10 ms·

My kid loves it, but I'm the one who has to deal with the mods and the shitty YouTube videos and ad-filled garbage forums made by a community that's somehow nev

My kid loves it, but I'm the one who has to deal with the mods and the shitty YouTube videos and ad-filled garbage forums made by a community that's somehow never heard of GitHub. Hopefully Microsoft can reign in all of that crap and make the game less of a nightmare to maintain.

jwn 12y ago
Thank you for making me realize I'm not the only crotchety old bastard who bitches and moans about this! My kids are old enough to play Minecraft but too young to understand how to install mods. Speaking of that, I've looked into the mod making scene and it's rather disgusting. Mojang really dropped the ball by not having an official way to write mods/plugins. Instead we get a horrible client side mod environment (Minecraft Forge), and a half decent server side (Bukkit), but they're not compatible with each other. Bravo Mojang!
- freshyill 12y ago
  It was so much worse before Forge. With Forge, it's still incredibly arcane, but it's not batshit crazy like it was before. Of course, now you need to have the Forge version of a mod, and you have to have the right version Minecraft too. I'm getting mad just thinking about it. I need to stop now.
  - Pyrodogg 12y ago
    This also highlights why client side mods (Forge based or not) are the vast minority of 'Modded Minecraft'. Configuring a Bukkit server would still have taken some work, but it also only required that to be expended on the server side. Players would be able to connect with a purely vanilla client and benefit from the enhanced interactions and gameplay mechanics that could be handled on the server side only. This attracts thousands more people than fiddling with launchers, or worse, .jar files.
- makomk 12y ago
  Bukkit's dead now anyway. The entire development team decided to call it quits due to legal uncertainty and general exhaustion, then Mojang announced that they weren't allowed to do that because Bukkit was actually owned by Mojang and had a special deal which meant there were no legal issues, contradicting what they'd told people who asked privately. Then one of the main developers got pissed about the fact that he'd been secretly working for Mojang for free and used the DMCA to kill the whole thing off - something he could do because his code, and all of Bukkit, was licensed under the GPL and using it for modding Minecraft was a GPL violation(!). This didn't stop Mojang from arguing that he had no legal right to do so, though. They're really keen on the whole free labour thing.
  - simoncion 12y ago
    > This didn't stop Mojang from arguing that he had no legal right to do so, though. They're really keen on the whole free labour thing. My read on the situation is this: 0) Bukkit people reverse-engineer MC code. MC code is non-GPL'd. 1) Bukkit people release RE'd MC code under GPL. In order for the Bukkit folks to be able to relicense their code, they would have had to add a couple of steps, and rewrite step one: 0.25) Bukkit folks write a spec from the RE'd MC code. 0.75) Bukkit folks hand that spec to an unrelated third party who then implements that spec without any other input from Bukkit. 1) That third party releases their work under the GPL.
    - nl 12y ago
      My understanding is that Bukkit people didn't reverse engineer the Minecraft code - they decompiled it. That's a problem. (Apologies if this is what you meant by "reverse engineered" - it isn't clear)
  - phaed 12y ago
    Everyone left that matters is on #sponge @ irc.esper.net recruiting and planning Bukkit's successor called Sponge, it aims to be something like Bukkit+Forge.
  - Pyrodogg 12y ago
