Minecraft Reaches Beta Status, Price Goes Up 279
Eric writes "After over a year of development, Minecraft has hit Beta status today. Minecraft was developed for about a week before its public release on May 17, 2009. With the new milestone, the price of the game has increased to €14.95; when Minecraft moves beyond beta status, it will sell for €20.00. The beta is more focused on polish and content. The aim is to add proper modding support via a stable API, some kind of non-intrusive narrative to help drive the game experience early on, and a late-game goal. Updates will be less frequent, so as to make sure stability is maintained thanks to more extended testing. Despite this, there have already been two beta releases: client and server Beta 1.0 followed quickly by client 1.0_01."
The real question going through my mind is.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Releases. (Score:4, Interesting)
The release that was supposed to inaugurate the beta also created a bunch of bugs for both single- and multi-player modes, including dupe bugs, which he was trying to fix.
The patch that followed the beta release was supposed to fix those bugs, and didn't. Minecraft remains almost unplayable for me in single- or multi-player mode; my friends can't even connect to the server anymore.
I understand that "beta" is just a milestone, but this is really inauspicious.
Re:Preorder now! (Score:5, Interesting)
No shit.
This man made BANK on a fucking ALPHA.
What the fuck? I can understand needing development capital, but still, charging for an Alpha?
Insanity. He just showed up Microsoft, Apple, Google, EVERYBODY, at their own goddamned game.
The alpha was well worth it (Score:3, Interesting)
I bought the alpha a few months ago, and while I haven't played it recently due to time contraints, it is easily well worth the money that is being charged. I played it far more than games that cost three times as much, not to mention that when playing it, I was never frustrated, or angry, but thoroughly enjoying the experience, which is something I can't say about most games, not to mention ones that aren't even freaking finished yet!
Re:Poor programmer? (Score:1, Interesting)
Not really, he really is a bad programmer.
I'm not even sure if he knows what the Undo functionality is of whatever he is using.
He regularly fucks up even the most simplistic of things when he shouldn't have even been NEAR that section.
He is too messy, he dabbles around with everything at once, instead of focusing on one tiny section at a time.
Hell, the game STILL CRASHES WHEN IT EXITS. Seriously, launch it from command prompt, watch those errors roll!
Not to mention myself, along with countless other people, have to run MC (standalone) from command prompt with a JVM memory limit because Notch has done god knows what to screw even that up.
Game works fine in browser, but as soon as it hits that c drive and you start it yourself, oh boy.
And apparently he was at some code-athon recently, which as a huge let down i hear. (not sure myself though)
Now the game is too crashy to even play on SMP, eggs crash the game at random points, shit duplicating like crazy.
Server-side inventory was supposed to FIX duplication bugs, not make it 10 times easier!
Well, just heard from friend that the more recent patch to this update (god) is a little less buggy, so there is some hope this game will be completed by 2020...
Re:Preorder now! (Score:5, Interesting)
From a first-person perspective you place and remove blocks, which have various properties, to build things. Some of those blocks can be combined and refined to make:
* New kinds of blocks, like glass or stairs
* Tools, like pickaxes and torches
* Interactable objects like doors, vehicles and refining furnaces
* Sensors, switches, buttons and NOR gates, with which one can build everything from an automatic door to a turing-complete computer
The world you play in is procedurally generated from a seed and, depending on technical limitations, is several times the size of the surface of the earth, albeit only 128 metres deep. There is a day-night cycle, monsters can spawn wherever it is sufficiently dark (i.e. at night or in unlit caverns) and farm animals can spawn wherever it is sufficiently bright.
For example, I have built a monster-resistant house with a moat, and a system of water channels that funnels the creatures from the moat down to a contraption that kills them, at which point their loot is funnelled to a sensor that lights up a lamp upstairs to tell me to go fetch the goodies. I'm currently finishing off that system before I venture into a newly-discovered cave system to get some more iron ore with which to build some tracks for a railway system. On another part of the map, I am hollowing out a mountain to build a secure location in which to construct a portal to a parallel dimension of pure suffering.
Re:Preorder now! (Score:4, Interesting)
This was my gripe too, that minerals are so hard to find. But then I created a new world recently... it looks like the iron probability was increased a lot, but only shows up in new worlds, or when new map chunks are generated in old worlds.
Re:Poor programmer? (Score:5, Interesting)
He is a terrible programmer.
He doesn't use Java NIO; instead, he uses threads. Wanna guess how many threads he spawns on startup? How about how many threads he spawns per connected player? (Answer: 12 and 4.)
His wire protocol and disk format are horrible. No delimiters, no seekability, no fixed packet sizes. He invented his own little standards and they are horrible. http://www.minecraft.net/docs/NBT.txt [minecraft.net] is the disk format; before that, he just serialized the Java classes directly to disk. (And to wire; one of the Alpha wire packets was just a chunk of the disk format!)
His grasp of GL is embarrassingly awful. He pridefully boasts GL 1.1 compatibility, but the fact is that he uses no features or extensions from GL 1.2 or later, including shaders, dynamic lighting, or vertex buffer objects. All of the drawing is done in slow display lists, and the lighting is done through a statically stored light map. (This might not set off alarm bells if you haven't done GL before. Trust me when I say that this is horribly slow.)
I wouldn't mind if it weren't for the fact that he has charged for alpha-quality software, as part of an open alpha test.