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  • 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
  • > 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?

    by pwdisswordfishy
  • 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.

    https://content.luanti.org/packages/isaiah658/zoonami/

    by hackthemack
  • 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.

    by armchairhacker
  • 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
  • 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.
    by giancarlostoro
  • There is always one thing that I found so facintating with the modding scene in Minecraft. Because Minecraft does not have a modding api but the java byte code can be changed. People simply developed their own way of creating an API. There are 2 main modding APIs. Forge/Neo-Forge and Fabric.

    [1]Fabric uses Mix-ins while [2]Forge uses a more event based system that is added to the source code of minecraft where they add hooks into events that users can use.

    To me its just incredible. Its not often that I see that users own an abstraction instead of the developers.

    I wonder from a modding perspective would it be better if all public methods are just the API users can call and they themselves create a way for mods to exist?

    [1] https://wiki.fabricmc.net/tutorial:mixin_introduction [2] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/concepts/lifecycle...

    by AyanamiKaine
  • It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.
    by NelsonMinar

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