Many creative people don’t care about being “locked in”, since they already make mods that can be broken by updates (and often are, unintentionally) and threatened legally (for violating IP and DRM). I think the much bigger problem with locked-down engines is simply that the lockdown methods used make it harder to develop on them.

Some people are asking for The Metaverse. Currently, the entire VRChat userbase. But you're right that there is not a large population of people willing to throw cash at it outside of a minority of virtual furries

A lot of people seem to be spending huge chunks of cash on enormous monitors, dual monitors, curved monitors, etc., and the appeal of that is mostly that it gets you a little bit closer to wearing a head-mounted display.

I think there’s a difference between “indie dev” aka either an experienced SWE trying it or some really motivated person with an established identity, credit card & income stream and a kid/teenager tinkering around.

In a “free for all” setting, anyone (including kids) could potentially learn enough (or even just download pre-made scripts) and try their hand at modding software/games.

In a modern situation with developer registration, etc someone would need some sort of established identity, potentially going through age verification, paying some nominal fee for a license, accepting an EULA and so forth. This is a huge barrier to entry for kids/teenagers just wanting to tweak the game experience for themselves/their friends. I remember my first time trying to install Apache on Windows I guess around 2008-09, and the (very well-made!) install wizard asked me for a domain name. At the time I wasn’t aware of how DNS/etc worked and was scared to continue, thinking I would either take up some other company’s name or not being “allowed” to use a random name I’d pick and get myself/my parents in trouble.

All these “regulated” ecosystems make it scarier for well-meaning but inexperienced devs to get started, while doing little to deter dedicated attackers who know the game and know actual cybercrime enforcement is both lacking and trivial to defeat in any case.

The “free for all” environment made me the developer & sysadmin (or DevOps person as the techbros call it) I am today despite no formal training/education and I am sad to see this opportunity go for the younger generations.

I'm always impressed when I check it, that flightsim.com is still running, and still has everyone's mods going right back to the 90s. Just in case anyone still wants the poor quality airport I uploaded for Flight Simulator 2000 twenty-something years ago.

The thing is, Minecraft of 10 years ago (or more) wasn’t even really that great of a game. It wasn’t bad, I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t that great.

What it did do right was be very open-ended and be conducive to modding, both of which were amplified by multiplayer capabilities.

I would wager that most of the fun players have had in Minecraft is from experiences that were built on top of Minecraft, not from the game’s own gameplay.

I don't think they're tone deaf, they just know that inexpensive gaming headsets can't make them enough money. They've invested something like $100 billion into VR and "only" sold 20 million headsets The revenue generated annually is almost nothing.

There isn't yet a game that involves all the players in one huge level, without shards, but there might be eventually. Current game engines don't support levels with that many players simultaneously. There is an interview with Neal Stephenson and Tim Sweeney on the Metaverse where Sweeney says supporting massive multiplayer is what he plans for Unreal Engine 6: https://www.matthewball.co/all/sweeneystephenson

> So one of the big efforts that we're making for Unreal Engine 6 is improving the networking model, where we both have servers supporting lots of players, but also the ability to seamlessly move players between servers and to enable all the servers in a data center or in multiple data centers, to talk to each other and coordinate a simulation of the scale of millions or in the future, perhaps even a billion concurrent players. That's got to be one of the goals of the technology. Otherwise, many genres of games just can never exist because the technology isn't there to support them. And further, we've seen massively multiplayer online games that have built parts of this kind of server technology. They've done it by imposing enormous costs on every programmer who writes code for the system. As a programmer you would write your code twice, one version for doing the thing locally when the player's on your server and another for negotiating across the network when the player's on another server. Every interaction in the game devolves into this complicated networking protocol every programmer has to make work. And when they have any bugs, you see item duplication bugs and cheating and all kinds of exploits. Our aim is to build a networking model that retains the really simple Verse programming model that we have in Fortnite today using technology that was made practical in the early 2000's by Simon Marlow, Simon Peyton Jones and others called Software Transactional Memory.

how big was Roblox in 2006?

> In that era, I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode.

You could also play any Source mod. Also WC3 maps were insane at the time.

In many ways it remains ahead of the curve. Kids that grow up making games in Roblox rarely survive the jump to a dedicated engine because Roblox is just so much easier to develop for in nearly every aspect. One big thing I've heard is that instantly getting working, robust online multiplayer by default baked into the engine is a major plus.

> I'd have to download Steam, buy individual games like Counterstrike, and the wackiest thing would be the "surf" gamemode.

It's interesting that you chose Counter-Strike as an example, as that is a Half Life mod itself, and by 2006 there was a large ecosystem [1] of Half Life modifications using Metamod and AMX Mod (X). The last one in a weird C-like language called Small or Pawn, which was my first programming language that I made serious programs with.

