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Comment by ineptech | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to mourn what was lost though. Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure. In my kids' friendgroup at least, the "modding games as an entry point to programming" concept has been handed off from Minecraft to Roblox.

It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

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I can't even imagine what it's like now, but Roblox is how I first learned programming when I was 11. This was well over a decade ago.

Roblox (talking in past tense; not sure how much of this is still true) allowed you to create "Places", which were basically 3D interactive universes that consisted of a few primitive parts (rect. prisms, cylinders, etc.) arranged and connected to each other, as larger solid objects, or with hinges. It was, in other words, a multi-player physics sanbox. Also, the use of the word "place" instead of "game" is interesting to note; as a child, it felt like they could really be anything, with no particular expectations.

I don't remember when Lua scripting was added - I think it was around 2008-2009 or somethng - but it allowed you to perform simple event-based programming, registering clicks/deaths/collisions/etc and manipulating the game world. As a child I saw this as a form of magic. What would otherwise be a physics sandbox with inanimate objects interacting in a strictly mechanistic fashion became one in which anything could happen. You know, magic. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that was my thinking.

So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard. I am still pursuing this goal. Also, RIP Erik Cassel. His tutorials were one of my first - if not my first - introduction to programming ever. He died too soon.

> So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard.

You may have already found it, but Fred Brooks's little essay on why programming is fun has always resonated with me [0]:

> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. [...]

> Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

[0] http://www.grok2.com/progfun.html

Not the OP, but that was a wonderful read, thanks for sharing.

It follows that, maybe we programmers should see ourselves as working class poets or writers.

Weaving our magic words like wizards casting their spells, with every line written, we watch as our work of fantasy hardens into reality.

Our faithful computer always does our will.

With infinite patience, it takes our every instruction until each one has been precisely executed, down to the last word.

A bit idyllic, true, because there is always the dark side, the bugs. But otherwise, pure magic.

And, nothing wrong with other professions, but, more that 20 years after starting out, I can still remember why I wanted to be a programmer.

>You know, magic

>So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard

that's a classic MIT AI lab idea.

"We'll actually see that Computer so-called-Science actually has a lot in common with magic."[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY 0:40, and a lot in the SICP textbook

all your rblx info is still true, by the way. there's a lot more you can script with too, including internal and external API integration, inter-game info transfer, transactions, all kinds of stuff.

Lost? Nothing has been deprecated, Java edition is still supported and kept in feature parity with Bedrock aka MS Edition. Yes, Bedrock is not mod friendly like Java, but the modding community hasn't stopped.

And yes they moved the license server from a Mojang server to the MS login system, but what is the real difference here? You still have to login, you just don't like MS for unrelated reasons.

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server

https://hub.docker.com/search?q=minecraft

https://old.reddit.com/r/admincraft/

> Yes, Bedrock is not mod friendly like Java

It's getting there, though. They recently introduced the framework for more advanced mods. Heck, Create Mod is even available on Bedrock now.

One of the devs on the Bedrock scripting team here :)

I started programming with Bukkit and hMod in Minecraft, so I am so happy to help others learn to program with Minecraft!

Do you have any resources to help someone get started? I've done a bit, but always looking for more info.

This is a good starting point!

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document...

This is the kind of pessimistic take that gets a lot of traction on HN, but man does it not match my experience.

> Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure.

First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way.

Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.)

> It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.

Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security.

[0] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/

[1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-Ho...

I'm not super knowledgeable about it so I should just let someone else answer; but to clarify what I was saying, I'm not talking about the account migration, I'm talking about the fact that the new version ("education" edition, the one most kids use because of the steep discounts to schools) client can't connect to the old ("java edition") servers. The old server is still easy to run and hack on, but none of your friends will be able to connect to it, and while I don't know too much about the new server, all of the how-tos I looked at start with "go sign up for your free $100 worth of Azure student credits".

Maybe a clearer way to say it is, I'm not saying modding itself is harder, but I think that back when this article was written, if a teenager bragged that they run their own server with mods they usually meant they have a shell open on their home computer with "java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M something.jar" in it and a mod directory with downloaded-and-hand-edited-textfiles, and nowadays they mean they pay for a cloud server and selected mods from a list. But again I'm mostly repeating what I hear from my kids' friends, tell me if I'm off base here.

Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything.

I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!). I still occasionally break out an old version of Java Edition and play some of the old mods that I liked back in the day. Many of those aren't maintained any more because the creators have moved on, but many have stuck around (Biomes O' Plenty and Iron Chests have a 1.21 release, and Applied Energistics has one for 1.20 that was last updated today). Plus we still get amazing new mods like Create.

I don't think it's that the old Minecraft has really gone anywhere, it's that, like the internet as a whole, it got so popular that geeks and nerds stopped being the majority. The existence of Minecraft Bedrock brought Minecraft to a bunch of kids who would have never grokked the wild west of Minecraft Java. But its existence hasn't taken away from everything that Minecraft Java still is.

We've indisputably lost whatever Minecraft would be today if notch hadn't sold it. We can't know what that is, maybe it would've sucked. What we got instead feels like just another corporate studio game, a good one, yes, but we already have a lot of those.

At every branching point in history, we have indisputably lost the result of the branch not taken. But... what's your point caller? That fact by itself is pretty meaningless.

