9 ms·

Minetest has a lot of promise, but also has a lot of low-hanging fruit, particularly around the fit and finish of the game. For instance the configuration GUIs

Minetest has a lot of promise, but also has a lot of low-hanging fruit, particularly around the fit and finish of the game. For instance the configuration GUIs for setting up your controls is pretty bad, you still can't reconfigure your mouse keys without editing minetest.conf Still, it gives me hope that if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow, minetest should prove to be a good foundation for community-run block game.

fnordpiglet 3y ago
The Minecraft IAP and server spam is getting pretty close.
- rmorey 3y ago
  This is the major reason I stay away from bedrock versions, java seems to have way less of this
bscphil 3y ago
> if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow Honestly I haven't touched Minecraft since Microsoft started enforcing "you have to have a Microsoft account". It's not ruining the game per se, and it's not an overwhelmingly burdensome thing, it has just raised the activation energy of getting back into the game enough that I haven't summoned the will yet.
- mikepurvis 3y ago
  I bought Minecraft for my son and I've been extremely frustrated by this requirement and that there's seemingly no way to stay signed in— I've had to print out my MS account details and tape them to his computer so he can sign in whenever he needs.
  - esskay 3y ago
    I'd recommend using a launcher, it stops that happening. I use Prism Launcher and after the initial sign in about a year ago I've never been asked to log in again even after going a few months of not playing it.
  - teekert 3y ago
    If you are on Linux, this is a known issue, I think you need Gnome Keyring installed (on any DE) to avoid this behavior.
    - mikepurvis 3y ago
      Okay! Thanks for this. Yeah it's on a bog standard Ubuntu 20.04 install; I didn't realise this might be fixable by installing additional software.
      - teekert 3y ago
        Fwiw I think standard 20.04 already has gnome keyring. As suggested here, try a launcher perhaps? I think the one in the store has been working fine for me.
        mikepurvis 3y ago
        I'm using the official Minecraft launcher, likely from the snap store? In any case, knowing that this is fixable, I will take a closer look when I have a chance. Ironically, for all this trouble, at least we were able to get Minecraft running at all on Ubuntu— on a separate Windows 10 machine I couldn't get it going at all. Might try again at some point with a VM so that we can play together.
        bscphil 3y ago
        Complete speculation on my part, but I wonder if maybe snap applications have trouble accessing the keyring from inside the sandbox.
  - amlib 3y ago
    I've worked around this by printing the command line while minecraft is open with something like: cat /proc/$(pgrep java)/cmdline | sed -e "s/\x00/ /g" And then pasting that sucker in a script wrapped around a .desktop file and from then on only launching that. Opens just as fast as it did back in 2010 and I don't need to open the launcher unless I need to update the game or something like that. I only play on single-player, haven't tested on multiplayer. The tokens might expire after some time and thus require you to "reseed" the command line from time to time.
  - platz 3y ago
    use multimc
    - mort96 3y ago
      Wasn't there a lot of drama around MultiMC recently?
      - tmtvl 3y ago
        You may be thinking of the PolyMC->Prism Launcher transition.
- marak830 3y ago
  And then there are people like me who purchased the game, and now cannot play it. This is why I f#$@ing pirate you idiot managers
kragen 3y ago
right now microsoft has had minetest removed from the google play store for a month using groundless copyright accusations
- spencerchubb 3y ago
  Groundless copyright accusations? If there were accusations, they seem grounded. I took one look at the site and those images are 95%+ similar to minecraft
  - mepian 3y ago
    I looked it up, they are actually groundless in this case: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomment-1485528633 https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomme...
    - spencerchubb 3y ago
      I don't know copyright law very well, so I ask in earnest. If you copy the entire essence but still write the code yourself, is that not infringement?
      - roywiggins 3y ago
        You can't copyright an idea, just a particular realization of an idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_dist... Game mechanics pretty much can't be copyrighted at all.
        drones 3y ago
        Game mechanics haven't been copyrighted, but they have been patented. The developers of shadow of war has a patent on their nemesis system. It's not just an implementation detail, it's the entire concept. https://www.ign.com/articles/wb-games-nemesis-system-patent-was-approved-this-week-after-multiple-attempts https://www.ign.com/articles/wb-games-nemesis-system-patent-... >The patent protects the "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games." >This encompasses a hierarchy of procedurally-generated NPCs that interact with and remember the player's actions. The patent also covers changes to the NPCs' positions in the hierarchy, as well as their appearance and behaviour, again based on the actions of the player.