Especially the War3FT mod where users gained server-bound XP in combination with a reserved slots plugins which allowed top-XP users to join a full server really created a tight community of players on my tiny DSL home-hosted server.

[1] https://www.amxmodx.org/compiler.php?mod=1&cat=0&plugin=&aut...

Yeah, I think Minecraft definitely still would have been a hit without any modding. Though it might not have become the absolute juggernaut that it is now without it -- it's hard to say for sure.

I wouldn't worry too much about it breaking anything with how version-specific modding already is. And by the time the full release is out, I'm sure every tool will have updated based on the new names from the snapshots.

Still is for legal reasons. Also the community names (Yarn) come with javadoc that actually explains what the function does

Hyrum's Law

Amusingly, Minecraft is a counter-example. It has very few assets and they are hardly essential to the experience.

no, I think they're looking for the official game to be open sourced... that's much more appealing than a knockoff since it's the version everyone actually plays.

Honestly, I would almost settle for Microsoft open sourcing the Minecraft Java back-end server at a minimum. This alone is long overdue. The massive fanbase could have started to maintain it in ways Microsoft could only fathom.

Notch has said he would do many things and rarely follows through with them. I'm still waiting for 0x10c.

I'm pretty sure A Minecraft Movie has already made more money that the game had made when he made that promise.

Back then he couldn't have foreseen the size of the money printing factory that the game would become.

Notch has said a lot of things over the years. Many after the sale to Microsoft were not so great. Suddenly without purpose and more money than he would ever need in a life time, he found a new purpose that wasn't so great.

A lot of Qanon rants and other conspiracy things. Just goes to show you that some times it is best you don't get what you wish for.

Sales are still good though- right? It’s the no paid iOS game.

Luckily I have never had to deal with obfuscation, but from what I have seen there are some grotesque things like defining every single randomly named method call in an array or map with random order or weirdly combining or tearing apart methods.

The only time I encountered it was when I was working for the government, we were working on the rules that decide who gets audited in depth by the tax police. The .jar it compiled to was obfuscated.

AFAIK it also shortens the names, which might make the jar smaller or make it take less time to do name resolution at runtime. It probably won't be very relevant though, especially after startup.

But the only version that matters is 1.20.1!

They were already releasing official mappings.

The Luanti client lets you search and install mods from content.luanti.org

It differentiates between mods and games. A game changes the core game to be much more different, but sometimes a game is just a collection of some other mods.

https://content.luanti.org/packages/?type=game

Personally, I find it more fun to just go and click on about 6 to 8 mods that are interesting and see how the game goes.

https://content.luanti.org/packages/?type=mod

Some of my picks are...

https://content.luanti.org/packages/ElCeejo/animalia/

https://content.luanti.org/packages/random-wizard/gear_up/

https://content.luanti.org/packages/TenPlus1/farming/

https://content.luanti.org/packages/FreeLikeGNU/goblins/

Over time people learned the key APIs and classes that you needed to interact with. And obfuscated Java is like an order of magnitude easier to work with than machine code. Once someone figured out how to do something it was generally pretty easy to use that interface to do your own thing. Modders of course still often hit edge cases that required more reversing, but yeah, it was really cool to watch over the last 15+ years :)

There is and kind of isn't. There are community led modding apis, but also datapacks that are more limited but still allow someone to do cool stuff leveraging tools, items, etc already in the game.

If you remember entire contraptions of command blocks doing stuff like playing Pokemon Red in Minecraft or "one commands" that summoned an entire obelisk of command blocks, the introduction of datapacks pretty much replaced both of those.

Not only working around proguard, but Minecraft mods are built on top of an incredibly cool and flexible runtime class file rewriting framework that means that each JAR can use simple declarative annotations like @Inject to rewrite minecraft methods on the fly when their mod is loaded or unloaded. This massively revolutionized mod development, which was previously reliant on tens of thousands of lines of manually compiled patches that would create "modding APIs" for developers to use. Putting the patching tools in the hands of the mod developers has really opened up so many more doors.

Minecraft also has a plugin system based around JSON file datapacks, but it's a lot more limited. It's more at the level of scope of adding a few cool features to custom maps then completely modding the game.

I remember Notch saying in 2010 that he planned to add an official modding API, but it never actually happened.

---

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20100708183651/http://notch.tumb...

Most modders aren't reverse engineering the game. There's a small community that are doing the obfuscation and then everyone else is effectively working from normal Java code.

While I don't doubt that some mods are created by teens, just under half of Minecraft players are adults.

Yup very common to take a popular minecraft mod, insert malware, rehost it, and seo your way into getting downloads.

This is not the norm these days! There are popular mod loaders like curseforge that pulled from moderated repositories. It’s still not bulletproof, but a far cry from trusting some installer executable

> I am terrified by Minecraft mods always being distributed from dodgy download sites and not rarely come with their own Windows EXE installers.