Contrary to the point of view that somehow Microsoft changed everything, what surprising is how much they didn't change or might not be different at all... Jens Bergensten is today's Chief Create Officer at Mojang... but he's not a Microsoft plant, he's been there since 2010 and, moreover... " After the full release of Minecraft (1.0.0), Persson transferred creative authority of the game's development to Jens Bergensten, afterwards continuing to help out with Minecraft while also working on new projects." (https://minecraft.wiki/w/Markus_Persson) That happened in 2011 a few years before the Microsoft acquisition. As far as I can tell, there is a significant representation of pre-Microsoft Mojang staff that still exists within the company; sure there are many more people that have only been there since the Microsoft acquisition, but that seems to be a function of growth and resource availability more than some imposed change of direction.

So actually, I'm not sure what we've lost here. Pocket Edition, later to become Bedrock and upon which Minecraft Education is based, was well underway prior to the Microsoft acquisition. That ship sailed while Notch still owned the company. Outside of the Microsoft account and chat reporting requirements, which clearly were Microsoft driven, it's difficult to really see how different things would be. Arguable Jens might have been reeled in more by Notch, but my bet is that Notch was paying more attention to his 0x10c by 2012 and Jens would have had pretty substantial creative discretion by that time.

Halloween update was really just so good

I enjoyed Minecraft with less RPG mechanics overall

I feel you. Modern minecraft updates feel immensely tone deaf

> Your complaint is essentially that Microsoft released a new version of the game under the same name, which is not compatible with the old one because it's not actually quite the same game. That's a reasonable complaint, but doesn't constitute "losing" anything.

If enough people are pushed onto a new system, then yes we do lose the ease of the old system.

That may be true in the abstract but has not been really demonstrated in this thread.

I spent the rest of my comment detailing the ways in which everything I ever liked about Minecraft is still available—do you have anything to add in support of the idea that something has been lost, or just this abstract observation?

Available isn't the same if it's not what people are using. Especially since you had to buy them separately for so long. This is not an abstract loss.

You're still talking abstractly, though. What was actually lost, in concrete terms?

As I noted in my comment, I'm still subscribed to YouTube channels of people who are still playing on the same server with the same group (with some changes over the years, of course). I don't play Minecraft as often as I did in 2012, but that's because I have a career and a family, not because I can't. I'm now introducing my son to Minecraft Java and he's loved it every time we've played it.

I'm just not seeing the loss, and those who are bemoaning it here haven't actually pinned down what's now missing from Minecraft as a result of Bedrock (or even Microsoft in general).

It's easy enough for an adult to follow setup instructions, but the ability ability for a kid to come home and set up their own minecraft server and bring in friends is cut down a lot when you go from "just about everyone has minecraft (java)" to "just about everyone has minecraft (bedrock)". Java is still there but it's not the thing everyone already has ready to go. That's especially true for vanilla but it also increases the amount of hurdles you have to go through to set up and use a modded java install.

And before they merged ownership, the gap between casual play and a custom java server went from "some setup time" in the earlier days to to "more setup time, also more than a hundred dollars purchasing copies of java version even though everyone in the group already owns minecraft". Surely you can see the lost opportunities there.

As someone that’s hosted many servers over the years and made a few mods, it’s easier than ever. Getting started with modding is so much easier with the excellent IDE support and mature modding APIs compared to class monkey patching and struggling to load up a decompiled version of the game in Eclipse was.

> Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014

That was such a long time ago... I remember people proclaiming the death of Minecraft.

> I remember people proclaiming the death of Minecraft.

To be fair, it's on a long slow Yahoo!-style death path - Microsoft have not been good stewards of the game. They've owned it for 10 years and we're still having to rely on 3rd party mods monkey-patching the game for basic optimisations and QOL improvements. The bug tracker is awash with things that should be fixed but are ignored in favour of "mob vote of the year" and forcing in things they can tie to merch / media and IAPs.

Microsoft bought Minecraft to milk it dry for money - and they are doing that amazingly effectively - but they did not buy it to make the game better or their users happier.

Minetest, which has been around nearly as long and is a FOSS game with more or less feature parity, covers all these bases. Super easy to script in Lua. Simple to set up servers.

I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.

Same here! Got a server on an old Rpi 2 and as client an old Samsung tablet. All works great and we have a lot of fun! The only thing is to setup the game as you like, with mods etc. it takes some trial and error, but it's also fun.

> Runs great on lower end hardware too.

Our first server box was a late gen P4 running headless Ubuntu. The CPU had strong single thread performance and handled dozens of players.

I dislike the auth changes as well, but it hasn’t had any impact on server hosting in my experience. It’s still just as easy as getting the right JVM and running the jar. The only thing new is the EULA you have to accept on first launch

The auth changes locked me out of my minecraft alpha account. Apparently I had a period of time to link my minecraft account with my microsoft account and that is gone now. I just use a pirated launcher now since they made it so I can't play the game I bought anymore otherwise. I miss playing on servers though.

You can even still disable user authentication. That’s a pretty sweet deal for a game owned by Microsoft. There’s legit support in the game for pirated copies.

For a while I hosted a server for some friends that used TLauncher, turning off the "online mode" was indeed super simple! Then they also got the proper copies from Microsoft and I could just change the configuration setting, and we could all play with the proper accounts, although if I recall correctly they lost their old items and such, because those were considered different player IDs and whatnot.

Not condoning it per se, but the game could be way more draconian in its implementation of auth.

There are still entire ecosystems of minecraft mods. Launchers are popular that hook into these systems and essentially give you specific minecraft package environments for each just like software environments to manage multiple conflicting sets of dependencies on a single machine.

https://www.curseforge.com/

You can try minetest, an open source clone. It's fun!

consider minetest, which makes it trivial to get started with your own server and can be scripted in lua like roblox

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