Hi.
Ever since the start of this year, I've gotten highly interested with Minecraft 1.12. This is the update for me and many other passionate builders
(the following thoughts are coming from a MC builder with 4-5 years of experience).
I greatly appreciate what the developers have done and are doing with this update.
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But, I'm extremely bothered by that — while there is a snapshot, this is the only one:
and past development trends, more snapshots with more additions, features, and changes are expected after the first one for a major update. Except, this is not the case with 1.12.
At the time of me writing, it has been 5 weeks since the first 1.12 snapshot. After waiting a week or two in February, I’ve started to get anxious, impatient, infuriated, and sometimes — very sad. In-attempt of expressing fairness, at least two of those weeks had limited development time due to a flood of meetings and the annual GDC (Game Developer’s Conference). And in the time of developing, they’ve been working on some highly technical pieces, like removing the current block id limit so they can add more blocks. What are some of the most requested blocks for Minecraft? More slabs and stairs.
With this update, 1.12, and its name: the “World of Color Update”, Mojang has set an ideal theme to satisfy some of the most wanted building features for the game. And they’ve made some success already, and the community can only encourage them to do more (in-general). The opinions are strong — applying the good minds of the community will be very rewarding, but not responding to them can destroy avid players’ lives. If the developers do not add a bunch of stair and slab blocks in this update, we’re going to clobber and smash them down to the lava and bedrock, maybe even into The Void. This tension grows from rumors that hardened clay, granite, diorite, andesite, concrete, etc. stairs and slabs will not happen, even after solving the issue with limited block ids. That’s a show of how much people care about Minecraft.
So, what’s my problem? I play Minecraft mostly on a multiplayer server. And on there, I like to build a lot and conduct large-scale projects. Whenever new building blocks are announced for an upcoming update to the game, I think about how I could incorporate the blocks into my builds. I have gotten better at ignoring them and carrying on my work without them; I wasn’t excited about 1.10. But now with the number of blocks incoming, I feel guilty to not have them for whatever I’m building. And some of the textures are going to change in future snapshots: wool and cyan terracotta. I’ve felt that if I experiment with the new blocks and wool colors, I will not have an accurate depiction of how my builds will look in the final release. I haven’t been inclined to mess around with the blocks in Creative. But, I’ll try again now.
___
What I think this time comes to at the end of the day, is that this development of 1.12 is leaving me cliff-hanging and wondering what are the developers doing to building in Minecraft, my greatest passion about it. I want to know all the blocks they’ll be adding in this update and be able to try them all out and/or judge if I want to use any of those new blocks as the primary building material of a large building project.
Am I alone in having these personal issues with Minecraft 1.12 — The World of Color Update? Does anyone have any help/advice for me and other builders?
I keep seeing people talk about "limited block IDs" but the game has been able to support 4096(!) block IDs for many years now. True - the Anvil file format, added in 1.2.1, allows for 4096 block IDs, as seen in this old Wiki page from 2012:
TAG_Byte_Array("Blocks"): 4096 bytes of block IDs defining the terrain. 8 bits per block, plus the bits from the below Add tag. 3D order YZX.
TAG_Byte_Array("Add"): May not exist. 2048 bytes of additional block ID data. The value to add to (combine with) the above block ID to form the true block ID in the range 0 to 4095. 4 bits per block. 3D order YZX. Combining is done by shifting this value to the left 8 bits and then adding it to the block ID from above.
The only issue I can possibly find is that they added 256 to the block ID to get the item ID so they don't conflict in ItemStacks (for example, in 1.6.4 an iron shovel is assigned the ID of 0 in the Item class but the real ID is 256; item ID 0 would be air if it existed as a block back then) but all they need to do is change that to 4096; since numerical item IDs are no longer used in the save files, and pretty much anywhere else, there should be no issues with this except for older (pre-1.8) worlds and in that case they can just convert them since items are an entirely separate thing from blocks. Somebody even wrote a mod (for 1.2.5) that did this, before Forge added its own patch (most mods would be impossible without it):
So really, if Mojang can't implement such a simple workaround, well, I don't know. At the very least, it should have taken far less than 5 weeks, seeing that there are already working examples; sure, they can't just steal Forge's code and use it as-is but they can look at it to see what needs to be changed, just as they probably used Optifine to see how to add mipmaps and all the other once Optifine-exclusive features (the majority of video settings were added by Optifine first; brightness, mipmaps, vsync, fine framerate limit, render distance in chunks, Advanced OpenGL (since removed; based on my experience this was responsible for much of the performance boost Optifine claimed and the integration of GPU-independent occlusion culling since 1.8 explains why some see better performance since then), fast/fancy/no clouds (independent of Fast/Fancy graphics, which used to be all or nothing), and more).