    Craftbukkit was never licensable under the LGPL. From the projects inception, it contained proprietary, closed-source Mojang code used without a license. It's LGPL license was invalid from the start. From the get go we were plagued with issues and obstacles we needed to overcome, one of which we were sadly unable to tackle despite our best efforts: the legal barrier of licensing and permission. When starting the Bukkit project and even getting involved with hMod before that, we all knew that our work - no matter how well-intentioned - fell into a dangerous legal grey area. - EvilSeph[1] This calls into question the legal standing of all derivative works of Craftbukkit. The contributors still have copyright over the things they wrote, but they also weren't writing them in a vacuum. They were creating derivatives of Craftbukkit under the assumption it was valid LGPL. The LGPL wasn't violated because it came out that Mojang controls the Bukkit project. It was voided before these contributions came into question. It's not clear what license, if any, the contributions by Wesley, et. al. fall under. I am very interested in the legal issues of this whole situation and am constantly looking for the best resources I can find. If you're curious, I suggest reading some posts by /u/VideoGameAttorney on reddit[2] [1] https://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-its-time-to-say.305106/ https://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-its-time-to-say.305... [2] http://www.reddit.com/user/VideoGameAttorney http://www.reddit.com/user/VideoGameAttorney
bpyne 12y ago
Thank you Freshyill and JWN! I nearly ripped my hair out trying to keep the Minecraft, Forge, and the JVM in sync version-wise for the Pixelmon mod. I tried upgrading just one of them and the Pixelmon mod silently failed. Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.
- VLM 12y ago
  Minecraft dev culture in 2014 in general feels exactly like microcomputer dev culture in 1985, speaking as a guy who was there. Version control, whats that? Why would I want to open my source code, free software whats that? We don't need standards or APIs we can just hack it into working, one piece at a time. What do you mean a development methodology or strategy, we just start coding? If you find a bug, its your fault, if you don't like seeing bugs then stop finding them. What is all this scalability and O(n) talk I don't understand why that could matter. We don't do documentation (although in minecraft world in 2014 rather than make a one page doc in five minutes, we get unprofessionally produced 45 minute youtube videos as "docs".) What do you mean by a "silo", why would a silo be bad, I just wanna admin my own webforum and only use my forum. Its a really retro game, and I'm not talking about block graphics. Culturally and technologically its like something out of shareware game programming on a C64 in the 80s. The crazy thing, is in 2014 there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling us that doesn't work, but just like 80s software development, it really DOES work. Maybe not well, maybe lots of heads pounding on desks in frustration, but it works surprisingly well. If you're in the modern dev community it does feel like visiting a museum or an Amish community, very deja vous.
  - arcatek 12y ago
    Déjà vu ;)
jay-anderson 12y ago
I very much agree. Last Christmas I gave my kids one mod install each. Earlier in the year I helped them once which set a bad precedent :). I cut them off telling them to wait until Christmas. Since then they've discovered some minecraft launchers which automate some of this process, but it's still pretty ugly. Mojang really needs to fix this: standard mod interface (which doesn't require jar surgery), sane distribution, etc.
- Filligree 12y ago
  Point them at the FTB launcher, go from there? I would find it difficult to live with just one mod. Half the time it doesn't even make sense; they assume the presence of others.
jebblue 12y ago
People of all ages play and enjoy Minecraft including moi.
- freshyill 12y ago
  No doubt. I might even play it once in a while if I didn't resent it so much for being a complete shitshow to deal with outside of the game itself.
nl 12y ago
