Minecraft Monday – 12/06/10

Another week goes by, another sea of multiplayer fixes flood our way. Since last week, Notch (as stated in his blog) has made the following fixes:

11/30/10

Bug fix #3

* Swords and other weapons now deal damage properly
* Added proper hurt animations and sounds to mobs and players
* Fixed dead players logging in as invisible ghosts
* Made arrows visible and deal damage
* Hoes now produce proper seeds
* Creepers make noises and animate before exploding
* Explosions animate properly
* No more infinite free arrows
* Server logging now appends to server.log rather than overwriting it
* Buttons and levers (and a few other blocks probably, it’s a general solution) animate properly
* Fixed minecarts (and pigs!) moving twice as fast as they should when ridden.
* The join server screen now remembers the last entered ip
* Increased chunk saving frequency on the server
* Leaving sneak mode no longer triggers a million sounds
* You can now see sneaking players
* Names of sneaking players aren’t visible through walls, and are visible a much shorter distance
* Snowballs!!

12/01/10

Bug fix #4

*Fixed a rather bad memory leak bug in the server (entity position updates accumulated in orphaned player objects)
* Riding carts and boats now works properly when you travel long distances.
* Harvesting crops no longer yields fake seeds
* Removed /home (sorry!)
* Snowballs again!

12/03/10

Bug fix #5

• Added /kill command. Does 1000 points damage to the player
  * Did some patching client side to prevent duplicated entities
  * The join server page now remembers the port as well as the ip
  * Fixed a bug where joining a server on a specific port caused the client to forget all keybindings
  * Added lakes and rare lava pools, both on the surface and randomly in caves.
  * Fixed a crash bug when destroying the vehicle from under a player
  * Players connecting to a server or respawning are invulnerable for three seconds

He also mentions on his blog their intentions to replace the video on the home page with a user made entry, as well as a tutorial video on the help page. But why waste precious time typing when I could just copy and paste:

We’re looking for one video for the front page that sets the mood of the game and sells it well without being too cheesy, and for one tutorial type video on some help page somewhere. We have some requirements:

* No custom texture packs, it should show off the “raw” game
* No video effects like bloom or blur
* No copyright protected music
* You’ll have to tell us that we can use your video

So if you have anything good, or if you want to make anything new, please email us ([email protected] and/or [email protected]), and we’ll select a few nice ones and possibly rotate them every now and then to keep the page fresh.

Right now I’m rooting for the following video, from Vareide, for the homepage:

His work so far has been consistently fantastic, but it’s early days, so something else could pop up out of the works.

On the tutorial side, I’d have to recommend Paul Soares Jr again. His tutorials are done in almost a “Let’s Play” style, so you can watch his world grow as he teaches you the basics.

So far, so samey. Regular readers may notice that I’ve already talked about these two guys before (for good reason.)

So how about something new?

Ladies and Gentlemen- Minecraft Chick.

“The Misadventures of MinecraftChick” has a very simple premise: a girl, not only new to Minecraft, but gaming in general, decided to start a series of videos following her journey from complete “n00b” to “1337Queen” of the Minecraft world. Someday.

So far, we’ve seen her learn to chop wood, attempt to place a work bench, kill innocent spiders and generally die. A lot.

These “Bambi learns to walk” style of videos are really compelling to watch for some reason; I think it’s because it reminds you of your first few nights on Minecraft, and the journeys we’ve all had. It also highlighted how Minecraft has a much steeper learning-curve than we all give it credit for.

Also, it’s pretty amusing to still see her occasionally look down at the keyboard before moving forward.

My final finding of the week was the Minecraft Museum.

I think this a great idea:

Purely for fun, I thought it’d be nice to try and keep track of some of the more interesting pictures of Minecraft in its early days so that people could look back and go “Wow, it used to look like that?”. This website is what I’ve ended up creating to solve the problem.

Essentially, anyone can create an account and upload images to the site, helping to document the progression of the game. Since the game is still in early development (although rapidly approaching beta) I can see it becoming more interesting as the months tick by. Watch this space.

Remember, don’t forget to check out our forums and share your stories and creations!

–Biznitch