That's not their main mean of distribution, most often those sites were just third parties unrelated to the mod authors that repackaged the mod and somehow got a better SEO. But TBF back in the days the UX/UI for installing mods was pretty terrible. Nowadays there are more standardized and moderated distribution websites from which you just download the .jar of the mod.

> And as far as I know there is no sandboxing at all in the game (uhm, no pun intended) so once installed the mod has full access to your computer?

This is totally true though.

As someone whose kid has pulled me into the world of using mods (though not (yet) making them for Java Edition) I think this PSA is worth sharing of how to use minecraft mods without pain and with minimal risk, in case anyone is getting started, or has gotten started and finds it frustrating:

1. Use MultiMC to manage instances with various mods, since mods are rarely compatible with each other, and since each version of a mod only is compatible with a single specific point release of the game itself.

Never download any EXE files to get a mod, that does sound sketch AF.

2. mods are always packaged for a particular Loader (some package for multiples and some require Forge, Fabric, or NeoForge), and MultiMC can install any of them into a given instance. Aside from different startup screens there seems to be no difference so idk why we need 3 different ones.

3. Curseforge's website and modrinth both seem to be legit places to get mods from. I personally find the installable Curseforge program itself to be bad and spammy, and would never use that, but the site still lets you directly download the jars you need, and lets you check "Dependencies" to find out what other mods you need.

Yeah mods are just regular Java .jars that can do anything. To circumvent this issue Mojang introduced datapacks but they are super limited in what they can do. They’re basically just Minecraft commands in a file along with some manifest files to change e.g. mob loot drop rates. These Minecraft commands are Turing complete but a huge PITA to work with directly, no concept of local variables or if statements, no network access, etc. Every entity in MC has associated NBT data that is similar to JSON that stores values like position, velocity, inventory, etc. You can change NBT with commands for mobs, but in what can only be described as a religious decision, Minecraft commands are unable to modify player NBT. So for example it is impossible to impart a velocity on a player.

One wonders why Mojang didn’t embed Lua or Python or something and instead hand-rolled an even shittier version of Bash. The only reason MC servers like Hypixel exist is because the community developed an API on top of the vanilla jar that makes plugin development easy. Even with that there is still no way for servers to run client-side code, severely limiting what you can do. They could’ve easily captured all of Roblox’s marketshare but just let that opportunity slip through their fingers. Through this and a series of other boneheaded decisions (huge breaking changes, changes to the base game, lack of optimization), they have seriously fractured their ecosystem:

- PvP is in 1.8 (a version from 2015) or sometimes even 1.7 (from 2013)

- Some technical Minecraft is latest, some is in 1.12 (from 2017)

- Adventure maps are latest version

- Casual players play Bedrock (an entirely different codebase!)

The words “stable API” have never been said in the Mojang offices. So the community made their own for different versions, servers use the Bukkit 1.8 API, client 1.8 mods use Forge, latest mods use Forge or Fabric. The deobfuscated names are of little utility because the old names are so well ingrained, and modders will also probably avoid them for legal reasons.

Yes, much like how most software for PC has been written since the beginning of time?

Agreed; modding obfuscated Java is impressive, but not quite on the level of modding in the (Nintendo) emulation community. The things that have been achieved with classic Nintendo titles are absurd, like adding high-performance online multiplayer to Super Smash Bro. Melee.

Tbh decompiling software and figuring out how it works isn’t easy but that is part of the fun :) - it’s the reason ive ended up following many of the weird paths in computing that I have

First time I have heard of object-oriented obfuscation.

I get it, but in general I don't get the OO hate.

It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.

Unfortunately, people often use crap examples for OO. The worst is probably employee, where employee and contractor are subtypes of worker, or some other chicanery like that.

Of course in the real world a person can be both employee and contractor at the same time, can flit between those roles and many others, can temporarily park a role (e.g sabbatical) and many other permutations, all while maintaining history and even allowing for corrections of said history.

It would be hard to find any domain less suited to OO that HR records. I think these terrible examples are a primary reason for some people believing that OO is useless or worse than useless.

indeed. with how good and cheap/free decompilers have gotten over the years my preferred way to read abstraction-happy c++ and rust code is to compile it with optimisations and debug symbols and then read the decompiler output.

It took me a while to find how to obtain the official mappings, but this article seems to have instructions: https://minescript.net/mappings

According to the article, official mappings can be found here: https://piston-meta.mojang.com/mc/game/version_manifest_v2.j...

Why do they obfuscate if they're just going to provide the mappings?

That's a level of dedication that I have never devoted to anything in my life.

That's energy that could change the world if harnessed correctly.

Given the Oracle v Google decision, the likely answer is yes. But then there’s a fair use argument to be made.

Your mod uses variable name FooBar in ways Microsoft don't like, Microsoft sues you for copyright

before the judge would have to admit it was just coincident.

They're playing Roblox and Fortnite these days, both free of course.