The Word of Notch

This blog was a joke for the 1st of April

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 17:43:00 -0400

Hi,

Just wanted to say to the people who believed in this story, or didn’t understand why I made this blog :

It was the April joke for my website, which is the biggest French website about the game : Minecraft.fr

It was really fun and a lot of people freaked out on my board :)

I hope the story I told will never happen and Mojang will continue their good work on the game (@Notch : I hope the modding API come out soon, and please make the multiplayer less buggy :D)

The end of Minecraft

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 20:03:00 -0400

As you saw on my last article, Sean Parker went to visit us at Mojang’s office yesterday and we had a great time ! Sean invited three of us along to fly to London with his private jet to go to a party. We spent a nice time at this party where we met a lot of interesting people. That was really awesome and I enjoyed it.

Back at the office, we talked with Sean about our company, and our main game : Minecraft.

After a really long discussion, we finally came to an agreement. I no longer own Mojang AB, and Sean is now the society’s chief executive officer and holds all the rights on the games we made, this include both Minecraft and Scrolls.

Apparently, he wants to stop minecraft developpement and focus more on Scrolls (our lastest game) to make money selling virtual cards.

I’m sorry for everyone who believed in our company and I’d like to thanks everyone who followed us in this adventure.

The weirdest night of my life!

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I feel like James Bond.
Or, rather, I feel like a geeky kid who just finished playing James Bond for a few hours and wants to tell all his friends about what happened.

Yesterday, a rather spontaneous rich guy dropped by the office to meet and greet, which was fairly awesome. We had a short meeting where everyone said what they did and what we thought about the future and so, and as he left, he invited three of us along to fly to London with his private jet to go to a party where a famous musician was playing. That was even more awesome.

I immediately said yes. Then I called my fiancee to make sure it was ok. ;)

We arrived at the party at about midnight, where there was a table reserved for us. There were rich people and various hang-arounds everywhere, but the mood was very relaxed and energetic. The music was brilliant, and the entertainment even more so. People got drunk, people smoked on balconies, and we ended up in a hotel suite eating white bread and some kind of peanut butter/gingerbread paste.

After catching some very brief sleep in our own hotel rooms (paid for by Mr Rich (thank you, sir! (I wonder if he’s reading my blog..))), we flew back to Stockholm just in time for a meeting with a potential new employee.

It’s amazing to realize that there are people who actually do this all the time, flying around in private jets, and having assistants who in turn have their own assistants.
As alluring as this lifestyle is, strangely I’m more excited about the fact that the oscilloscope I ordered last week finally arrived and is waiting for me back home.

Soo exciting, please vote for us!

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/global/tournaments/standings/5

Full steam ahead, captain!

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

Someone pointed out to me that most of my blog updates recently were about how I had no time to develop. I thought about it, and realized that I only feel like I have the time to blog when I’m being prevented from doing actual development. So I guess in one sense, the recent lull in updates can be seen as a good thing. ;) Hopefully it doesn’t mean I’ve grown tired of blogging..

I’ve been able to focus on development a lot the last couple of weeks, and we’re hoping to get the new update out soon. It will include the wolves, the ability to change your spawn point, and a rather ambitious statistics tracking and achievement system. Once that update is out, we’ll spend some time figuring out exactly what to do with the modding, which should result in a nice modding API.

Other cool news is that work has started on the mobile version of Minecraft, we landed a merchandise deal with J!NX (pardon the plug), the guys working on Scrolls decided to use Scrum with internal demos each Tuesday, the office renovations are almost complete, and 2 Player Productions reached their goal on kickstarter to make a full-length movie about Mojang! Amazingly, they’re the third highest funded project on kickstarter!

The state of Minecraft

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 06:36:00 -0400

There are manly men with powertools in our office, punching floors and walls in an attempt to make things look better. As a result, we haven’t been able to work from the office this week, and worked from home. Jens spent most of the week working on a new mob; the wolf! You can tame it and order it to follow you around, and it’ll work as a pet. They’re fairly rare, but they won’t despawn once you’ve tamed them.

I worked on the achievement and stats system. One design issue was dealing with offline mode and synching the achievements once you get a connection again, but that’s been solved. We’ve got a couple of people in the office who don’t like achievements in games at all, so the goal is to design something that they’re fine with.

Achievements will NOT be chores like “cut down 10000 trees”, but rather challenges like “ride a pig off a cliff”. Stats, however, will be used to keep track of how many trees you have cut down. The long term plan is to show achievements and stats from the profile page on minecraft.net as well, in case you want to brag.

Just keep in mind that because you can design your own levels and run your own servers, people will be able to cheat with achievements and stats! ;)

Oh, and here’s a vid of the wolves: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9Lp9p5yjuo

Warning: Some malicious client mods are stealing passwords

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

When you install a mod, the mods gets full access to your computer, and can do ANYTHING to it.
Make sure you absolutely trust the source before installing any such mods.This applies to both server mods and client mods.

