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From what I have seen, that is not at all an unpopular opinion. Minecraft is widely considered, even by its own player base, to be a resource-hogging, poorly-built mess.

It is really fun, though.

"Son, have you been playing Minecraft on my iMac again?"

"No way, Dad"

"Go to your room."

(This is an actual transcript from last week)

I can use the same technique with MS Word on the Macs in our house. They feel broken if someone has used Word recently. Restart required. 2013 MacBook Airs.

Apple laptops have, and have had for some time, absolutely terrible heat dispersion. I had a 2007 silver Macbook Pro that overheated constantly under any kind of load. It was a huge pain.

I can only speak about the 2012 MBP and the 2013 rMBP, neither of which demonstrate any issues at all with dissipating heat.

You example is from 7 years ago. The entire MacBook line has been completely changed, inside and out, since then.

What sort of work do you do on them? The issues I had, and that I've seen others have on MBPs of varying years, occurred mostly in games, video editing, etc. Things that might not be the primary purpose of the product, but nevertheless shoudln't cause it to overheat and shut down.

I run several VM's, Photoshop, and games. Never had overheating result in a mandatory shutdown/reboot.

You'd be very unlikely to with modern CPUs. They generally just throttle back to a tiny fraction of normal performance, unless the heatsink literally falls off (and maybe even then).

> unless the heatsink literally falls off

Or if the laptop was shipped without the screws which hold the heatsink in place (happened to me). The thermal throttling can hold for some time, but it'll reach 100 degrees and turn off, even if you aren't doing anything CPU-intensive.

2012 rMBP (they completely reengineered the heat distribution in the retinas). I've had all CPU cores at maximum load and the GPU churning for extended periods doing heavy video encoding on multiple occasions, it gets pretty hot, and the fans scream, but it's never had actual running issues due to the heat.

Apple addressed these issues, very publicly, giving an anecdote from 7 year old hardware is still not a great data point for the current state of their hardware.

I have no issues with anything except Word. Video encoding and other fairly intensive things run just fine, Word bring the computer to its knees to the point where I can tell if it has been open. A restart is always required.

I mostly do iOS development, which produces very little heat.

I do use it for gaming, however. I've played through Portal 2 on max settings. The aluminum definitely gets hot right above the keyboard near the left top corner, but it has never shut down due to heat.

I have a macbook pro from 2011, a macbook air from 2013 and a retina macbook pro 2014. I had issues with heat dispersion with the macbook air but not with the macbook pro and the retina macbook pro.

I'd recommend checking to see that the heatsinks are clear. I was having horrible slowdown on a 2010 MBP that I realized after a lot of hair pulling was due to thermal issues. Pulled the fans/heatsinks, there was a solid mat of dust between the fans and heatsinks. Cleaned those up, and suddenly the fans never even spun up to audible levels.

There are things to help. Unfortunately the settings panel is pretty much opaque about what effect all thedifferent things actually do.

But reducing render distance helps.

Thanks, I'll check that out.

Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are both incredible, complex games made by one mediocre programmer (not commenting on the Mojang team, just Notch himself). It's frustrating, but it should also serve as an inspiration to any small, talented team that wants to go even further.

I'd like to be a mediocre programmer as Notch...

Mediocre may be the wrong word, but perhaps "unmeticulous".

Ships things that work.

Adequate practice beats out sublime theory every time.

Just goes to show that shipping matters more than perfect code...

Ever wonder how many projects fail to ship because the developers are concerned their code isn't good enough?

I imagine the shipping developers don't!

It's another example of Worse is Better

Under the assumption that Minecraft could not have been delivered as quickly or seen a similar level of success if properly engineered. For Notch, this may be true. But that doesn't mean it is a golden rule for all developers. In fact, I don't think it is very closely related at all. More of a coincidence.

I think that's a rather severe misinterpretation of Worse is Better. Worse is Better doesn't mean ship with silly bugs and never fix them; it means ship simple, understandable systems. The canonical example is that unix system calls sometimes need to be restarted instead of always succeeding. But that doesn't mean unix succeeded because its system calls would randomly return incorrect data.

I always thought it was a better example of deciding if you should optimize code or just throw faster hardware at a system.

You should be commenting on "the Mojang team", not Notch. Minecraft was way more performant when Notch was working on it. There were a number of blogposts in the recent past about how Minecraft maintainers rewriting Minecraft to be more object-oriented and idiomatic have trashed what little performance there was.

It was only more performant because it did less back then. And Notch had to incorporate fan mods to the lighting and chunk rendering code to even achieve that.

There have been recent issues but lets not pretend they aren't the sort of mistakes Notch liked to make.

Go look it up - recent patches have had massive increases in CPU and RAM usage not because of new features, but because of making the code prettier. Notch may not be an expert on lighting or chunk rendering, but he's pretty good at writing efficient game code.

Mediocre or not, I'd sure love to have a look at Dwarf Fortress' code.

Part of Minecraft's popularity is it's history of bugs and hacks. It's what makes it all interesting isn't it? If everything worked perfectly from day 1 and every feature were part of the core there would be no sense of ownership, as people would understand the limits very quickly and would move on to Dwarf Fortress. Of course there are some actual bugs, but sometimes those bugs are a lot of fun! (of course i am just guessing, i am not a player)

Edit: It's fascinating how difficult it is to intentionally engineer something with the purpose of it being hacked on by people.

Like it or not, these bugs become integral parts of the game. The whole Block Update Debacle was a bug that came from events not being sent to diagonal blocks (or something like that) and now there are thousands of youtube videos about how to exploit it.

The phrase "like it or not" can be applied before anything and sounds unnecessarily dickish. Like it or not some of us think deliberate design goes a lot further than accidental design. Like it or not airplanes use a lot of fuel when they travel over the Pacific. Like it or not just isn't needed at the start of a sentence.

The massive bugginess is #1 what eventually killed my motivation for the game. (Plugin scene drama and Mojang EULA dickery being items 2 and 3).

It's very hard to enjoy the game when making builds over a certain size leads to all manner of graphical glitches and memory leaks and other weirdness that you need to be intimately familiar with the operation of the Java virtual machine in order to fix. A number of these bugs lead to world corruption - I remember back when 1.7 had its initial release, there was a certain configuration of redstone blocks and mine carts that would "corrupt the world state" and leave you with an unplayable world.

The only people who were negatively interacting with the EULA were the server operators abusing it, like charging the kids of rich parents $10,000.00 US for special privileges in game. Mojang put a stop to that abuse, good on them.

You will forgive me for thinking the game author coming in and telling me how I have to run my private server is just a little bit of a reach.

this thread feels eerily familiar...

oblig contribution: perfect code != worthwhile code