual stimulation I'm getting out of swiping pokeballs with my finger.
I'm mainly curious as to how team Mojang plans to solve multiple builds in the same location. Ranked by popularity? Swarm mechanics like Niantic?
Idk. I could see myself getting some good wows from this after a few years when the most talented builders have come by and placed some cool stuff. I don't think it's bad, it's experimental tech which continues to break new ground in a game I've enjoyed for a good decade.
Sure, they'll probably bumble it just because this is unexplored space and Daddy Microsoft is at the table, but I think Mojang is just excited to be in a position to try something so interesting.
Wild battles were never especially intellectually stimulating anyway? Even trainer battles are only sometimes of any particular interest beyond grinding, and those are still in Let's Go completely unchanged.
Maybe this Pokémon flees if attacked or frightened. That's OK, use Bind with a high-speed starter. Needs a particular status condition? Can't get their health too low? Only a particular grade ball works? Only a special ball made out of fruit by some weird creep in the neck of the woods? They only come out at certain times? You have to track their migration patterns? Hold certain items? Complete certain tasks?
Little to none of these nuances carried over to the Let's Go series in their fleshed-out form. Sure, a lifetime of grinding out wild battles makes them feel a bit stale, but it doesn't mean the nuance isn't there. It just becomes routine for experienced players. These experienced players feel like they have nothing to do or think about when the entire strategy is just repeatedly flicking a Pokéball with their thumb.
Ultimately, design choices like this meant to bring in the casual audience are cheap and non-cognizant of veteran fans. You think Nintendo would have learned from this after failing to recapture most of the transient market acquired during the Wii run once they attempted to usher in the Wii U.
You can't tell stats or nature with much detail until after it's caught, but you never could. Move rarity isn't a thing in wild battles in any generation as far as I know; every individual of a species has the same learnset and known-moves for wilds are determined by level. You can see the species and whether it's shiny from the overworld, without going to a battle. There's never, ever been any "only a particular ball works", though some will be more effective, but that's still in Let's Go. Fleeing is almost completely exclusive to a few legendaries, none of which appear in Let's Go. Not sure about whether Let's Go has time-of-day or swarming, but at least in principle there's no reason why it couldn't.
Minecraft's controls for building stuff is very simple - you just point and click to place or remove stuff depending on your active item. Here you can point (via gyroscope, etc) and tap and you could even "scrub" to remove stuff. This could be done with just a hand (the phone in portrait mode, you tap/scrub with your thumb).
Seems a no-brainer.
Who wouldn't want to put a fortress around your house that everyone on the "inside" could see?
This could also be a pretty great starting application for AR goggles, Magic Leap, HoloLens, etc. Kinda pricey to play Minecraft but bootstrapping via phones isn't a terrible idea and would get the tech in the hands of more people.
All of this is clearly an optimistic interpretation of what could happen, but good on them for trying something ambitious. I hope it jumpstarts the AR future we've all been promised.
The big wildcard, as others have pointed out, are a bunch of penises everywhere. Very hard to actively moderate.
"oh god steve dropped a giant penis on my front yard AGAIN, fuck it lemme drop a bunch of TNT on it"
In the novel, there are layers of augmented reality where people have put their mark on the world with AR Dioramas scattered through-out the world. In the book, AR scenes might depict historical events, art, or information.
If your planing on Playing Minecraft:Earth, you might want to check it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country
https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-ebook/dp/...
(Though I am a little sad it's not Minecraft but with a single 'world' server where every player is present.. I would LOVE that :-))
[0] https://exaquark.com/blog/scaling-minecraft-to-millions-of-u...
It could definitely be done.
The problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go, is that the player has to go places in real life to have fun in the game, and one attraction of fantasy sandbox worlds is that you have mobility capabilities that are impossible in your real life.
In regular Minecraft, creative mode, you can fly and hover. This is extremely alluring to a kid who may otherwise only be able to ride a bicycle around their own boring subdivision neighborhood during daylight hours. Hey, it's even nice for people who have cars. If the kids have to beg Mom or Dad to drive them across town in the real world to mine virtual diamonds, that's not going to end up being fun for anybody.
People play games where they live, and if the AR game does not include people's homes as a legitimate place to play, then having fun includes some amount of inconvenience that sours it. Some people can tap a Pokestop or Portal from their bedroom or living room. Other people have to drive ten minutes to reach the nearest one.
