December 2010
22 posts
Minecraft – PC Gamer UK’s Game Of The Year
As a teenager, I read PC Gamer compulsively. Not only did they give me access to game demos before the internets got big, but they also had a very strange British sense of humor, something which I’ve always loved (Monty Python, Bill Bailey, Eddie Izzard, Father Ted (see the important edit below!), Queen Elizabeth II). Oh, and they reviewed games.
I remember getting the first episode of They...
Christmas Day
If you purchased the game recently through PayPal and didn’t get it, do not worry. Because of Murphy’s Law, PayPal transactions stopped auto-processing the second we left for Xmas. We fixed it today, and it’s all getting sent out as I’m writing this.
And here are eleven gift codes for Minecraft:
y2e9-b9a3-e9u2 g4p3-m2u4-k3f4 e9h5-m7d9-g8t6 b3w8-d9n3-q2f9 r8v8-i9u9-x9e3...
What I played in 2010
I went through this list and picked out all the games I played in 2010. Here they are, with tiny reviews each:
Bayonetta Devil May Cry all over again, making less sense than ever. Epic action, great controls. 3/5 BioShock 2 The new developers totally fail to understand what was good about the first one. 2/5 Aliens vs. Predator The original developers totally fail to understand what was good...
Some thoughts about release schedule during beta
Here’s an idea!
* All commit comments are public to everyone. Possibly even tweeted out * Everyone who has bought the game can download the latest nightly build. These will almost certainly be quite buggy. * Before doing a release, we make a special Release Candidate build. You can download these as well, and they’re supposed to be not buggy. (But they will be. ;)) * Once the release...
Updated Client and Server to Beta 1.1_01
1.1 contained an additional bug fix I forgot about: * Fixed “fancy” characters not working in the game by detaching font resources from the code.
1.1 contained a bug where no text worked anywhere in the game because the newly made font.txt didn’t make it into package when building..
This has been fixed in 1.1_01, and it affects both client and server.
[edit]
Groan, hang on..
Updated Client and Server to Beta 1.1
The server update isn’t mandatory, but it’s HIGHLY recommended
* Rewrote Leaf Decay for the seventeenth time, and as a result.. * .. fixed HUGE fps drops in single player * .. fixed players getting spammed with data and getting disconnected in SMP * .. felt like a sexy programming god * Fixed the item dupe bug in SMP
Minor patch 1.0_01. More bugfixes tomorrow.
Client 1.0_01 is up, fixing a double chest issue and a rare crash on load level bug.
There’s a serious problem getting the client started for some people (especially Mac OSX?). I’ve also heard about weird item duplication bugs with dropped items, and a severe performance reduction.
It’s 7:40 PM here, but I will work on these bugs tomorrow.
I’m also hoping to be able to...
Minecraft Beta
I just updated the client and the server to Minecraft Beta 1.0 * Working server-side inventory! Finally! (And as a result of that, a whole pile of bugs and issues got fixed) * Made SMP servers save chunks way less often in most cases. Chunks don’t resave if they got saved in the last 30 seconds * Moving too far away from a container, or having it blow up, closes the inventory screen * Fixed...
Websites and gift codes!
It’s a bit rough around the edges, but the new version of minecraft.net is up! It will receive even more polish in the future, with prettier art by JunkBoy and less super-wide content.
I spent all day today working on gift codes, and it’s working now! The way it works is that you buy codes that get connected to your account, then you give those away to friends. When they redeem the...
Man down! And another man down!
It’s the week before beta. Two people are home, struck down by some mysterious illness. I should probably be home myself as well, but here I am, plugging away at the code. Just now, I got furnaces to work in the server-side inventory, complete with working progress bar art thingies.
Remaining is visible armor and items, then client-side prediction for less lag, and a pile of testing....
Looong Monday
It’s 11:35 pm and I got home not long ago. Today was spent mostly with working on server-side inventory. I ran into some problems with an earlier assumption that all popups would be simple containers, so I had to move some code around to make it popup centric rather than container centric. Each popup can have multiple viewers now, which is nice. Primarely it will be for multiplayer, but...
Pottymouths!
Seriously, wow. Haha :D
[edit]
Looking into a way to link the blog posts to the forum where you can comment and discuss in a moderated way..
One week left on the Webhallen compo, and the...
The Webhallen competition where you can win a painting by Kristoffer Zetterstrand and an SSD signed by me runs for one more week! Check it out: http://www.webhallen.com/minecraft/
And the first official Minecraft merchandise appeared on ThinkGeek today! Check it out as well: http://tinyurl.com/mcthinkgeek (search for “Minecraft” if you don’t find it)
More merchandise is coming!...
Minecraft Beta: December 20, 2010
The next epoch is upon us! The skies are trembling, pigs are growing wings, and the nether is turning awfully cold, as Minecraft slowly crawls out of Alpha..
Minecraft will reach Beta status on December 20th, 2010.
With Beta comes a larger focus on polish and content, and we’ll start early on with adding proper modding support with a stable API, and we’d love all input we can get...
So many emotions, so little space!
Last night, I finally got inventory to the stage where it can run without any client side code at all, all through a tiny two-method interface. That means moving it server side is trivial. I expect to have most of it done today, and I feel happy as a duck! :D
There’s a really awesome Friday mood here in the office as well, with a Starcraft 2 semifinal playing in the background (we seem to...
Paul Millen is not enjoying our support →
Support is not our strongest side. Having grown rather quickly from a one-man operation, we obviously have no idea how to deal with the level of emails we get, and that sucks bad.
Turns out in this case that he had forgotten his username, something that wouldn’t happen if we sent out proper confirmation emails.. or if the email hadn’t gotten missed repeatedly several times by several...
Server-side inventory and websites
(A lot of my blog posts have “and” in the title!)
I’ve been working on server-side inventory, but progress has been slow and agonizing, mostly due to the first version of inventory just being a GUI hack. I got almost nothing done yesterday, but today I will roll up my sleeves and just dig in. The first step will be to commit everything to our brand new version control system...
Welcome back, Tumblr!
I missed you! While you were offline, I came up with a funny pun:
Watch it! You don’t want to tumblr and fall!
Bug update #5, and we need videos
Client version 1.2.6 Server version 0.2.8 (not mandatory)
* Added /kill command. Does 1000 points damage to the player * Did some patching client side to prevent duplicated entities * The join server page now remembers the port as well as the ip * Fixed a bug where joining a server on a specific port caused the client to forget all keybindings * Added lakes and rare lava pools, both on the...
Bug update #4, and we're six people in the office...
Client version 1.2.5 Server version 0.2.7 (not mandatory, but you might want to update anyway)
* Fixed a rather bad memory leak bug in the server (entity position updates accumulated in orphaned player objects) * Riding carts and boats now works properly when you travel long distances. * Harvesting crops no longer yields fake seeds * Removed /home (sorry!) * Snowballs again!
I will start looking...