Oh yes!! See my previous comments on this exact problem[1]. I'm actually working on a server app thing to make this easy. The idea is pre-configured sets of mods which will work together, installable with a single click. I have various techniques to constrain the resources used by mods so they don't kill other servers on the same machine, too. The mod part isn't ready yet, but on-demand Minecraft server provisioning is working well. People on HN probably aren't the real market since most here can wade through the horrors of incompatible mod versions etc, but my contact details are in my profile if anyone is interesting in testing it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903685
- Filligree 12y ago
  Um... so, the FTB launcher?
  - nl 12y ago
    Mildly similar I guess, but non self-hosted, and you don't download anything.
Pengwin 12y ago
Why dont you just use something like Tekkit, FeedTheBeast, or ATLauncher? They bundle mods together and its a click and play ordeal. They are essentially just autoconfigs for Forge. I find the most odd thing about minecraft is how much 3rd party adds to the game, but is in no way supported by mojang. Even when Things such as pistons and horses began as mods, and were implemented into the standard game years later. Its been years since mojang announced they'd make a mod api, and it still doesn't exist.
- Tepix 12y ago
  Why would you trust your account data with a 3rd party launcher? Mojang explicitly advises you not to enter your login + password into non-official launchers.
  - VLM 12y ago
    The 3rd party launchers are a generation or two ahead of the stock launcher, historically the risk is about zero, and the gain is immense. Technically, CPM 2.2 is much more secure than windows 8.1 but its not sweeping the market.
  - Pengwin 12y ago
    I had the same feeling, to be honest I just gave up caring about my Minecraft account. Mojang butchered their account system, Then butchered their own launcher. They went from a simple log in and play to this seemingly complex mash-up of features that barely anybody even needs thrust straight at you in an ugly way. 3rd Party launchers actually do this better, where you select what you want, and customisation is easily found, but optional. Launcher aside, mods are easily able to have shady code in them anyway. I remember a server which required you to use a custom modded client which, upon decompiling, i found contained a nice FTP module inside its mandatory anticheat, allowing anyone with permission on the server to issue your client commands to retrieve anything from your minecraft directory.
jmspring 12y ago
Honest note here - no idea what will pan out, but if it does ping me about getting some github traction. I don't play minecraft, but happy to help organize some forum or such.
- Pyrodogg 12y ago
  Proper version control strategies have been employed by larger projects and more established mod authors for quite a while now. See Pahimar, Forestry, MinecraftForge, Sponge, Bukkit (now DMCA'd) on Github. Minecraft is probably attracting tens of new people to Java and game modding every day. Backgrounds vary all over the place. Not everyone knows the best practices well enough to just go out and start on them. This leads to the scenarios described around here about poor mod management in 2014. The 'state of the art' definitely has changed, but it's not a structured community so the outside view still looks similar to 3 years ago.
mverwijs 12y ago
This is why I have my nephew maintain his own minecraft-server. Costs me 10 euros p/month. Kids' ten years old, knows how to debug crappy java plugins better than most java programmers. Everytime he calls me to ask about a problem I think: "Okay mverwijs, don't hold back." He now edits yaml files, rsyncs plugins, makes backups. He's smart, but not a genious. He's doesn't even speak or understand english. Most kids can learn to do their own minecraft-management. Kids love minecraft. They love to have their own server. I shamelessly abuse that love to install some *nixcraft on them.

