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- Hacker News
- The community obfuscation mappings unrestrictively licensed. The Microsoft ones are not. It's a trap.by 64718283661
- Does copyright apply to variable names?by poly2it
- But the whole point is there are no more mappings. I’m not sure what the trap is supposed to be?by einsteinx2
- I'm pretty excited this but for a slightly strange reason. I have a little monitor for the logs that posts things like player joins and deaths to a chat room. It is fun and also encourages people to hop on the server when someone joins.
However the source information was always missing and strange in the logs making matching some messages difficult. Hopefully this will make more messages more unique so that I can easily match the ones I am interested in.
by kevincox - I got my start coding by modding Minecraft - I added a quest system; one day I wanted to add dialogue trees and slowly turn it into a RPG. I hope future generations will always have this wonderful opportunity, this low barrier to entry opportunity to do substantial personal-passion mods.by nxobject
- I hope Claude Code follows the same path. It's just wrong to have such a key tool in your development toolchain obfuscated. Changes to CC reflect in the way I work. I've been modding the app for ever now. Something as simple as evalling prompt changes, or finding ways to optimize context. Just make it OSS, like Codex. To add insult to injury, Claude has coined some key industry standards, such as MCP, now Skills. It also supports plugins, inviting others to release their plugins as OSS on Github [1], while their core remains proprietary.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-code-plugins#:~:text=P...
by ojosilva - Even if they made it Source Available it wouldn't hurt them much, because Minecraft is very easy to pirate and the reason anyone pays for anything at all is because you need an account in Mojang's authentication servers (which people do not want to move off of for various reasons).
Hell, they could even make it Open Source with a clause preventing other companies from using to code to make a profit. It's too big to fail.
by RGBCube - > Hell, they could even make it Open Source with a clause preventing other companies from using to code to make a profit
Such a clause would immediately make it Source Available not Open Source.
by TheDong - > But we encourage people to get creative both in Minecraft and with Minecraft – so in 2019 we tried to make this tedious process a little easier by releasing “obfuscation mappings”. These mappings were essentially a long list that allowed people to match the obfuscated terms to un-obfuscated terms. This alleviated the issue a little, as modders didn’t need to puzzle out what everything did, or what it should be called anymore. But why stop there?
Indeed, why did they even bother with this half-measure in the first place?
- Were the mappings only a subset of the obfuscated classes/methods/etc? Basically making the mapping a sort of public APIby matteotom
- Perhaps it was easier? There were also probably legal reasons.by ethmarks
- If my memory serves, the stated justification for not going open source was copyright and trademark protection. Apparently, that is no longer a concern, if it ever really was.
Now I'm bracing for them to drop support for Java Edition entirely and go strictly Bedrock in a couple of years.
Perhaps Minecraft 2.0 is finally nearing release.
by naruhodo - If I had to guess, the legal team's brains started melting when de-obfuscation was mentioned.by rirze
- A lot of mod tooling was built around the obfuscated or community names for those APIs.by Macha
- I much prefer just writing stuff for Luanti (formerly minetest).
You can, pretty much, get the Minecraft experience by downloading mods. Or just use the VoxeLibre game mod.
https://content.luanti.org/packages/Wuzzy/mineclone2/
The mods are written in lua and you can find the source code for most of them.
One I like is Zoonami which turns the experience into a Pokemon like game.
by hackthemack - does something like AllTheMods 10 exist for Luanti? Or Meatballcraft?
- Zoonami will achieve what Tuxemon didn't.by anthk
- by cachius
- Minecraft, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Trackmania...these are games that succeeded because of their communities. Alone, they don't provide much for the average player, but creative players build interesting things that appeal to everyone.
I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal experience, I've heard this about VR in general). If you want to build a community, you must make development easy for hobbyists and small users*. I believe this has held even for the biggest companies, case in point the examples above.
* Though you also need existing reputation, hence small companies struggle to build communities even with good engines.
- All of those were also all $0–$20. It's kind of a chicken and egg problem to build a user and developer community. Games have to build a strong playerbase with limited content, then enough gamers have to be invested enough to become creators. Enough have to be able to actually pull off the development, yes, but I think the even bigger problem is that they'll never have a reason to with the small number of users inherent with platforms that cost $500–$3500 for special hardware to get onto.by mminer237
- > Not just locked down
The lockdown is a big part of it, though. The industry has cross-platform VR/AR SDKs like OpenXR that Apple refuses to implement. A big reason their platform isn't supported day-and-date with multiplat VR releases is Apple's insistence on reinventing the wheel with every platform they make.
