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I noticed an omission on this list was Minecraft. Today, the game of course has thousands of engineers working on the various versions of the game due to its s

I noticed an omission on this list was Minecraft. Today, the game of course has thousands of engineers working on the various versions of the game due to its success. But in the beginning (and throughout Alpha/Beta and during the beginning years of its 1.0 development) it was built on a hacked-together Java LIBJDX 2.0-based engine. Here's the first video uploaded by Notch when he first embarked on a new "Cave game": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpv5kZ9-rE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMpv5kZ9-rE (the original video is blocked in the US for some reason) An interesting side-effect of this technical decision was that the game was heavily moddable. Java byte code is relatively easy to decompile, and class files easily modularize the various components of the game. So installing a mod amounted to un-zipping the minecraft.jar file and replacing .class files with modded ones. In fact, this is still how modding works in the Java version of the game.

pageandrew 6y ago
I find it hard to believe that Minecraft today has thousands of engineers working on it.
- meheleventyone 6y ago
  Minecraft the Java game certainly doesn't but the whole IP probably has a lot more people working on it than people think. You have the Java version, Bedrock version, AR game and all the ancillary porting involved as well as all the backend services etc. powering Realms and the other bits and pieces. I think thousands of engineers is a massive exaggeration but it's certainly going to be a lot.
  - TotempaaltJ 6y ago
    Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, had 70 employees in 2016. It will definitely not have thousands by now. Maybe hundreds.
    - meheleventyone 6y ago
      Yes that's what I said.
      - sorryitstrue 6y ago
        Interesting that you interpreted this as a correction and not support of your point
        meheleventyone 6y ago
        I guess that's because of the design of the interface here. Generally speaking if I support or agree with something I upvote it. I typically only reply if I have something useful to add or I disagree. That also seems to be the general style of commenting here at least in my experience.
  - _bxg1 6y ago
    Minecraft (the non-Java version) is on everything with a screen. Every game console this generation and last, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, every desktop OS, Apple TV, Gear VR, Fire TV. Simply managing all those different builds has to take lots of developer-hours, not to mention the fact that they're still adding features regularly.
- willis936 6y ago
  Right. It’s been years since they promised a modding API. Mods draw the community. A modding API is not a big ask considering the community has made half a dozen mod interfaces from the source code leak. MSsimply don’t want to spend any amount of resources to help development when they can’t justify how it will make them money. MS has been pushing monetization since they purchased Mojang. If you make a modding API then you can’t charge for items that do nothing besides limit creativity, such as player skins (the most basic example of something that everyone has been using as a creative part of the game even without mods). The java backend is doomed from the onset. Then why is the bedrock edition not better? It’s a simple game that a small team of competent engineers should have done in less than two years. Unless they actually make a modding API for the bedrock edition, the bedrock edition will be little more than a footnote. The java edition will remain the most relevant set of releases until mods are officially supported in bedrock.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    That was to be expected anyway, Microsoft Games division rather favored rewriting it into C++ than creating a Java compiler for each platform they would like to sell the game on. If Managed Direct X and XNA had an uphill battle against WinDev, where they even suggested to move from XNA into DirectXTK, as if the target audience would be the same, there isn't much Java love to expect from the games division.
- Voloskaya 6y ago
  Because it doesn't, not remotely close.
- kbenson 6y ago
  On all the various mods and variations, I don't doubt it's thousands. Minecraft took in all this generation's version of quake and half-life modders. In the late 90's early 2000's I remember tracking 20-30 different quake and half-life mods, most having small teams of people working on them. Minecraft is a couple orders of magnitude more popular, so I wouldn't doubt a few thousand. There's enough people making content for it that you can probably find a youtuber playing some new mod or specialty level with complex logic every day if you look.
seabird 6y ago
Minecraft mods have not worked by manual replacement of classes for a long, long time now. Doing so is highly discouraged, and you use a mod loader like Forge. Minecraft modding is neglected in all official capacities, it's a usability trainwreck, and the self-installed dictator of the preeminent mod loader is very easy to not like. I've played a lot of modded Minecraft, and I can tell you for sure that you suffer through the myriad technical problems because there's just nothing out there like it, and not because it's a good experience.
- flafla2 6y ago
  Sure, but on a technical level modding works exactly the same way. Modloaders like forge arose from a few issues with the simplified process I listed: for one, 2 mods that overwrite the same .class files conflict with each other and can’t be installed at the same time. Second, when new Minecraft versions come out it can be a pain to update your mod. Not to mention the update procedure mentioned above is pretty cumbersome for the average user. Modloaders like Forge are platforms for mod installation because they overwrite the class files, and instead modders would add class files that don’t conflict instead (these days it might patch in code via Reflection, so things might be slightly different, but the fundamental process is the same). Furthermore I believe Mojang has started releasing debug symbols for Minecraft so the decompilation is no longer 100%. community driven as it used to be. Fundamentally though, Forge is really doing the same thing. My point is that without the ability to easily decompile and patch in code, Minecraft modding would not be nearly as easy to do and platforms like Forge wouldn’t exist I used to be a MC Modder back in the Beta, and at peak my mod had order 50000+ users, so I have some idea what I’m talking about. Admittedly I didn’t use a Mod loader at this time though.
devbat8712 6y ago
Slight correction: Minecraft used lwjgl 2 as an OpenGL binding. It never used libgdx.