jwn 12y ago

Thank you for making me realize I'm not the only crotchety old bastard who bitches and moans about this! My kids are old enough to play Minecraft but too young to understand how to install mods. Speaking of that, I've looked into the mod making scene and it's rather disgusting. Mojang really dropped the ball by not having an official way to write mods/plugins. Instead we get a horrible client side mod environment (Minecraft Forge), and a half decent server side (Bukkit), but they're not compatible with each other. Bravo Mojang!

freshyill 12y ago
It was so much worse before Forge. With Forge, it's still incredibly arcane, but it's not batshit crazy like it was before. Of course, now you need to have the Forge version of a mod, and you have to have the right version Minecraft too. I'm getting mad just thinking about it. I need to stop now.
- Pyrodogg 12y ago
  This also highlights why client side mods (Forge based or not) are the vast minority of 'Modded Minecraft'. Configuring a Bukkit server would still have taken some work, but it also only required that to be expended on the server side. Players would be able to connect with a purely vanilla client and benefit from the enhanced interactions and gameplay mechanics that could be handled on the server side only. This attracts thousands more people than fiddling with launchers, or worse, .jar files.
makomk 12y ago
Bukkit's dead now anyway. The entire development team decided to call it quits due to legal uncertainty and general exhaustion, then Mojang announced that they weren't allowed to do that because Bukkit was actually owned by Mojang and had a special deal which meant there were no legal issues, contradicting what they'd told people who asked privately. Then one of the main developers got pissed about the fact that he'd been secretly working for Mojang for free and used the DMCA to kill the whole thing off - something he could do because his code, and all of Bukkit, was licensed under the GPL and using it for modding Minecraft was a GPL violation(!). This didn't stop Mojang from arguing that he had no legal right to do so, though. They're really keen on the whole free labour thing.
- simoncion 12y ago
  > This didn't stop Mojang from arguing that he had no legal right to do so, though. They're really keen on the whole free labour thing. My read on the situation is this: 0) Bukkit people reverse-engineer MC code. MC code is non-GPL'd. 1) Bukkit people release RE'd MC code under GPL. In order for the Bukkit folks to be able to relicense their code, they would have had to add a couple of steps, and rewrite step one: 0.25) Bukkit folks write a spec from the RE'd MC code. 0.75) Bukkit folks hand that spec to an unrelated third party who then implements that spec without any other input from Bukkit. 1) That third party releases their work under the GPL.
  - nl 12y ago
    My understanding is that Bukkit people didn't reverse engineer the Minecraft code - they decompiled it. That's a problem. (Apologies if this is what you meant by "reverse engineered" - it isn't clear)
- phaed 12y ago
  Everyone left that matters is on #sponge @ irc.esper.net recruiting and planning Bukkit's successor called Sponge, it aims to be something like Bukkit+Forge.
- Pyrodogg 12y ago
  Craftbukkit was never licensable under the LGPL. From the projects inception, it contained proprietary, closed-source Mojang code used without a license. It's LGPL license was invalid from the start. From the get go we were plagued with issues and obstacles we needed to overcome, one of which we were sadly unable to tackle despite our best efforts: the legal barrier of licensing and permission. When starting the Bukkit project and even getting involved with hMod before that, we all knew that our work - no matter how well-intentioned - fell into a dangerous legal grey area. - EvilSeph[1] This calls into question the legal standing of all derivative works of Craftbukkit. The contributors still have copyright over the things they wrote, but they also weren't writing them in a vacuum. They were creating derivatives of Craftbukkit under the assumption it was valid LGPL. The LGPL wasn't violated because it came out that Mojang controls the Bukkit project. It was voided before these contributions came into question. It's not clear what license, if any, the contributions by Wesley, et. al. fall under. I am very interested in the legal issues of this whole situation and am constantly looking for the best resources I can find. If you're curious, I suggest reading some posts by /u/VideoGameAttorney on reddit[2] [1] https://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-its-time-to-say.305106/ https://forums.bukkit.org/threads/bukkit-its-time-to-say.305... [2] http://www.reddit.com/user/VideoGameAttorney http://www.reddit.com/user/VideoGameAttorney

bpyne 12y ago

Thank you Freshyill and JWN! I nearly ripped my hair out trying to keep the Minecraft, Forge, and the JVM in sync version-wise for the Pixelmon mod. I tried upgrading just one of them and the Pixelmon mod silently failed. Of course the forums are a Wild Wild West of inconsistent solutions that make me feel like Druidic incantations would be just as effective.

VLM 12y ago
Minecraft dev culture in 2014 in general feels exactly like microcomputer dev culture in 1985, speaking as a guy who was there. Version control, whats that? Why would I want to open my source code, free software whats that? We don't need standards or APIs we can just hack it into working, one piece at a time. What do you mean a development methodology or strategy, we just start coding? If you find a bug, its your fault, if you don't like seeing bugs then stop finding them. What is all this scalability and O(n) talk I don't understand why that could matter. We don't do documentation (although in minecraft world in 2014 rather than make a one page doc in five minutes, we get unprofessionally produced 45 minute youtube videos as "docs".) What do you mean by a "silo", why would a silo be bad, I just wanna admin my own webforum and only use my forum. Its a really retro game, and I'm not talking about block graphics. Culturally and technologically its like something out of shareware game programming on a C64 in the 80s. The crazy thing, is in 2014 there's a lot of people making a lot of money telling us that doesn't work, but just like 80s software development, it really DOES work. Maybe not well, maybe lots of heads pounding on desks in frustration, but it works surprisingly well. If you're in the modern dev community it does feel like visiting a museum or an Amish community, very deja vous.
- arcatek 12y ago
  Déjà vu ;)

jay-anderson 12y ago

I very much agree. Last Christmas I gave my kids one mod install each. Earlier in the year I helped them once which set a bad precedent :). I cut them off telling them to wait until Christmas. Since then they've discovered some minecraft launchers which automate some of this process, but it's still pretty ugly. Mojang really needs to fix this: standard mod interface (which doesn't require jar surgery), sane distribution, etc.

