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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if they'll ever just open source the Java Edition on GitHub. People will buy Minecraft on every platform it is released on, just like Skyrim.

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There's no reason for them not to. Open source launchers using the "honor system" for account verification are already established and normalized. It's trivial to just comment out that verification. The jars and assets are free to download from Microsoft's servers without needing an account. It's a trivial game to get without paying, so I don't see any downside for them to open source the engine.

Honestly, I would almost settle for Microsoft open sourcing the Minecraft Java back-end server at a minimum. This alone is long overdue. The massive fanbase could have started to maintain it in ways Microsoft could only fathom.

the client and server are the jar file, but net.minecraft.client deleted, client has both.

I don't even think open sourcing Minecraft would hurt them financially. People don't buy Minecraft because that's the only way to play the game; it's not, it's easy to find ways to run Minecraft for free. The reason people buy it is to join servers.

Most serious servers only allow players with valid paid Minecraft accounts to join, because it allows the server owner to ban people or otherwise keep track of people. I don't see any reason why this would change just because the game client was made open source.

People could set up 3rd party auth systems and eliminate the need for mojang

Maybe, but the "paying" is load-bearing, because you need to prevent banned people from just creating new accounts.

Sure a different approach might be possible, but would likely also hinder adoption of such a 3rd party account system.

You can already do that and some do. Mojang, for some incomprehensible reason, even lets you disable auth in the official server's settings (`online-mode=false`).

It's not incomprehensible. It enabled LAN games without outside internet access.

That already exists, but people still buy the game

Back in 2010 Notch promised

> Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100301103851/http://www.minecr...

Notch has said he would do many things and rarely follows through with them. I'm still waiting for 0x10c.

He sold the game to Microsoft, his promises kind of don't matter anymore.

I think you meant to reply to the parent comment, I never mentioned Minecraft

> Once sales start dying

Has that part ever happened?

TBF sales didn't start dying

The only upside of that game was that I taught myself assembly because of it. Even though it never released

I'm pretty sure A Minecraft Movie has already made more money that the game had made when he made that promise.

Back then he couldn't have foreseen the size of the money printing factory that the game would become.

I remember when Minecraft was sold for $2 billion and people thought it was madness and would never make the money back.

Since then they've made that back on game copies alone, and god only knows how much from movie/merch rights and microtransactions.

Notch has said a lot of things over the years. Many after the sale to Microsoft were not so great. Suddenly without purpose and more money than he would ever need in a life time, he found a new purpose that wasn't so great.

A lot of Qanon rants and other conspiracy things. Just goes to show you that some times it is best you don't get what you wish for.

What is he up to recently? Did he come around?

I have been following him, and I think a lot of the claims about him have been exaggerated. He stopped being so edgy on twitter after watching the "this is phil fish" video. It is an interesting watch and applicable to notch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w

He is developing a new voxel-like game called "levers and chests", and before that he has shown us a few cool webgl demos I find interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYMy7TPsNd0

Sales are still good though- right? It’s the no paid iOS game.

More games should be open source like doom. It doesnt effect the art assets which are still copyrighted.

Amusingly, Minecraft is a counter-example. It has very few assets and they are hardly essential to the experience.

There are so many third-party texture packs for Minecraft that losing access to the official ones would hardly even be an obstacle.

The music and sounds play a large part into the experience though, and are much harder to replace than the textures.

The sounds maybe, but the music? If there's one game whose music I always turn off instantly it's Minecraft. Touhou Youyoumu Minecraft ain't.

The music is definitely considered classic, you can find tons of people online talking about how it means a lot to them - and personally, I really loved the music.

I remember the early Minecraft musics from C418 to be relatively unconventional, especially some of the jukebox discs.

I started playing Minecraft again recently and while it sounds like it’s the same artist, and it’s still somewhat contemplative, it’s not dissonant anymore.

It's not the same artist. C418 had a very good deal with Notch's Mojang, letting him keep rights. Microsoft demanded that he sign over the rights to further music as work for hire. He refused, as a result the newer music in Minecraft is made by other composers who signed on to that deal and try to make music fitting with C418's style.

