4 ms·
Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are both incredible, complex games made by one mediocre programmer (not commenting on the Mojang team, just Notch himself). It's fr
by TillE 12y ago
Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft are both incredible, complex games made by one mediocre programmer (not commenting on the Mojang team, just Notch himself). It's frustrating, but it should also serve as an inspiration to any small, talented team that wants to go even further.
- blencdr 12y agoI'd like to be a mediocre programmer as Notch...
- tedunangst 12y agoMediocre may be the wrong word, but perhaps "unmeticulous".
- fnordfnordfnord 12y agoShips things that work.
- krapp 12y agoAdequate practice beats out sublime theory every time.
- Mikeb85 12y agoJust goes to show that shipping matters more than perfect code...
- rmc 12y agoIt's another example of Worse is Better
- nightski 12y agoUnder the assumption that Minecraft could not have been delivered as quickly or seen a similar level of success if properly engineered. For Notch, this may be true. But that doesn't mean it is a golden rule for all developers. In fact, I don't think it is very closely related at all. More of a coincidence.
- tedunangst 12y agoI think that's a rather severe misinterpretation of Worse is Better. Worse is Better doesn't mean ship with silly bugs and never fix them; it means ship simple, understandable systems. The canonical example is that unix system calls sometimes need to be restarted instead of always succeeding. But that doesn't mean unix succeeded because its system calls would randomly return incorrect data.
- joezydeco 12y agoI always thought it was a better example of deciding if you should optimize code or just throw faster hardware at a system.
- cdr 12y agoYou should be commenting on "the Mojang team", not Notch. Minecraft was way more performant when Notch was working on it. There were a number of blogposts in the recent past about how Minecraft maintainers rewriting Minecraft to be more object-oriented and idiomatic have trashed what little performance there was.
- Perdition 12y agoIt was only more performant because it did less back then. And Notch had to incorporate fan mods to the lighting and chunk rendering code to even achieve that. There have been recent issues but lets not pretend they aren't the sort of mistakes Notch liked to make.
- cdr 12y agoGo look it up - recent patches have had massive increases in CPU and RAM usage not because of new features, but because of making the code prettier. Notch may not be an expert on lighting or chunk rendering, but he's pretty good at writing efficient game code.
- Vaskivo 12y agoMediocre or not, I'd sure love to have a look at Dwarf Fortress' code.