The best I can come up with is that players use their mobile devices in the real world to mark their territory or drop warp points or exchange friend tokens or do discovery, and they can still build or explore the whole world from home. Geo-tagged photos might be able to update textures and geometry.
If someone builds a grand castle in the neighborhood park, that's not going to work in AR if you have to climb stairs that don't exist or go below ground when there is no real-world hole. But maybe you could see there is a castle there, through the discovery glass at the park, tap the block that grants your user read-only visitor access to it, and then go back home to climb the tower or explore the dungeons.
If someone else builds a different castle overlapping over the same territory, you can decide which user's construction appears in your personal sandbox.
You could still design it to get the types of interactions you're after.
Edit: To clarify I think it’s hard because of the earth not being flat but also because of the difficulty of syncing AR tracking to GPS tracking in a device independent way. You’d get a lot of error depending on how you attached the two reference frames together. Having many smaller buildable spaces means you can have lower accuracy from GPS but still make the world feel populated. The cubes wouldn’t align between volumes but the volumes can be in close proximity.
Possible (if off-brand) solution: a Minecraft based on the extrusion of an icosahedral tiling of the sphere [1], with voxels that are triangle prisms rather than cubes. Maybe an idea for someone who wants to design an AR game and does not have to sell it as a Minecraft variant.
I assume the center of gravity of such a world would be the actual center of mass of however the voxels are arranged, meaning players could affect it with large enough structures or small enough worlds. Without adjusting "straight" "horizontal" structures to conform the curvature of the world, gravity would no longer be a force that was normal to the surface of the structure at some points on it.
I can also imagine people digging to the center of a world to find the gravity flip-flop point and playing with it. Or hollowing out the interior of the world in order to get a zero-G chamber (assuming no atmosphere) [1]. Or building gravity trains [2].
[0] https://imgur.com/a/0J5RoE1
[1] http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshel...
https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-06-01-lego-mmo-devel...
Thank you, now I'll never unsee it.
Do you people not remember your own childhoods?
Why just low income? All kids at some point find low brow humor funny. Some grow out of it.
Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right 1) boring 2) that will at least keep minecraft earth from being covered in swastikas and genitalia
I say this because, you won't want to climb 100 feet in the air, to place a block on top of that castle.
I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this will be very very popular. This is pitched as virtual collaborative lego, but you get to use your phone at the same time.
Hopefully we will see artists play around with it as well; William Gibson wrote a little about AR-based art in the blue ant trilogy; I always thought it was an idea worth thinking a little more about.
Being able to virtually build something in AR mode in Minecraft seems pretty sweet, especially if your friends can see it. Getting the AR to work right won't be easy though, phone positioning is imprecise and it will be really hard for the phone to line something up exactly the same if your friend is viewing it from a different angle.
This is one of those game concepts that looks like it would be fun an easy but turns out to be a real nightmare to implement I think.
If this turns out to be a really great app and it isn't successful, I wonder if we can take that as a signal from the market that people aren't that interested in AR, at least not in its current phone-based state.
We can imagine a distopic future with a thin boundary between the physical world and VR where you would travel through totally destitute neighbourhoods in real life, while seeing great works of art in VR that were built by the users of a virtual world game akin to this.
https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmen...
Sorry!
This version of Minecraft
requires a keyboard.
Please try again on another device.
> Minecraft Earth will be free to play.
> Minecraft Earth is coming to iOS and Android this summer on AR-capable devices. We’ll have more to share soon.
($B in 15 minutes)
So now we're gamifying gentrification and incentivizing the idea of covering the earth with human constructions? (It's certainly arguable, but at least Pokemon Go encourages physical activity and social interaction.)
Yes, I know I'm being reactionary but this just feels wrong, not to mention a misguided application of the Minecraft concept. Is this is the best they could do? Is this really all we can expect of AR at this stage?
(I work for the latter company and we do VPS: the thing you'd need to build the game I assume people will glean from the video but they are totally not releasing.)
Mark my words, i said it first
I could have either bought materials for 1-3 projects and then not been able to build anything else, or build a computer (back then it was cheaper to build than buy) and then have limitless ability to build things digitally.
> Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day. It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft creation on the real-life grass.
Because i have to tell you, when even video game posts that mention grass can be about climate change - it’s not helping the cause. It’s going to make people sick of hearing about it - regardless if they agree and won’t sway someone if they don’t.
I assume there is a better term for scandal fatigue. That some smart HN user knows.
Back to the announcement, parents might be more receptive if the advertisement was more about enhancing the outdoor experience.