I don’t know which mods are the culprits.

When the modding support is added, there will be support for sandboxing mods to give them less access to important stuff. You can chose to trust a mod if you want to, and if it needs to do fancy things, but the default will be to run the mod sandboxed.

I found my old Turbo Pascal projects! :D :D Screenshots!

Thu, 17 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0400

I found my old Turbo Pascal projects! :D :D Screenshots!

Terrain generation, Part 1

Wed, 09 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I’ve been promising to write a technical post on Minecraft for a while, but never really got around to doing so. I’m on a tiny airplane now, though, with nowhere to run, so here we go!

One of the most complex parts of Minecraft is the terrain generation. When I changed the game over from being just single zones of a map to an infinite map, the terrain generation got a whole lot more complicated, as terrain needs to get generated on the fly as the player explores, and it has to be the same no matter what direction the player approaches it from.

1) How infinite is it?

First of all, let me clarify some things about the “infinite” maps: They’re not infinite, but there’s no hard limit either. It’ll just get buggier and buggier the further out you are. Terrain is generated, saved and loaded, and (kind of) rendered in chunks of 16*16*128 blocks. These chunks have an offset value that is a 32 bit integer roughly in the range negative two billion to positive two billion. If you go outside that range (about 25% of the distance from where you are now to the sun), loading and saving chunks will start overwriting old chunks. At a 16/th of that distance, things that use integers for block positions, such as using items and pathfinding, will start overflowing and acting weird.

Those are the two “hard” limits.

Most other things, like the terrain generation seeds and entity locations use 64 bit doubles for locations, and they do much subtler things. For example, at extreme distances, the player may move slower than near the center of the world, due to rounding errors (the position has a huge mantissa, the movement delta has a tiny, so it gets cut off faster). The terrain generator can also start generating weird structures, such as huge blocks of solid material, but I haven’t seen this lately nor examined exactly what behavior causes it to happen. One major problem at long distances is that the physics starts bugging out, so the player can randomly fall into ground blocks or get stuck while walking along a wall.

Many of these problems can be solved by changing the math into a local model centered around the player so the numbers all have vaguely the same magnitude. For rendering, Minecraft already uses local coordinates within the block and offset the block position relative to the player to give the impression of the player moving. This is mostly due to OpengGL using 32 bit floats for positions, but also because the rounding errors are extremely visible when displayed on a screen.

We’re probably not going to fix these bugs until it becomes common for players to experience them while playing legitimately. My gut feeling is that nobody ever has so far, and nobody will. Walking that far will take a very long time. Besides, the bugs add mystery and charisma to the Far Lands.

2) Isn’t that terrain shape pretty awesome?

In the very earliest version of Minecraft, I used a 2D Perlin noise heightmap to set the shape of the world. Or, rather, I used quite a few of them. One for overall elevation, one for terrain roughness, and one for local detail. For each column of blocks, the height was (elevation + (roughness*detail))*64+64. Both elevation and roughness were smooth, large scale noises, and detail was a more intricate one. This method had the great advantage of being very fast as there’s just 16*16*(noiseNum) samples per chunk to generate, but the disadvantage of being rather dull. Specifically, there’s no way for this method to generate any overhangs.

So I switched the system over into a similar system based off 3D Perlin noise. Instead of sampling the “ground height”, I treated the noise value as the “density”, where anything lower than 0 would be air, and anything higher than or equal to 0 would be ground. To make sure the bottom layer is solid and the top isn’t, I just add the height (offset by the water level) to the sampled result.

Unfortunately, I immediately ran into both performance issues and playability issues. Performance issues because of the huge amount of sampling needed to be done, and playability issues because there were no flat areas or smooth hills. The solution to both problems turned out to be just sampling at a lower resolution (scaled 8x along the horizontals, 4x along the vertical) and doing a linear interpolation. Suddenly, the game had flat areas, smooth hills, and also most single floating blocks were gone.

The exact formula I use is a bit involved (and secret!), but it evolved slowly over time as I worked on the game. It still uses the 2D elevation and noisyness maps, though.

STILL TO COME, ON TERRAIN GENERATION:

Biomes!
Caves and Large Features
Trees, Lakes, and Small Features
The nether!

Now I’ll prepare for landing so I can switch flights!

Minecraft - Volume Alpha by C418

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

C418 makes music for Minecraft. He has released an OST of sorts on bandcamp. All the music from Minecraft (including a few unreleased tracks) are on there, in high quality.

Go buy Minecraft - Volume Alpha now! (or listen to it for free)

Everything you pay there goes directly to C418, so that’s a great way to show him you enjoy his music!

Five

Thu, 03 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Wow. We won five awards.

In the IGF, we won the Audience Award and the Grand Prize.
In the GDCA, we won awards for best Debut, Downloadable and Innovation.

I got to shake Anthony Carboni’s hand two times, Tim Schafer’s hand three times, and hold five short nervous speeches, rambling about indie games and being thankful.

