Comment from Notch about yesterdays update

Bug update #1. More coming tomorrow

There were some pretty severe bugs with players respawning, which I’ve spent most of the day today fixing. I’ve solved a lot of them, but I noticed that the respawning player can still fail to see other players in the spawn area under some circumstances.

Instead of delaying the bug fix update until tomorrow, I decided to release what I’ve done so far now today. I’ll fix the remainder tomorrow, and also work on a few more bugs I’ve gotten told about (thank you very much for the organized lists!).

The server has been updated to 0.2.5_01, but it’s not a mandatory update.
The client will auto-update to 1.2.3_02

Speaking of which, I will make the client updater ask the player before applying new updates. Automatic forced updates are scary, and they were only in because they were convenient and I never thought about it.

Adding a new texture pack

I've had a few people asking me how you do to change from the standard texture pack to something else, so I though I'd make a short tutorial for how you do it. It's really simple.

First off you need a texture pack to replace the old one with. So what I did is that I downloaded a pack that someone else made, and a good place for that is HERE. The Painterly webpage has a wide range of texture packs, and you also have the possibility to arrange your own pack from pre-made textures. So you download a pack.

What you then do is to open up Minecraft as I have done in the picture below, and click the button marked with the red rectangle saying Mods and texture packs.

After that you press the Open texture pack folder button, which acually says "place texture pack files here".. so it's quite obvius what to do right?

So what you do then is to drag the .zip texture pack (I belive is has to be Zipped to be able to work, not 100% sure about that though) to the folder you have just opend. And then you are set to go! your new texture pack is installed.

As you can see below, you can choose from the two texture packs. Either the standar pack or the one you have just downloaded and installed.

And here you can see the difference between the standard pack (left side) and the new painterly pack (right side). Sorry that I took the last picture in the dark, but click on it and you should get to see a larger version of it where it's easier to see the difference between the packs.

Ofc you could also make your very own texture pack aswell. But that takes a whole lot a time compared to just downloading that someone else already made. You can be laze from time to time! But if you try to make your own texture pack, make sure you do it in a software where you can turn white backgrounds into transparent.

Slow day

Oh this has been such a slow day. I have barly gone out of the house, except for when I had to go out and get all the freaking snow away so you can get from the door out to the mail box.

The only things Minecraft-wise I've done today is to upload the binary addition tutorial. Which explains the basics of binary addition so that you can understand the redstone binary adder more easily.



And the other thing is to learn how you add new texture packs to minecraft.

Tomorrow will probably(hopefully) be a more productive day.

New update (24/11)

Notch has uploaded the update now, here is what he's posted on his blog so far.

I’m expecting bugs on this one, so I’m monitoring the usual channels (irc, twitter, email) extra carefully.

Basically everything I talked about in the last post is done, with some extras such as visible hurt animations (how did I forget that?) and visible fire on burning mobs.

The lighting still isn’t right, I need to rewrite it. I think I know what the problem is now, though. Or rather, I know what ONE problem is. You know when you’re traveling by boat, and you see weird strips of light on the ocean floor in multiplayer? That.

Also needed is visible armor on players and mobs (sheep!), and some tweaks to reduce laggy moving mobs. And bows and arrows.

There are a couple of new settings for the server:
pvp. True by default. If this is set to false, players can’t hurt other players.
spawn-monsters. True by default. Set to false to remove all monsters.
spawn-animals. Also true by default. Set to false to remove all animals.

[edit:]

Wow, that broke the game. Hold on while I try to fix stuff.

[edit:]

I’ve uploaded a new server and a new client, fixing the two major bugs I heard about.
I had to disable leaves decaying again (sorry!) because it caused infinite loops in certain situations.

Keep me posted, and I’ll keep fixing!

I have put up a server myself to try it out. It... didn't go so well, hehe. But I can tell you that the health is working, there are monsters that can hurt you pretty badly and you can hit them aswell. I am having some bad lagg though, dunno if it has something to do with the client and update or if it's just my internet that's messing around. Anyone else tried SMP after the update?

Video milestones

Just noticed that three new videos have reaced over a thousand views now. It aint that much compared to alot of other things on youtube, but I am proud of it anyway! And here they are!

Working health in SMP tomorrow!

So Notch posted today that he is going to make an update tomorrow that is gonna make the health in SMP work as it's supposed to which includes fighting monsters and other players.
The update was supposed to come today but Notch forgot to bring  the keystore with the private certificate key to the office.


He also did another post today reminding us about the texturepack competetion he's holding along with Webhallen. Where you can win a SSD drive, autographed ON the acual drive, funny place to do it. The winner will also recive the real painting of the new painting that's going to enter the game soon.


Here is a picture borrowed from Notch's blog, showing the progress so far.

The painters webpage can be found HERE

 (currantly down due to heavy traffic... It's been "Notched")

Message from Notch

Sickness, Sprint and Speakers

I spent most of the weekend in our awesomely comfortable sofa, eating painkillers and helping the NCR take control of the Dam. My best guess is that I had a cold of some kind. It probably started last week when I actually spent my days working with other people for the first time in many months.

Today was the second day in our office, and we got started with our first sprint (we’re doingScrum, you see). We’ve ordered a huge fancy cork bulletin board to keep the sprint task note thingies, but for now we just keep the notes on a desk.

Getting organized like this is a bit scary and unusual for me, but I think it’s a definite good thing in the long run, especially once we start developing a proper product backlog. It turned out I had forgotten a couple of features for SMP health. Getting physical notes to move around helps a lot for motivation and keeps me focused on the task, though, so I think this will improve my development speed. (We used scrum when I worked at Jalbum). Today, despite losing much of the day to a meeting, an interview for ABC and helping Jakob pick out glasses, I managed to finish falling damage, fixing the respawn bug I was struggling with last week (the most robust way to fix it was to send new spawn location coordinates to the client and trigger a local respawn instead of trying to quickly move the respawned player to the correct location), and implementing drowning.

Oh, and we bought speakers. Music is important, and does wonders for the mood in an office. We’ve set up a public shared Spotify list. Feel free to add music to it that you think we’d enjoy, or that might make us laugh, and we’ll listen to it tomorrow.

If someone’s deleted everything on there or anything like that, feel free to fix it. :)