anonym29 3y ago
Right now, Microsoft is perm-banning accounts from all servers for gameplay activity that is openly encouraged on certain servers, like griefing, which is a fundamental aspect of anarchy servers like 2b2t; to say nothing of the speech policing.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  not in my experience. const (the only playable anarchy server) is as vile and wild as ever and nobody got banned AFAICT. 2b was hot trash for a long time now and it mostly serves to fuel hauses raging coke addiction
- DefineOutside 3y ago
  They banned people for mass scanning billions of IP addresses then creating bots to automatically grief these small servers. I don't know how you can justify this. This isn't someone being an asshole on 2b2t... this is someone destroying thousands of small servers just to be destructive.
  - jahsome 3y ago
    There is some serious cognitive dissonance in the Minecraft community. There's a narrative that Microsoft is "destroying" the community that does not align with reality. Most recently, the outrage was over the (entirely optional!) chat moderation features on private servers, and the mindless recitation that it would lead to widespread abuse and false-positive bans. It didn't. I can only assume it's the result of non-technical people who know _just enough_ to think they know what they're talking about parroting misinformation in discords, Twitter, YouTube comments, etc. Perhaps it's a just a younger, more impressionable audience. There is seemingly no reasoning with them either. They will vehemently defend wild points with zero evidence, and often with evidence to the contrary readily available.
    - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
      This is how outrage spreads on the Internet, through "very online" communities, and gaming tends to have a lot of them. People who have an axe to grind against X (big tech company, a streamer, a game, etc) exaggerate the truth and make lots of paranoid points. These communities tend to be very big about solidarity so everyone else in the community parrots the message and through a game of telephone fake rumors whip up outrage. It happens on HN a lot these days too on pretty much any Big Tech related topic.
zimpenfish 3y ago
> if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow They're not ruining it as much as just letting it stagnate in favour of things like Story Mode, Dungeons, and Legends. If they'd put half the energy they've put into those shameless cash grabs into optimising the Java version, it would improve millions of players' daily experience. It should not require a suite of mods to get passable performance.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  They are ruining it by trying to control multi player. Users are being banned from the entirety of multiplayer over screen recordings of greifing. It’s honestly outrageous that MS thinks they should control what happens on other peoples servers.
hooby 3y ago
When my Mojang account was forcibly transferred over to a Microsoft account, I suddenly no longer owned Minecraft. And since I no longer had access to the email account I had used for the original purchase nine years prior, Microsoft support outright refused to even talk to me, unless I prove ownership beyond all doubt. That I owned the email address currently linked to the account, and had played the game just a week before, and that I knew the security questions/answers wasn't proof enough for them. And yes I really KNEW all the security answers - as those were stored in my keepass. They treated me like a criminal, and I never learned whether the game disappeared by accident, or if they removed it intentionally because some algorithm thought I got it illegitimately... As far as I personally am concerned, they already did ruin Minecraft.
- herbst 3y ago
  Same. Haven't played Minecraft since then. I won't bother with Microsoft about this. And this from someone who did earn his income with this game. IMO they already ruined Minecraft by deciding to rewrite it and run with 2 complete seperate editions and only care about the -.NET- Bedrock one.
  - FireInsight 3y ago
    I thought Bedrock edition was C++?
    - herbst 3y ago
      No idea honestly. The initial launcher updates definitely have been .NET and we're completely broken on Linux. I never went any deeper than accidentally updating the launcher back then.
  - pjmlp 3y ago
    Bedrock is in C++, and the development workflow is that many features are still first development in Java version, and then redone on the C++ later. Java version isn't going away, as Bedrock still doesn't support many of the scenarios, and Microsoft doesn't want to lose that userbase.

