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> Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft that are
by mbell 8y ago
> Yet for every AAA development house that can't prioritize making public versions of their in house development tools, there are games like Minecraft that are almost nothing but modding tools pretending to be games, and getting all sorts of interesting fans doing interesting things.
Minecraft doesn't have any significant modding support from the developer. Official 'mods' are mostly limited to textures / shaders. The real modding tools that exist for Minecraft were created by the community and largely exist because Java is comparatively easy to reverse engineer in addition to some 'off the record' style support of the mod lib authors by the game developers. The whole mod scene has gone through various phases of questionable legality and unknown future. The Minecraft mod scene exists largely in spite of the game developer, not due to it.
- WorldMaker 8y agoFor what it's worth, I also consider the base "gameplay" pattern important, official "mod" tools: crafting, redstone, etc. The variety of things done with just those simple tools, no Java, rivals a lot of stuff done with "mods" to past games; don't discount it simply because it's done entirely within the ruleset of the "game" itself. Minecraft is this generation's ZZT.
- mental1896 8y agoI don't think Mojang ever tried to actively stop the mod community like, say, Rockstar did. I would say Minecraft does have modding support in the sense that the installation files are an open book, inviting unlimited modding opportunities for anyone who wants to tinker.
- fenwick67 8y agoThey never tried to stop it but they never fostered it either. It was just coincidentally easy to reverse engineer the code and install mods. But the interfaces were VERY brittle, and mods had very specific version requirements. Official mod support (with an installer and an API) was on the dev roadmap but never materialized.
- nemo846 8y agoDon’t know about “open book” given Minecraft’s Java bytecode is obfuscated - mods rely on code deobfuscated by players.