If the rumors of Valve's VR headset being able to run flatscreen games are true, it's more-or-less Game Over for the Vision Pro. The appetite for an iPad-like experience with six DOF is already handled by much cheaper machines.
by bigyabai - Agree! We saw this a lot. Launching with the Quest 3, we were often the first company to do X, Y, Z despite being months after new features had been released in the SDKs because they were poorly documented (and often even conflicting).
Diverging even slightly from the demo use case would quickly feel like Sisyphus; so close, but never succeeding in getting over the hill.
Good for marketing in certain cases (to be the first), but bad for the community of builders
by kvam - > I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal experience, I've heard this about VR in general). If you want to build a community, you must make development easy for hobbyists and small users*. I believe this has held even for the biggest companies, case in point the examples above.
Unity and UE have pretty good VR support nowadays, and even godot is getting there. Plus making a custom engine for VR was never that much harder than for a normal 3D game (well, once some API like OpenXR got normalized).
The big issue with VR right now is that it is more costly to develop for than normal apps and games, while having less user. It makes it a hard sell. For some indie dev, I allow them to profit from a market that is not yet saturated (right now, with no good marketing, you just get buried on steam, any app store, etc). There are many factors that make it more costly, like having to support several mobility and accessibility features for games (for example smooth and jump locomotion, reduce fov when moving the view, etc), that you usually don't have to care for in other plateform. And there is the issue of interactivity. UX (and in many ways UI) is still very far from ideal. Most VR apps and games just try things out, but there is still a world of pattern and good practice to build up. This makes using anything VR often an annoying experience. Especially since some issue can be an absolute no-go for some user. As an example, displaying subtitle in a 6dof environment can be tricky. Some game put it at a fix point of your view, which can cause nausea and readability problem, some move still follows the head/view but with a delay, which reduce nausea issue but can be distracting and also has readability issue (the subs can go out of view).
by maeln - The other reason being that nobody is asking for The Metaverse, and definitely don’t want to spend huge chunks of cash on a funny hat to wear in order to access it.by jon-wood
- I disagree with regard to Minecraft (only game I played in that list). I bought the game while it was in alpha and even then the single player experience was outstanding and sucked me in. I still have vivid memories from 15+ years ago. The balance of creativity and survival (and friggen creepers) was perfect.
I dont think I am alone in saying this. IIRC the game was making millions while still in alpha.
by YesBox - Roblox had a phenomenal engine when it came out and its terrain destruction is still unmatched.
In 2006, I could download the Roblox app and bam, I would play thousands of 3D multiplayer games for free that loaded near instantly. With fully destructible buildings and dynamic terrain. Somehow I didn't get viruses from remote code execution.
That was groundbreaking at the time. In that era, I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode. Most games I'd buy on CDs. I certainly couldn't knock down entire buildings with grenades.
If you contrast with Second Life/Habbo Hotel, you could walk around and talk to people I guess?
The community that spring up around it eventually carried it into total dominance of gaming for American children, but the basic parts of the engine like "click button, load into game, blow stuff up" were a decade ahead of the curve.
Also Blockland cost money, Roblox was free.
by jjmarr - You can add the Flight Simulator series to the list, which spawned a vast ecosystem of add-ons, both free and commercial.
I believe though, that what you actually need as a big or small company, is good game first and foremost; the engine is secondary. When the community around a game reaches a critical mass, the very small percentage of its members who have the skills to modify things becomes significant as well.
For instance, Richard Burns Rally was not intended to be modded at all, yet the fans added new cars, new tracks, online scoreboards, etc.
In the Luanti [1] community (a voxel games engine/platform, designed to be moddable nearly from the start), one begins to see something similar as well: notable games gets mods, others don't (the former default game is a particular case; it is not exactly good but go tons of mods because of its status, and games based on it benefit from that ecosystem). Yet all use the same engine (perhaps Roblox is similar in that respect, I'm not sure if they have "reified" whole games like Luanti did).
by astrobe_ - Obfuscating Minecraft code doesn't make much sense to me from an IP protection angle. It is one of the easier games to build from scratch once you see how it plays. Most of the magic is emergent behavior between many simple rule systems. Nothing in that source code would be much of a revelation. It's not like there's a nanite implementation hiding in there somewhere. It's mostly boring stuff like defining how pig or sheep walk through the scene and respond to various goals. The "scariest" part of Minecraft tech is probably chunk management.by bob1029
- That's all true now but none of it was true back in the alpha days.
And once there were mods and mod loaders built on the obscured source, it became easier to not disrupt the toolchains than to bite the bullet; I think Mojang now wants to make moving mods easier (someone somewhere has to be a bit sad that there are famous modpacks running old versions of Minecraft because it's easier to backport everything to 1.7.10 (including running on newer Javas) than it is to update mods).
by bombcar - I wonder if they'll ever just open source the Java Edition on GitHub. People will buy Minecraft on every platform it is released on, just like Skyrim.