It's even recognized by the Library of Congress!

https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-recording-prese...

It's not hard to get into the library of congress? It's purposely extremely easy. I forgot who it was, but there was one big right-wing talk show host that would end all of his segments by saying it's being added to the Library of Congress as if it's an exclusive accolade, and people rightfully called him out on his shit for how easy it is to do that

The classic Minecraft music was great. Some of the new music Mojang has added in recent years is unlistenable noise. Like "glitchcore" crap. I tried playing with music on recently and after a few hours had to give up.

I like Minecraft’s music. If there was a way to have it not play when the game is paused or on the title screen, I would probably keep it on.

A quick search nets this: https://modrinth.com/mod/pause-music-on-pause

Interesting, I love Minecraft's music. I do listen to it intentionally outside of the game, but it's not quite the same as having it suddenly start up during gameplay. The first I heard of someone "obviously turning off the music" was, I kid you not, yesterday, and now I'm hearing it for a second time today. Would woulda thunk!

There are soundtracks I listen to outside of their games: Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Chrono Trigger, Shadowgate,... but Minecraft would be way near the end of the list. The music is too generic to be worth the attention, yet too present to work as ambiance. It kinda reminds me of Silent Hill's soundtrack.

"Generic"? Ouch, lol.

I turn off the in-game music while playing. I prefer to listen to my own stuff, including video essays etc, but I do still enjoy a lot of the music, and I've listened to it standalone a decent amount. I would tend to the same in most sandbox games, like factorio

That specific coincidence is a great example of the "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon"

Ah, thank you! Never knew what that was called. Guess I could asked Chat Jippity but there's no fun in that.

Cannot disagree more. Probably my favorite video game music of all time.

> If there's one game whose music I always turn off instantly it's Minecraft.

I turn it off but only because I have great difficulty with multiple sound sources at the same time. I will happily listen to C418's output for hours whilst doing something else.

(And also Touhou because who doesn't love an electric trumpet?)

I play Minecraft for the music. And for the feeling of digging myself up from the mines and breaking through to surface to hear the sound of rain.

Free (as in freedom) software can still be sold.

OSS would probably also just mean "read the source e.g. on github", not really specific as to all the four essential freedoms.

This is one area EA has been doing well.

They have been open sourcing some of their older IPs, they recently open sourced their Command & Conquer games for example:

https://www.ea.com/games/command-and-conquer/command-and-con...

It sounds like you might be looking for Minetest/Luanti.

no, I think they're looking for the official game to be open sourced... that's much more appealing than a knockoff since it's the version everyone actually plays.

It's much less appealing because it's much harder to mod.

It's much more appealing because it has a much more vibrant modding community.

Community can go a long way towards compensating for worse technology, yeah.

Community is the entire goal. The technology just has to meet some minimum threshold. You know any 13 year olds playing Minetest?

I don't know any 13-year-olds, but I hear that a lot of them do play Minetest.

My kids are younger than that and play Minetest/Luanti all the time. They are well aware of Minecraft but are completely engrossed by the modding first approach of Luanti.

less appealing to who? Lots of 13 year olds learned to code by writing minecraft mods so it can't be that hard. You also get the benefit & satisfaction of it actually being in Minecraft—yes, they are both very similar games where you explore and place blocks in a procedurally generated world, but it really does matter. I can't really explain why if you don't get it but it's evident people do care even when they know about Minetest.

IMHO, "actually in Minecraft" is roughly akin to "my shoes are actually Nike".

That said, I never had any interest in playing on a server that was populated by anyone but my small circle of friends.

Now my kids are growing up doing the same which I find great because I know exactly with whom they are interacting and have no worries about it.

Exactly. Why losing the time with Minecraft when there's Luanti, a free community-driven project?

At this point, they could open source it, and just charge for Minecraft accounts being able to authenticate with their login servers to join authenticated Minecraft servers, and it wouldn't change sales much.

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