E3 keep everyone busy this week? News all over the place! Twitter, blogs, G4, Spike TV, the whole gambit. But what about Minecraft? Considering the flurry of excitement that E3 causes on developers, Notch was still able to tweet out a few nifty hints of things to come that caught me by surprise.
Minecraft News
First off, his tumblr blog post!
- It looks like we need to change the release date for Minecraft to be able to get a good venue for MinecraftCon. 11/11/11 is fully booked. One week later, perhaps? I’ll post more details as soon as we’ve decided and booked a venue.
- We are working on Minecraft Beta 1.7, which I’m referring to as the “adventure update”. We’re keeping the details secret so people can get surprises. The idea with this update is to flesh out the game a bit, making it reward exploration and combat more. Assuming we like them in play testing, pistons are coming in 1.7.
- We’re starting the modding support on a small scale with 1.7. We’ll be giving the source code out to a very VERY small group of people before the release of 1.7. We’ll use those experiences to work out the final details, then we’ll get the modding api out as soon as possible after 1.7 has been released. (source)
He also mentioned some other little things that E3 all covered, like xbox360 Minecraft and it works with Kinnect and all that jazz. As for his twitter, he mentioned that there will no longer be massive chunk updates during the day/night cycle. All of this will be handled via textures alone. source (I’m hoping this means less lag and not more in the long run.)
This info lead to another tweet, stating that “this means that skylight and blocklight can have different colors now. Nights are brighter, but tinted blue now. Blocklights are warm.” (source)
An odd tweet brought up the ‘dreaded’ lanterns again, stating that he’d like to make them cast the brighter/different toned Skylight to make them stand out, but coding will not permit it. (source)
Finally, and probably the biggest news of the last nine or so hours is that Minecraft officially hit 2.5 million sales just today. He hit a million back in January, and was at like 100,000 to 300,000 in October, and I know for sure that on December 22nd he was at 855,263 copies sold. Notch gave an update to the game in celebration of 1 million sold. The Misses and I have something in the works that’ll time out nicely for this milestone… soon, my friends. Soon…
While looking up old posts o’ mine to check how many people bought the game when, I noticed my very first Minecraft related post was November 9th last year. Ironically, that post is related to some Bleh News this week.
Bleh News
In my first Minecraft post I put up a sneak peek at a Twisted Metal level I was working on, and planned on finishing. That server got reset before I did complete it, though I did get awful far. I rebuilt that very same megabuild on a new server a friend from the first server made himself. (The completed Cloud Cutter, the buying and selling mods, the spawn town ‘mall’ and that, all on the same new server.)
So, two days ago I loaded up that server to chip away more at the project o’ mine. Oddly my location was not where I logged out at, but a quick /spawn or /warp will do the trick. Those mods are not installed. Not the first time, new patches always killed the mods for what seemed like an eternity. No bother.
Except my bud tagging along with me also appeared on the same spot as I. That’s when we noticed a new guy working on carving out a mountain nearby and he told us several other people have popped onto his server, saying they were looking for another place as well.
‘New’ server is dead. Project lost. Again. Teh Sighz!
Well, now this puts me in quite the pickle. Funny enough, I’m not really mad at all that it’s lost as I’ve been busy jumping around working on other projects all over the place and the server population was dwindling pretty quick. My only real annoyance is that I didn’t get a recent screen shot, so all work since May 6th is undocumented >.< (“Can’t wait” to tell the Misses all her stuff is gone as well. She’s more of a builder than I :X)
This leads to another conundrum. Do I re-rebuild it? More than likely. Though next time I’ll be accepting help to speed it along. I did it almost entirely solo, (thought it made the build sound more epic), but even with admin powers to spawn items in my inventory it got quite taxing once the majority was in place. I started looking forward to building it when the Misses helped out earlier in the month. In a way, I’m glad we didn’t finish it as it would have gotten wiped off anyway ^_^
But where to rebuild? After tinkerin’ on a buddy’s server I got the idea to possibly build it in the Nether, as it requires a great deal of lava. The only issues I can think of is that the top of it would need to be encased in glass to prevent getting constantly ruined by Ghast attacks, and I just found out sometimes the Nether’s world gets randomly restarted anew. At least online. Till that gets fixed, odds are low I’ll dive right back into it. Furthermore, I don’t wanna post a pic of it not complete, as it ruins the whole reveal in the end. So not only am I stuck with a pickle, I’m stuck with a pickle that I can’t even eat. How annoying is that XD
