What's your opinion of Minecraft?

[Brendan]

Hi,

Anyway, has anyone seen the 1.8 update pre-release? that looks so awesome, endermen are freaky..

I've been messing with the 1.8 pre-release for the last few days. Some rough notes:

• I'm not sure if there's a way to stop endermen from removing important blocks from structures I've built. I can imagine building a complex machine of some kind and an enderman removing a block that holds back some water, causing weeks of work to be trashed.
• I'm not sure if the "animals only spawn when chunks are generated" rumour is true, but if it is I killed all the animals close to my base to get food to survive while building that base
• Animals don't seem to multiply (e.g. give birth). It's far too easy to wipe them out in a "permanently gone" way, especially if your spawn point is in a huge desert where very few animals spawn to begin with. Note: With hindsight, I'd recommend making a fishing rod or building a wheat or mushroom farm in the first 2 "minecraft days" of starting a new world to avoid animal extinction.
• sheep don't seem to regrown their wool, so if you need a lot of wool you're screwed (until/unless you find a spider spawner and build a string factory)
• not sure if zombie meat is meant to poison you or not - food bar goes green but it doesn't seem to effect health. Wish I knew that before I ate all the animals
• the lighting is glitchy. Same "occasional black strips of darkness down cliff faces" (maybe on chunk boundaries?) that always happens when Notch touches the lighting, and the new stone brick steps aren't right (same problem all steps had last time Notch touched the lighting)
• the lighting is dodgy. I'm not sure why but you get strange hues of light (e.g. white light near a torch, then a brownish light a few blocks from the torch) that don't make sense. Not sure if there's some sort of saturation going on (e.g. the light near the torch is meant to be 120% red, 100 % blue and 120% green but saturates to 100% red and 100% green near the torch making it appear white)
• the lighting is dodgy. In sunlight it seems OK. Underground it's not - a wall of torches seems bright (as it should) when you're close, but suddenly becomes dark when you're about 30 blocks away from it. Not sure if this is a limitation of the way lighting has been changed (e.g. if the game keeps track of sun/sky light everywhere, and only keeps track of other sources of light within a fixed/limited area around the player)
• the "smooth lighting" is still dodgy. If you put a torch into a deep (1 * 1 * n) pigeon-hole none of the surfaces inside the hole are lit properly (same bug has existed ever since the "smooth lighting" was added to the game).
• star light seems dodgy. At night, I think star light is blue in an attempt to mimic the eye's response in low light conditions. The "blue hue shift" should occur in all low light conditions (e.g. including underground when there's no sun/star light) and shouldn't happen at night on the surface when there's other light sources nearby (where the eye's cones dominate and the eye's rods don't). Either Notch doesn't understand how eyes work, or he screwed it up.
• still problems with terrain generation - trees spawned in lava lakes, dirt/stone blocks floating in mid-air that don't make sense, sand that hovers a few blocks above things in ways that sand shouldn't, etc.
• the "mushroom plague" problem (where growth of mushrooms is unlimited, and you can go into a cave and find mushroom carpet) is still there
• the vines are cool, but now there's a "vine plague" problem (where growth of vines is unlimited and can cover entire mountain ranges). Same problem they didn't learn to avoid/fix from mushrooms
• the villages seem cool too; but it doesn't take long (a few different worlds) before you notice that all villages use the same set of about 6 buildings with no variety (it's like villages are "cut & paste").
• village placement seems dodgy. You get villages where the entrance to some buildings is in the middle of a lake and nobody can get in the building, gravel paths/roads that jump up steep inclines that don't make sense, etc.
• there's still no in-game help system. If you want to find out how to craft a fence or piston or something, then the only option is to start a web browser and go to the wiki. The closer they get to a final release the more stupid this becomes.
• lots of smaller bugs that are just plain stupid (e.g. the current pre-release crashes when you try to add objects to a chest or inventory that's already full)

If you look at all this, half of the problems indicate poor design and lack of forethought; and the other half of the problems indicate poor quality control practices (e.g. lack of unit testing). I'd also suggest they do more frequent releases - e.g. each week add something small (or add a small part of something larger) and fix all the bugs from the previous week. With 2 months between releases they release 2 months of unfixed bugs, and it's probably going to take them 2 months to (fail to) fix all the problems. I'm also estimating that they'll miss the "November 2011" final release date by about 6 months.


Cheers,

Brendan