In praise of Minecraft

I've been meaning to do a post on Minecraft for a while. The game is absolutely ingenious, and here's why:

1. It's written in Java. I remember back when any game developer would scoff at Java as a noob language for people who didn't want to do real programming. Point any of those scoffers to Minecraft's multi-million dollar profits, and they'll shut up right quick. While it's no Id Tech 5, it gets the job done, and has one very important benefit: Java is multi-platform. Minecraft can be played natively on any OS with OpenGL a suitable JVM. That means I'm playing it on Linux without a hitch.

2. It's a true sandbox. A lot of games tout themselves as sandboxes, but then only deliver a little pile of sand on top of a lot of cement. The world of Minecraft can literally be dismantled down to the bedrock, and rebuilt in whatever fashion the player wants. The game delivers the experience of an unlimited set of Legos, but to scale with the player, so you can walk around inside your creations.

3. The world is procedurally generated, and is a joy to explore. There's a few key things to note here. First, every world is different, so your experience changes with each world you play. Second, with mountains and forests and cave systems and chasms, there are truly gorgeous bits of scenery to discover. Every time I start a new Minecraft world I am driven by the thrill of exploration. Third, because the world is procedurally generated from a limited number of assets, the majority of the content created by the developers was programmatic, rather than artistic. Instead of being bogged down with hours of modelling and texturing, the devs spent time writing algorithms that would generate an effectively unlimited amount of compelling content.

These last two points, and especially the last part of this last point, are where the true ingenuity of Minecraft lies. Instead of pouring millions of dollars and countless man-hours into producing a blockbuster AAA title with fancy graphics and marketable characters, the creators of Minecraft made a game that makes itself. Minecraft gameplay is centered around the player establishing their own objectives, and essentially entertaining themselves. Minecraft content is procedurally generated, making the experience different and compelling in every new world the player enters. Combining these things with the fact that the game is playable on any OS, on almost any system, and it's easy to see why the game is so successful.

Power Users vs Usability

The big quote of UDS seems to be: "There is a bit of a myth that power users don't like and aren't interested in usability and ease-of-use. I think that’s nonsense."

You're actually correct, Mr. Shuttleworth. And that's why all of your power users are switching away from Unity. They want usability and ease-of-use. Which happen to be things that a rigid, non-customizable interface does not provide.

Mark, you need to start thinking of usability as User-Ability. Are you giving your users the ability to do what they want with your interface? No? Then you're not providing usability.

Followup: Giving Up on Fglrx

I bought an nVidia card. Never been so happy to see a binary blob in my life. Pardon me while I go huggle my bug-free silky-smooth fps.

Giving up on Open Source

Well, sort of. I ditched the FOSS radeon driver. Why? I've been playing Minecraft. As you are probably aware, Minecraft isn't exactly a graphically intensive game. So when I have to run it on the lowest settings, and it still makes my system chug, I've had enough.

I know the open source radeon driver is a work in progress. But if I can have the performance I want now, for free, there's no reason to make myself suffer. Additionally, the driver has been a "work in progress" for years. There's obviously very little work and very little progress going into it.

So now I can play Fable, Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike Source, Doom 3, Guild Wars, Heroes of Newerth... all of those games that have just been sitting on my hard drive. Yay!

In other news, to switch back to fglrx, I upgraded to Oeneric. This is my first time upgrading releases while still in beta. No complaints so far, though aside from LightDM there's nothing really new for me in Xubuntu 11.10.

The current state of r600g

Xorg-eders on Xubuntu 11.04 current to 2011-09-02 on r600g with i386 libs installed on amd64. Just figured I'd share the level of success I am having with this.

OpenMW

Just wanted to take a second to show the new OpenMW Wordpress theme that I made! Doing the phpBB forum next, and then the wiki...

How Fark Does Patents

Following up on my recent post on patents, here's a (WARNING: strong language) blog post from Fark about their recent troubles. Good to see more people calling this stuff out for what it is.