4 ms·

Don't get me wrong, he did a lot with what he knew. That doesn't mean his work couldn't benefit from a re-implementation from a team with a deeper understanding

Don't get me wrong, he did a lot with what he knew. That doesn't mean his work couldn't benefit from a re-implementation from a team with a deeper understanding. You have to remember that Minecraft's world format, server-client architecture, and username system all underwent massive changes, all of which could have been avoided in the first place. It's also worth mentioning that Minecraft runs well (which I would contest) on modern hardware in the same way DOOM does; not asking for much in the first place doesn't absolve your work from horrid inefficiencies/long running bugs.

kbutler 9y ago
Hard to argue that a hypothetical clean original architecture beats a "good enough" implementation that evolved to a multi-billion-dollar business. If he had waited and engineered a solution suitable for a billion-dollar business up-front, would it ever have shipped and become a billion-dollar business?
- axus 9y ago
  There are people who run Minecraft game servers as a small business. A more efficient implementation lets them make more money, so for them this could beat Mojang's server.
- imtringued 9y ago
  I'd say notch shipping his game early and updating the game frequently is what made the game incredibly successfull. I started playing the game when he was incrementally adding multiplayer functionality. He used to release a few features one at a time every week. I always looked forward to see how the game would improve next week. If he hadn't written the game in java modding support would turn from a merely hard problem to an impossible one. The first mods were written in obfuscated java code but minecrafts coders pack (MCP) enabled a mechanism to map obfuscated names to "reverse engineered" names which can then be applied to newer versions of minecraft. With C++ you could probably get away with manually decompiling points of interest which would easily take more than 10 times the effort and still create mods but as soon as the next update is released all that work will be for naught and you'll have to do everything over again whereas with java the decompilation is mostly automated.
  - seabird 9y ago
    The challenge of modifying the game is a problem that would have been mitigated by the game having a proper API. MCP was and is a crutch trying to minimize the underlying issue of the API being held off for over five years now.

kbutler 9y ago

Hard to argue that a hypothetical clean original architecture beats a "good enough" implementation that evolved to a multi-billion-dollar business. If he had waited and engineered a solution suitable for a billion-dollar business up-front, would it ever have shipped and become a billion-dollar business?

axus 9y ago
There are people who run Minecraft game servers as a small business. A more efficient implementation lets them make more money, so for them this could beat Mojang's server.
imtringued 9y ago
I'd say notch shipping his game early and updating the game frequently is what made the game incredibly successfull. I started playing the game when he was incrementally adding multiplayer functionality. He used to release a few features one at a time every week. I always looked forward to see how the game would improve next week. If he hadn't written the game in java modding support would turn from a merely hard problem to an impossible one. The first mods were written in obfuscated java code but minecrafts coders pack (MCP) enabled a mechanism to map obfuscated names to "reverse engineered" names which can then be applied to newer versions of minecraft. With C++ you could probably get away with manually decompiling points of interest which would easily take more than 10 times the effort and still create mods but as soon as the next update is released all that work will be for naught and you'll have to do everything over again whereas with java the decompilation is mostly automated.
- seabird 9y ago
  The challenge of modifying the game is a problem that would have been mitigated by the game having a proper API. MCP was and is a crutch trying to minimize the underlying issue of the API being held off for over five years now.