Zos_Kia
Doing the Lord’s work in the Devil’s basement
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My last job was on a fairly large typescript codebase (few hundred Klocs) which we started some time before LLMs were a thing. While we weren’t into academic engineering patterns and buzzwords, we were very particular in maintaining consistent patterns across the codebase. The output of Copilot, even with early models which were far from today’s standards, was often scarily accurate. It was far from genius but i’m still chasing that high to this day, to me it really indicated that we had made this codebase readable and actionable even by a new hire.
I’m all for laws to regulate data centers and manufacturing, but again, that’s not what is being pushed for. Most anti-AI peeps seem the be helping the enemy a lot more then they realize.
I’m guessing there’s a lot of controlled opposition which is incredibly cheap to produce, doesn’t leave much of a paper trail, and is reasonably effective.
I guess that’s where we disagree. I’d rather have sloppy talented bastards than little robots. One Kurt Cobain over a million Joe Satrianis, any time of the year.
You can train a monkey to be rigorous, I’m sure at EA sports they’re really disciplined with their file naming but I’m not gonna play their games to find out.
I mean, it’s a completely reasonable habit that prevents issues of this kind, i’m not disputing that. It’s part of a million little discipline things that will make your life better for an insignificant cost. But it’s also not a big deal and if you start caring about that then you should also care about all the other things that “should already be the standard by most devs”. And then where will you find the time and energy to punch above your weight class and release a masterpiece ? When you engage in that sort of task, you always have to neglect stuff that “should be the standard”. It’s cool and people should be cool about it IMO. Nobody’s gonna love you for being super rigorous about your file naming schemes and never being lazy, they’ll love you cause you have good ideas and work them hard.
I don’t find it nice when the internet is always back-seating every little aspect of what creators do, and being super demanding as if they were a mega corp with infinite resource and not a small group of every day people trying their really best to push out something great in a reasonable time-frame while not burning out. Maybe that’s not what you’re doing, man, it’s just one of my pet peeves.
Every process can be theoretically simple but they never have zero impact. So you come up with this process and some other guy comes up with another, there’s an infinity of things that are simple and quick. Imagine the uber-crunch a small team needs to go through to produce an AA title. It’s just cruel to just come up after the fact and be like “oh yeah you could have done this and that on top of your actual work, it would have added zero quality to the finished product but it’s oh so important to a few people”.
Like… When will gamers ever respect workers giving it their all? They’re just human ffs.
That’s just ridiculous standards when you apply them to a small team doing their best to pump out a unique piece of art. Yeah sure you can add a million processes to avoid inconsequential things like that but that’s time you can’t spend on making a good game. Zero value except for appeasing superstitious busybodies…
the zombification exploit is an exploit (unless they fixed it? idk I haven’t played since before the update with the warden), setting up a farm with the desired villagers is an absolute chore
Not sure what you mean ? Villager curing is a legit mechanic, and it’s not absolutely required. Personally i never bother, as emeralds are so easy to farm they’re basically infinite. I see what you mean about building villager “trading halls”, though, i used to hate it too. But it’s not really required either i guess. You can just pop into a village, convert 3 or 4 villagers to librarians with the trades you want : mending, unbreaking, efficiency & protection will get you most of the way even if it’s not maxed-out gear you’ll already see the difference. For more marginal enchants you can explore the End and combine equipment you looted from there.
It’s what i like in that mechanic, there’s various paths to acquire good equipment, a minimal setup will take minimal effort but if you geek out you can make yourself a god-tier kit that will stay with you forever.
Anecdotally I used to roll with a crew that had a bunch of PvPers who’d lose equipment all the time, so we had this huge kit-farming district in our base that was really fun to design and build. The system is pretty in-depth and i wouldn’t call it badly designed (even though it might not be to everybody’s taste).
I think what makes the game great is that it contains a number of game mechanics, which are all interlocked and play nice together. That gives it enormous versatility. You can be a nomad explorer, or a builder who stays at base and never sees a hostile mob. You can be a redstone engineer, or a farmer accumulating insane amounts of resources. You can create map art and barter with other map artists on the server. You can hunt bases and either grief them or contact their owners and get to know their history. You can play mini games on commercial servers or code your own mods and play PvA (player vs admin) on anarchy servers.
You can find the exact combo and dosage that fits your playstyle, then switch gears a couple months later and turn the game on its head. I don’t know of many games with that kind of variety.
Remove the XP cost increment upon repairing items, so that Mending is not an end-game necessity anymore
Yeah i see your point, it can get frustrating at first. Personally i don’t hate it, getting to keep your tools forever is an endgame perk and as such, it needs a bit of organization and knowledge. You’ll have to have at least some basic villager breeding (for a Mending librarian), and some basic farms (auto-furnace for XP generation & storage, or just some mob farm).
That’s kind of why i think the game is well designed. To get endgame perks you need to interact with different game mechanics at least on a surface level, it’s great for discoverability and inspiration.
The irony of these projects is that they only seem to appeal to people who don’t really like Minecraft, or used to like older versions but not recent ones. They have zero traction among active Minecraft players.
I’ve tried most of them and honestly they don’t hold a candle to the original - not that they are bad games, but rather they entirely miss the point of modern Minecraft and why it is so appealling to so many people. Although (some vocal fraction of) the community likes to nitpick every single detail of every single update, it is an incredibly well designed game.
Kind of tangential but I’ve always found the start of fallout 3 (the iconic scene where you exit the vault) to be a lesson in game design. Here’s a completely open world but I can guarantee in ten minutes you’ll be at the entrance of megaton. No direct prompting, just subtle framing and environmental clues.
I don’t know, the bedrock version started in 2011 way before Microsoft bought the studio. It was never free or community-driven, it is cheaper than the Java version, but it doesn’t have access to the free modding community. This sounds like a relatively good non-toxic deal to me, either you pay upfront or you suffer the micro-transactions. If you don’t have the money, you can still play the full game for a relatively low price.
Your implication that they don’t optimize or develop new content for the base game is simply unfounded and proven wrong every year like clockwork.
microtransaction hell
As far as i know the full game is entirely playable without spending a dime more than the price of the game. You can join an infinity of multiplayer servers or play the game solo from start to finish and beyond, and you still get the yearly update which, despite your statement, includes much more than “a new mob every six months”.
I personally don’t mind that cosmetics and entirely optional non-game-advantaging additional content are paid, as it is what bankrolls the studio to keep pumping out free updates every year. How do you propose they finance this otherwise ?
Minecraft falls squarely in this category. I paid 15$ some 12 years ago and am still getting a yearly update for free.
And yet if you go in the MC community, one of the most common complaints people have is that the updates are never enough and the Devs are lazy etc… I guess this goes to the point of this article, people can easily be trained to have unrealistic expectations.
I’m not crying for Mojang/Microsoft but I can’t imagine how it feels to be an indie dev and have people shit on you because the work you do for free is not good enough.
Oh that’s a totally different take then. Nobody is going to suggest to a MC community to uproot, install a new game and transplant there. That’s not a thing that ever goes well. Plus, it’s not about one community in particular, it’s about this whole ecosystem of independently owned and sometimes interconnected minecraft servers. As i said the social culture is very present in the way many people enjoy the game.
Now if there was a mod for minetest that could spoof the MC protocol (it is openly documented on the internet) and allow me to join a MC server, i would definitely do it, especially if minetest is more lightweight / hackable.
I find the QA potential to be enormous. I’ve seen my share of good EA games and the paper feedback is really what makes the difference. You’ll have devs revisiting assumptions that would be really difficult to challenge if you didn’t have a stream of real reactions to what you’re doing.