Halfway through GDC, here’s what we’ve done

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

We stepped on the plane to New York, and the Minecraft server died. While flying from New York to San Francisco, Tobias managed to get the servers back online via the amazing wonder of in-flight WIFI. I was afraid this would set the tone for the trip, but so far it’s been an amazing success.

Sunday was mostly relaxation and shopping (I found a great new coat, but it’s a bit too warm for SF), and it ended with a company dinner. We invited the Oxeye guys over as well, and it turned out really good. I had the biggest steak I’ve ever had, and also had room over to steal some of Jakob’s food.

Monday morning, I met one of my idols for breakfast, and kinda promised him I’d add pet dogs to Minecraft, so I guess that’s happening. Then we went to Google, did an interview or two, then went to dinner with a huge gaming company. I kept getting sleepier throughout, so I’m not sure how great of an impression I did. It could play into the whole “indie” thing though to seem uninterested. ;)

Today, we started with a meeting with Curse, the guys running the forums and the wiki these days, and we’ve got plans to work more closely together in the future. I think they’re doing really great things for the community. After a somewhat rushed but excellent lunch, Jakob and I did an interview with PC Gamer, I did a filmed thing for Eurogamer with Chris Hecker.

Then the scariest thing in a long time happened. I went on stage. I talked for three minutes about piracy, mumbled something about “That was quick”, and left the stage. I was scheduled to do a five minute talk, but only managed to fill 60% of it.. People tell me it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was.. but they’re probably just being polite.

Then I molested Danny B (the guy who made the Super Meat Boy music) for a bit before grabbing a quick dinner and ending up at the craziest party ever where I met a bunch of important and famous people.

Tomorrow is more meetings, and then the big award ceremony is. We’re nominated in a total of six categories across both the IGF and the GDCA.

I’m nervous.

Ah, I forgot!

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0500

We also announced our new game today! There’s not much info yet, but we’ll be getting an alpha version out as soon as we can!

Scrolls!

I figure most people reading this blog cares mostly about Minecraft development, so let me just say that I won’t be involved in the day to day development of Scrolls. Jakob, one of the guys I started Mojang with, is developing it, and has been since we started the company.

Still, I hope many of you will check it out once we’ve got some more stuff to show!

I’m sorry about the downtime

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

I don’t know what happened exactly, as I’m currently on a fight and seated far away from the other guys. But it seems that as soon as the entire company sat down on a cross Atlantic flight, the minecraft.net servers went down. This is frustrating.

We are working on improving server stability and uptime.

Minecraft Beta 1.3

Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
* Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button
* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
* Added three new half-size blocks
* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
* Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter “whitelist <cmd>” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add <player>”, “remove <player>”, “list” or “reload”
* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
* Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

2 Player Productions wants to make a documentary about us, kickstarting it

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

2 Player Productions wants to make a documentary about us, kickstarting it

Server downtime, and a new Launcher

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Minecraft.net is suffering some difficulties at the moment, with the database getting overloaded. We’re working hard on fixing the problem.

In the meantime, I’ve uploaded the new game launcher, which you can download from here once the servers are back up and running.

The biggest updates in there are that it shows the latest update news, logs in over https, it asks if you want to update or keep playing on the current installed version, only downloads modified files.

Our office is cold during the winter

Sun, 20 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Seriously. The radiators are tiny, and the rooms are huge. I think the landlord turns down the heat during the weekends as well.. I stopped by yesterday to get some bonus work done in between the two trips (I was in Mexico one week ago, and we’re going to GDC in one week followed by a short stop in Vegas).
Most of the work I got done last week was with the new launcher, and it’s almost done now! Here’s a mostly complete summary of the changes:

* Newly designed window looks slightly prettier, and also has a nice big space to load an HTML page showing the updates in the latest patch
* If there’s a new update, the launcher asks if you wish to update. You can choose between “Not yet” and “Yes”.
* The launcher only downloads modified files
* Logging in is done over https, preventing sniffing (we even double check the certificate)
* Downloaded files are checksummed, making sure the correct file was received
* You can force a full re-download of all game files in case you suspect your local files are corrupt
* There’s a handy link to go directly to the game install folder

We have a couple of bugs left to fix, and we’re going to try adding the ability to choose what dir to save/load levels from. Playing against your dropbox dir might be fun. Once all that is done, it’ll get released!

While I was away, Jens’s been working on 1.3, which we’re aiming at releasing sometime early/mid-week next week. I’ve forgotten all the new stuff in there (it’s sunday, ok?), but my favorite two are the redstone delay/repeater blocks and the beds. We’re hoping to be able to make the beds feature complete before GDC, but it’s more important to get the 1.3 update out, so some of the functionality might be missing for a week or two.

In other news, all the lights are on here. I tried playing Amnesia, but it turns out I’m a coward. If you’re reading this, Frictional; AMAZING JOB! I’ve never been this scared in a game, ever.

Video

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Video

Thu, 17 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0500