Filligree 12y ago
Point them at the FTB launcher, go from there? I would find it difficult to live with just one mod. Half the time it doesn't even make sense; they assume the presence of others.

jebblue 12y ago

People of all ages play and enjoy Minecraft including moi.

freshyill 12y ago
No doubt. I might even play it once in a while if I didn't resent it so much for being a complete shitshow to deal with outside of the game itself.

nl 12y ago

Oh yes!! See my previous comments on this exact problem[1]. I'm actually working on a server app thing to make this easy. The idea is pre-configured sets of mods which will work together, installable with a single click. I have various techniques to constrain the resources used by mods so they don't kill other servers on the same machine, too. The mod part isn't ready yet, but on-demand Minecraft server provisioning is working well. People on HN probably aren't the real market since most here can wade through the horrors of incompatible mod versions etc, but my contact details are in my profile if anyone is interesting in testing it. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903685

Filligree 12y ago
Um... so, the FTB launcher?
- nl 12y ago
  Mildly similar I guess, but non self-hosted, and you don't download anything.

Pengwin 12y ago

Why dont you just use something like Tekkit, FeedTheBeast, or ATLauncher? They bundle mods together and its a click and play ordeal. They are essentially just autoconfigs for Forge. I find the most odd thing about minecraft is how much 3rd party adds to the game, but is in no way supported by mojang. Even when Things such as pistons and horses began as mods, and were implemented into the standard game years later. Its been years since mojang announced they'd make a mod api, and it still doesn't exist.

Tepix 12y ago
Why would you trust your account data with a 3rd party launcher? Mojang explicitly advises you not to enter your login + password into non-official launchers.
- VLM 12y ago
  The 3rd party launchers are a generation or two ahead of the stock launcher, historically the risk is about zero, and the gain is immense. Technically, CPM 2.2 is much more secure than windows 8.1 but its not sweeping the market.
- Pengwin 12y ago
  I had the same feeling, to be honest I just gave up caring about my Minecraft account. Mojang butchered their account system, Then butchered their own launcher. They went from a simple log in and play to this seemingly complex mash-up of features that barely anybody even needs thrust straight at you in an ugly way. 3rd Party launchers actually do this better, where you select what you want, and customisation is easily found, but optional. Launcher aside, mods are easily able to have shady code in them anyway. I remember a server which required you to use a custom modded client which, upon decompiling, i found contained a nice FTP module inside its mandatory anticheat, allowing anyone with permission on the server to issue your client commands to retrieve anything from your minecraft directory.

jmspring 12y ago

Honest note here - no idea what will pan out, but if it does ping me about getting some github traction. I don't play minecraft, but happy to help organize some forum or such.

Pyrodogg 12y ago
Proper version control strategies have been employed by larger projects and more established mod authors for quite a while now. See Pahimar, Forestry, MinecraftForge, Sponge, Bukkit (now DMCA'd) on Github. Minecraft is probably attracting tens of new people to Java and game modding every day. Backgrounds vary all over the place. Not everyone knows the best practices well enough to just go out and start on them. This leads to the scenarios described around here about poor mod management in 2014. The 'state of the art' definitely has changed, but it's not a structured community so the outside view still looks similar to 3 years ago.

mverwijs 12y ago

This is why I have my nephew maintain his own minecraft-server. Costs me 10 euros p/month. Kids' ten years old, knows how to debug crappy java plugins better than most java programmers. Everytime he calls me to ask about a problem I think: "Okay mverwijs, don't hold back." He now edits yaml files, rsyncs plugins, makes backups. He's smart, but not a genious. He's doesn't even speak or understand english. Most kids can learn to do their own minecraft-management. Kids love minecraft. They love to have their own server. I shamelessly abuse that love to install some *nixcraft on them.