Hacker News Reader

Comment by heyitsnick | Hacker News Reader

As a redditer commented; I have never played minecraft for fear of never being able to put it down. It's fantastic it's been such a success, I think games like this will always appeal to a certain niche but no one count have predicted it would have been so successful to such a large audience.

With that said, I just contend myself with watching the odd youtube video. I dare not get closer.

View on HN

The typical path that many people (myself included) have experienced is: total obsession for 1-2 weeks, followed by rapidly waning interest.

It's a fantastic game, but you can quickly experience everything it has to offer, and thereafter you can set your own boundaries quite easily. It's really just a great big sandbox with no explicit motivating factors. But if Markus decides to include RPG-like elements some day, we're in big trouble.

>The typical path that many people (myself included) have experienced is: total obsession for 1-2 weeks, followed by rapidly waning interest.

This what I experienced. Mutliplayer is fun though, but I can't play the game properly due to bugs (framerate issues, random disconnects / crashes to desktop). I'm not sure if my local JRE has a problem but I have been doing Java development work recently and I've not had any issues.

I think once the bugs have been ironed out and the development process has been refined (to prevent re-occuring bugs) the game can really grow. Recent updates has shown that new features are being added to the game (including reaching out to the mod community) and by the time of proper release the game will have much more to offer.

It can be pretty long-term absorbing if you get into tinkering and construction, especially in groups. My friend who was running a server on his own box for him, myself, and a couple of other people eventually broke down and rented a Minecraft server after a few months.

RPG-like elements? Oh dear, that would be disasterous.

This was also my experience. It's also been one of the few games my wife has played intensely. We both got quite bored of it after a couple of weeks of addicting play. It's a really great concept, just severely lacking in any overall goal. Makes me wonder what a dedicated, complete minecraft-like game could accomplish.

It's also an excellent example of getting a working prototype out as soon as possible. You never know, it may be even more successful than the completed version. :-)

> But if Markus decides to include RPG-like elements some day, we're in big trouble.

You're probably looking for Wurm Online, then. More advanced than Minecraft, with the same sandbox multiplayer environment and RPG like elements such as skills and mobs.

I listened to an interview with the lead Wurm Online developer a month or so ago on the Massively podcast, and he mentioned that he was originally with the Minecraft dev team, but split off some years back for wanting to do something more involved.

See I don't even dare _search_ for that.

I find it more of a roller coaster. I get into it for a few weeks, then stop playing for a while. Then it repeats once I try the new updates or play with my friends on multiplayer.

I think the interest stays longer once you start playing with mine cart boosting and killing mobs with logic-gate contraptions. Then it turns the game into you against the game instead of the enemies in the game - an extremely open-ended, creativity-driven style of play.

I was very interested in it for a couple of weeks, but then I stopped playing much. Once in a while, I get in a mood to add onto my subterranean underworld and fire it up again. Still need to finish my underground biodome and Nether castle.

I wish the engine wasn't so inefficient. Disassembly shows some cringe-worthy code. This kind of game should run on netbooks, yet areas are choppy even on high-end machines. The pixel art also starts hurting my eyes after a while. Interpolation would help a lot. While higher-resolution texture packs help, they also risk breaking after updates.

Yes, there's definitely some inefficient code - but voxel-type games like this are also legitimately computationally difficult. Just because it looks like pixels doesn't mean it's simple to run.

There are occasional engine improvements, but Notch thinks (as he says in that reddit thread and elsewhere) that players don't appreciate changes that aren't new features.

Also, my machine is mid-range at best, and I never have any problems. In Windows of course - Mac and Linux are quite a different story. Then again, you could say the fact that it runs in other OSes at all is impressive.

It's Java and OpenGL, you'd have to do some work to make it /not/ run in other OSes.

OpenGL on Java is still pretty immature. There's still plenty of issues with the library Minecraft uses, LJWGL, especially on Mac and Linux. Support for OpenGL itself on non-Windows OSes is also often lacking, especially on ATI or Intel graphics cards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com