fnordpiglet 3y ago

The Minecraft IAP and server spam is getting pretty close.

rmorey 3y ago
This is the major reason I stay away from bedrock versions, java seems to have way less of this

bscphil 3y ago

> if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow Honestly I haven't touched Minecraft since Microsoft started enforcing "you have to have a Microsoft account". It's not ruining the game per se, and it's not an overwhelmingly burdensome thing, it has just raised the activation energy of getting back into the game enough that I haven't summoned the will yet.

mikepurvis 3y ago
I bought Minecraft for my son and I've been extremely frustrated by this requirement and that there's seemingly no way to stay signed in— I've had to print out my MS account details and tape them to his computer so he can sign in whenever he needs.
- esskay 3y ago
  I'd recommend using a launcher, it stops that happening. I use Prism Launcher and after the initial sign in about a year ago I've never been asked to log in again even after going a few months of not playing it.
- teekert 3y ago
  If you are on Linux, this is a known issue, I think you need Gnome Keyring installed (on any DE) to avoid this behavior.
  - mikepurvis 3y ago
    Okay! Thanks for this. Yeah it's on a bog standard Ubuntu 20.04 install; I didn't realise this might be fixable by installing additional software.
    - teekert 3y ago
      Fwiw I think standard 20.04 already has gnome keyring. As suggested here, try a launcher perhaps? I think the one in the store has been working fine for me.
      - mikepurvis 3y ago
        I'm using the official Minecraft launcher, likely from the snap store? In any case, knowing that this is fixable, I will take a closer look when I have a chance. Ironically, for all this trouble, at least we were able to get Minecraft running at all on Ubuntu— on a separate Windows 10 machine I couldn't get it going at all. Might try again at some point with a VM so that we can play together.
        bscphil 3y ago
        Complete speculation on my part, but I wonder if maybe snap applications have trouble accessing the keyring from inside the sandbox.
- amlib 3y ago
  I've worked around this by printing the command line while minecraft is open with something like: cat /proc/$(pgrep java)/cmdline | sed -e "s/\x00/ /g" And then pasting that sucker in a script wrapped around a .desktop file and from then on only launching that. Opens just as fast as it did back in 2010 and I don't need to open the launcher unless I need to update the game or something like that. I only play on single-player, haven't tested on multiplayer. The tokens might expire after some time and thus require you to "reseed" the command line from time to time.
- platz 3y ago
  use multimc
  - mort96 3y ago
    Wasn't there a lot of drama around MultiMC recently?
    - tmtvl 3y ago
      You may be thinking of the PolyMC->Prism Launcher transition.
marak830 3y ago
And then there are people like me who purchased the game, and now cannot play it. This is why I f#$@ing pirate you idiot managers

kragen 3y ago

right now microsoft has had minetest removed from the google play store for a month using groundless copyright accusations

spencerchubb 3y ago
Groundless copyright accusations? If there were accusations, they seem grounded. I took one look at the site and those images are 95%+ similar to minecraft
- mepian 3y ago
  I looked it up, they are actually groundless in this case: https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomment-1485528633 https://github.com/minetest/minetest/issues/13363#issuecomme...
  - spencerchubb 3y ago
    I don't know copyright law very well, so I ask in earnest. If you copy the entire essence but still write the code yourself, is that not infringement?
    - roywiggins 3y ago
      You can't copyright an idea, just a particular realization of an idea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_distinction https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea%E2%80%93expression_dist... Game mechanics pretty much can't be copyrighted at all.
      - drones 3y ago
        Game mechanics haven't been copyrighted, but they have been patented. The developers of shadow of war has a patent on their nemesis system. It's not just an implementation detail, it's the entire concept. https://www.ign.com/articles/wb-games-nemesis-system-patent-was-approved-this-week-after-multiple-attempts https://www.ign.com/articles/wb-games-nemesis-system-patent-... >The patent protects the "Nemesis characters, nemesis forts, social vendettas and followers in computer games." >This encompasses a hierarchy of procedurally-generated NPCs that interact with and remember the player's actions. The patent also covers changes to the NPCs' positions in the hierarchy, as well as their appearance and behaviour, again based on the actions of the player.

anonym29 3y ago

Right now, Microsoft is perm-banning accounts from all servers for gameplay activity that is openly encouraged on certain servers, like griefing, which is a fundamental aspect of anarchy servers like 2b2t; to say nothing of the speech policing.