pageandrew 6y ago

I find it hard to believe that Minecraft today has thousands of engineers working on it.

meheleventyone 6y ago
Minecraft the Java game certainly doesn't but the whole IP probably has a lot more people working on it than people think. You have the Java version, Bedrock version, AR game and all the ancillary porting involved as well as all the backend services etc. powering Realms and the other bits and pieces. I think thousands of engineers is a massive exaggeration but it's certainly going to be a lot.
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  Mojang, the developer of Minecraft, had 70 employees in 2016. It will definitely not have thousands by now. Maybe hundreds.
  - meheleventyone 6y ago
    Yes that's what I said.
    - sorryitstrue 6y ago
      Interesting that you interpreted this as a correction and not support of your point
      - meheleventyone 6y ago
        I guess that's because of the design of the interface here. Generally speaking if I support or agree with something I upvote it. I typically only reply if I have something useful to add or I disagree. That also seems to be the general style of commenting here at least in my experience.
- _bxg1 6y ago
  Minecraft (the non-Java version) is on everything with a screen. Every game console this generation and last, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, every desktop OS, Apple TV, Gear VR, Fire TV. Simply managing all those different builds has to take lots of developer-hours, not to mention the fact that they're still adding features regularly.
willis936 6y ago
Right. It’s been years since they promised a modding API. Mods draw the community. A modding API is not a big ask considering the community has made half a dozen mod interfaces from the source code leak. MSsimply don’t want to spend any amount of resources to help development when they can’t justify how it will make them money. MS has been pushing monetization since they purchased Mojang. If you make a modding API then you can’t charge for items that do nothing besides limit creativity, such as player skins (the most basic example of something that everyone has been using as a creative part of the game even without mods). The java backend is doomed from the onset. Then why is the bedrock edition not better? It’s a simple game that a small team of competent engineers should have done in less than two years. Unless they actually make a modding API for the bedrock edition, the bedrock edition will be little more than a footnote. The java edition will remain the most relevant set of releases until mods are officially supported in bedrock.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  That was to be expected anyway, Microsoft Games division rather favored rewriting it into C++ than creating a Java compiler for each platform they would like to sell the game on. If Managed Direct X and XNA had an uphill battle against WinDev, where they even suggested to move from XNA into DirectXTK, as if the target audience would be the same, there isn't much Java love to expect from the games division.
Voloskaya 6y ago
Because it doesn't, not remotely close.
kbenson 6y ago
On all the various mods and variations, I don't doubt it's thousands. Minecraft took in all this generation's version of quake and half-life modders. In the late 90's early 2000's I remember tracking 20-30 different quake and half-life mods, most having small teams of people working on them. Minecraft is a couple orders of magnitude more popular, so I wouldn't doubt a few thousand. There's enough people making content for it that you can probably find a youtuber playing some new mod or specialty level with complex logic every day if you look.

seabird 6y ago

Minecraft mods have not worked by manual replacement of classes for a long, long time now. Doing so is highly discouraged, and you use a mod loader like Forge. Minecraft modding is neglected in all official capacities, it's a usability trainwreck, and the self-installed dictator of the preeminent mod loader is very easy to not like. I've played a lot of modded Minecraft, and I can tell you for sure that you suffer through the myriad technical problems because there's just nothing out there like it, and not because it's a good experience.

flafla2 6y ago
Sure, but on a technical level modding works exactly the same way. Modloaders like forge arose from a few issues with the simplified process I listed: for one, 2 mods that overwrite the same .class files conflict with each other and can’t be installed at the same time. Second, when new Minecraft versions come out it can be a pain to update your mod. Not to mention the update procedure mentioned above is pretty cumbersome for the average user. Modloaders like Forge are platforms for mod installation because they overwrite the class files, and instead modders would add class files that don’t conflict instead (these days it might patch in code via Reflection, so things might be slightly different, but the fundamental process is the same). Furthermore I believe Mojang has started releasing debug symbols for Minecraft so the decompilation is no longer 100%. community driven as it used to be. Fundamentally though, Forge is really doing the same thing. My point is that without the ability to easily decompile and patch in code, Minecraft modding would not be nearly as easy to do and platforms like Forge wouldn’t exist I used to be a MC Modder back in the Beta, and at peak my mod had order 50000+ users, so I have some idea what I’m talking about. Admittedly I didn’t use a Mod loader at this time though.

devbat8712 6y ago

Slight correction: Minecraft used lwjgl 2 as an OpenGL binding. It never used libgdx.