Also, the lack of IDs without changing the code is partially Mojang's own fault - why did they use so many IDs for Shulker boxes, which are tile entities and could even have (near) full 24 bit RGB color if they wanted to (see leather armor, which uses NBT tags to determine its color)?. Or used separate block IDs for the new types of wood fences, when Pocket Edition used the same block ID and used data values instead (which are not used at all in the PC edition; MCEdit shows a data value of 0 for fences regardless of orientation).
Hi.
Ever since the start of this year, I've gotten highly interested with Minecraft 1.12. This is the update for me and many other passionate builders
(the following thoughts are coming from a MC builder with 4-5 years of experience).
I greatly appreciate what the developers have done and are doing with this update.
===
===
But, I'm extremely bothered by that — while there is a snapshot, this is the only one:
( http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/17w06a ).
Based on what Mr. Jeb said here:
(https://minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-17w06a)
and past development trends, more snapshots with more additions, features, and changes are expected after the first one for a major update. Except, this is not the case with 1.12.
At the time of me writing, it has been 5 weeks since the first 1.12 snapshot. After waiting a week or two in February, I’ve started to get anxious, impatient, infuriated, and sometimes — very sad. In-attempt of expressing fairness, at least two of those weeks had limited development time due to a flood of meetings and the annual GDC (Game Developer’s Conference). And in the time of developing, they’ve been working on some highly technical pieces, like removing the current block id limit so they can add more blocks. What are some of the most requested blocks for Minecraft? More slabs and stairs.
So, what’s my problem? I play Minecraft mostly on a multiplayer server. And on there, I like to build a lot and conduct large-scale projects. Whenever new building blocks are announced for an upcoming update to the game, I think about how I could incorporate the blocks into my builds. I have gotten better at ignoring them and carrying on my work without them; I wasn’t excited about 1.10. But now with the number of blocks incoming, I feel guilty to not have them for whatever I’m building. And some of the textures are going to change in future snapshots: wool and cyan terracotta. I’ve felt that if I experiment with the new blocks and wool colors, I will not have an accurate depiction of how my builds will look in the final release. I haven’t been inclined to mess around with the blocks in Creative. But, I’ll try again now.
___
What I think this time comes to at the end of the day, is that this development of 1.12 is leaving me cliff-hanging and wondering what are the developers doing to building in Minecraft, my greatest passion about it. I want to know all the blocks they’ll be adding in this update and be able to try them all out and/or judge if I want to use any of those new blocks as the primary building material of a large building project.
Am I alone in having these personal issues with Minecraft 1.12 — The World of Color Update? Does anyone have any help/advice for me and other builders?
-
— ForeverMaster
I keep seeing people talk about "limited block IDs" but the game has been able to support 4096(!) block IDs for many years now. True - the Anvil file format, added in 1.2.1, allows for 4096 block IDs, as seen in this old Wiki page from 2012:
The only issue I can possibly find is that they added 256 to the block ID to get the item ID so they don't conflict in ItemStacks (for example, in 1.6.4 an iron shovel is assigned the ID of 0 in the Item class but the real ID is 256; item ID 0 would be air if it existed as a block back then) but all they need to do is change that to 4096; since numerical item IDs are no longer used in the save files, and pretty much anywhere else, there should be no issues with this except for older (pre-1.8) worlds and in that case they can just convert them since items are an entirely separate thing from blocks. Somebody even wrote a mod (for 1.2.5) that did this, before Forge added its own patch (most mods would be impossible without it):
http://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/mapping-and-modding/minecraft-mods/1283541-1-2-5-4096ids
So really, if Mojang can't implement such a simple workaround, well, I don't know. At the very least, it should have taken far less than 5 weeks, seeing that there are already working examples; sure, they can't just steal Forge's code and use it as-is but they can look at it to see what needs to be changed, just as they probably used Optifine to see how to add mipmaps and all the other once Optifine-exclusive features (the majority of video settings were added by Optifine first; brightness, mipmaps, vsync, fine framerate limit, render distance in chunks, Advanced OpenGL (since removed; based on my experience this was responsible for much of the performance boost Optifine claimed and the integration of GPU-independent occlusion culling since 1.8 explains why some see better performance since then), fast/fancy/no clouds (independent of Fast/Fancy graphics, which used to be all or nothing), and more).
Also, the lack of IDs without changing the code is partially Mojang's own fault - why did they use so many IDs for Shulker boxes, which are tile entities and could even have (near) full 24 bit RGB color if they wanted to (see leather armor, which uses NBT tags to determine its color)?. Or used separate block IDs for the new types of wood fences, when Pocket Edition used the same block ID and used data values instead (which are not used at all in the PC edition; MCEdit shows a data value of 0 for fences regardless of orientation).
TheMasterCaver's First World - possibly the most caved-out world in Minecraft history - includes world download.
TheMasterCaver's World - my own version of Minecraft largely based on my views of how the game should have evolved since 1.6.4.
Why do I still play in 1.6.4?