Lacerda69 3y ago
not in my experience. const (the only playable anarchy server) is as vile and wild as ever and nobody got banned AFAICT. 2b was hot trash for a long time now and it mostly serves to fuel hauses raging coke addiction
DefineOutside 3y ago
They banned people for mass scanning billions of IP addresses then creating bots to automatically grief these small servers. I don't know how you can justify this. This isn't someone being an asshole on 2b2t... this is someone destroying thousands of small servers just to be destructive.
- jahsome 3y ago
  There is some serious cognitive dissonance in the Minecraft community. There's a narrative that Microsoft is "destroying" the community that does not align with reality. Most recently, the outrage was over the (entirely optional!) chat moderation features on private servers, and the mindless recitation that it would lead to widespread abuse and false-positive bans. It didn't. I can only assume it's the result of non-technical people who know _just enough_ to think they know what they're talking about parroting misinformation in discords, Twitter, YouTube comments, etc. Perhaps it's a just a younger, more impressionable audience. There is seemingly no reasoning with them either. They will vehemently defend wild points with zero evidence, and often with evidence to the contrary readily available.
  - Karrot_Kream 3y ago
    This is how outrage spreads on the Internet, through "very online" communities, and gaming tends to have a lot of them. People who have an axe to grind against X (big tech company, a streamer, a game, etc) exaggerate the truth and make lots of paranoid points. These communities tend to be very big about solidarity so everyone else in the community parrots the message and through a game of telephone fake rumors whip up outrage. It happens on HN a lot these days too on pretty much any Big Tech related topic.

zimpenfish 3y ago

> if Microsoft ever ruins Minecraft somehow They're not ruining it as much as just letting it stagnate in favour of things like Story Mode, Dungeons, and Legends. If they'd put half the energy they've put into those shameless cash grabs into optimising the Java version, it would improve millions of players' daily experience. It should not require a suite of mods to get passable performance.

Gigachad 3y ago
They are ruining it by trying to control multi player. Users are being banned from the entirety of multiplayer over screen recordings of greifing. It’s honestly outrageous that MS thinks they should control what happens on other peoples servers.

hooby 3y ago

When my Mojang account was forcibly transferred over to a Microsoft account, I suddenly no longer owned Minecraft. And since I no longer had access to the email account I had used for the original purchase nine years prior, Microsoft support outright refused to even talk to me, unless I prove ownership beyond all doubt. That I owned the email address currently linked to the account, and had played the game just a week before, and that I knew the security questions/answers wasn't proof enough for them. And yes I really KNEW all the security answers - as those were stored in my keepass. They treated me like a criminal, and I never learned whether the game disappeared by accident, or if they removed it intentionally because some algorithm thought I got it illegitimately... As far as I personally am concerned, they already did ruin Minecraft.

herbst 3y ago
Same. Haven't played Minecraft since then. I won't bother with Microsoft about this. And this from someone who did earn his income with this game. IMO they already ruined Minecraft by deciding to rewrite it and run with 2 complete seperate editions and only care about the -.NET- Bedrock one.
- FireInsight 3y ago
  I thought Bedrock edition was C++?
  - herbst 3y ago
    No idea honestly. The initial launcher updates definitely have been .NET and we're completely broken on Linux. I never went any deeper than accidentally updating the launcher back then.
- pjmlp 3y ago
  Bedrock is in C++, and the development workflow is that many features are still first development in Java version, and then redone on the C++ later. Java version isn't going away, as Bedrock still doesn't support many of the scenarios, and Microsoft doesn't want to lose that userbase.