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Comment by nostromo | Hacker News Reader

It’s frustrating how Minecraft’s potential hasn’t been realized under Microsoft.

The game has such huge potential and tremendous goodwill, and it’s been so stagnant since the acquisition.

I don't know. They've added a ton of underwater content, new structures, mobs (bees, foxes, llamas, phantoms, drowns, etc), sunken ships and treasure maps.

If anything, they've had a better release cycle since the acquisition.

What the game really needs is what was promised ages ago: a mod API on the C++ edition.

Minecraft is for selling Xbox's and Windows 10. If they wanted modding they would have modding.

It’s more a matter of doing what they promised, which is also a highly requested thing. There’s a middle manager somewhere who is being told they need to never officially support modding so they can continue to sell valueless items to children.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/64vrom/psa_c_edi...

You're a bit behind. That API has been out for almost a year now:

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/scripting-api-now-pu...

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Bedrock_Edition_beta_scripti...

You’re right I hadn’t seen this. It’s pretty fresh and I’ve been off minecraft for a few years.

It’s neat, but even by previous FAQ response standards it’s horribly weak. It appears like little more than an ability to make scripts of existing vanilla commands. You can’t make/register blocks, fluids, modify terrain gen, or even trigger individual events. As a framework it isn’t useful for content creators.

And a linux version of the C++ version.

Bedrock sever is available for Linux. No client yet, although there is a hacky launcher which runs the android binary on Linux and works alright.

Yea let's actually make the C++ edition playable first. Have you noticed how the cursor acceleration is actually like a joystick? I play on a computer for a reason, I don't want console nonsense creeping on me. Same goes for the whole UI. Also no linux version.

When it takes 30 minutes to load your mod pack and even with a RAM disk and a healthy number of fast cores on a dedicated server you're still dipping below 20 fps on some occasions, it's time for a leaner edition than java. I'm not even saying java is inherently the problem, but the java edition of minecraft is not performant and the bedrock edition is.

As I remember from setting up a server way, way back is you want to give that JVM as much memory as you can trow at it.

Better hope you pick the right arcane garbage collection strategy!

Latency minimal GC is the right choice for game servers. The most available one is G1, though others like Shenandoah and ZGC are on the way

I played with a few of them. A server I used to run had a leaky mod that would, when a base was large, leak so much that the GC would hit twice a minute with a 5 second stall. It didn’t matter what GC was used. I never found a solution.

I’ve done testing and at some point more memory just changes how long/large the GC cycles are. More memory can cause larger hiccups when mods are leaking memory.

I haven't hosted modded servers in many years but a while ago the advice was to avoid (4, 8] GB (might have been 6.5 instead of 8, I don't remember, but the point is there's a dead zone) because of something weird with the garbage collection. I think it had to switch to 64-bit pointers or something. Anyway the worse garbage collection outweighed the memory advantage. I personally never hosted with more than 4gb.

IIRC more memory also increases GC time so after a certain point the GC causes such annoying lagspikes it's often better to play with less.

I understand the interest in some of the larger modpacks, but I try to stay as close to vanilla as possible and to me, if it takes more than a minute to start a server, you've got too many mods loaded.

Additionally, the server isn't multithreaded. It benefits always from having the fastest clocked CPU you can throw at it.

Client performance can be greatly improved by using Optifine.

I would love to have a more-well-built version (as I think the core of Bedrock is), but Mojang has taken some weird steps where things like redstone mechanics are severely limited compared to the Java edition... and they have no intention on fixing it. Now you've got these weird minor differences that will never merge and you'll never get those players to switch versions.

You don't get it, most people don't want to mod with c++. Java is more popular, runs everywhere quite easily, and isn't as hard to understand. Imagine an 12 year old trying to mod with this language, they'd be spending more time figuring out how it works than coding a mod.

Scripting for Bedrock is in beta!

the new structures and content that reward exploration are great! the new mobs, not so much. they don't have a purpose in game that wasn't fulfilled already, and while I appreciate the diversity they give not something new to do, just more of the same. what'd be interesting are additions that open up new things to do, like that parcour level demo that show off the new wax block, but tbh wax and bees scale seems off compared with the rest of the game.

they really don't seem to want to explore too much. so what if they added a block that allowed automating things? what would be having a sky dimension accessible with the elyra wings? that would give new purpose to existing content without altering the game too much. what if furnaces and other production structures added taint to the biome, making it more and more polluted and unfriendly to live in? so many possibilities! luckily there's plenty mods out there, but a well balanced execution would make it so much better.

> what would be having a sky dimension accessible with the elytra wings?

This is something that definitely needs to be added at some point. One problem I would see is that there is already a very good mod that does that. In a sense they are between a rock and an hard place in trying to both copy and not copy it.

From what I understand, a lot of that is due to a combination of factors from bugs and spaghetti code from prior to purchase, to the necessity to not change too much too quickly, which might cause a community uproar, to simply just trying to recoup the cost of the IP purchase in the first place by developing projects around the IP, which the main game (java edition) doesn't see any progress from.

Much of the popularity of the game has a lot to do with the modding community as well, which is where you go when simply building in the vanilla game is no longer interesting. Any change to the vanilla game can have major ripple effects on the modding community.

Lastly, I'd say that one huge development they recently fixed in the code base was the block ID limit. Now that the ID system is name based rather than number based with a hard coded limit, the number of blocks that can be added to the game isn't limited by anything other than the direction of the creative team and new mechanics.

How so? They've been releasing updates at a pretty good clip each with significant changes.

Everyone is arguing with you but I 100% agree. Official mod support is all I want. And it isn't happening.

Hmm, there's been an awful lot done with Data Packs.

Didn't they unify everything so all the different clients (desktop, mobile etc) can log into the same worlds? That would have been a hell of a lot of work.

No, not really. There's a "Windows" version for Windows-based desktops that can co-mingle with the other C++ versions, but the main version of the game is still based on Java, with the features being ported to the various console versions shortly after. The Java version remains the only way to play Minecraft on Mac and Linux, for example, and it's also where pretty much the entire modding scene lives.

It's a little complicated from the outside looking in, since the base game is very similar on the surface, but there are major technical differences between the platforms that would make true cross-platform very difficult.

EDIT: The Minecraft Wiki has an excellent overview of all the various platforms. Check out the sidebar on the right for a breakdown. Generally, the "Bedrock" edition is what's on most consoles that are still being supported, and I ... think it has cross-platform multiplayer support? I play on PC so I am not super familiar with the details on console.

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki

There are two main versions of Minecraft.

Minecraft (formerly known as bedrock) which is the C++ edition and runs and plays across Windows 10, Android, iOS, and Xbox.

Minecraft Java Edition (formerly known as minecraft) which as the name implies runs on Java and can play between Windows, MacOS, and Linux.

Feature sets of the game are VERY close now (and get closer each release) with the major difference between them now mainly being in how redstone works. Java has redstone bugs that have since become so relied on they are considered features, the C++ version doesn't have them. Someone picking up minecraft for the very first time wouldn't feel they were missing anything using C++ version.

> Minecraft (formerly known as bedrock) which is the C++ edition and runs and plays across Windows 10, Android, iOS, and Xbox.

Switch too. There are rumors that the Playstation 4 will receive a version based on Bedrock as well, but it's not confirmed.

Another important thing to mention about bedrock redstone is that it is non-deterministic while Java's redstone for all its bugs is 100% reliable.

If iOS now works with the java edition I'd consider that a major achievement

Does minecraft earth and the countless updates not count?

They are mostly working on Minecraft 2 which will be a massive multiplayer world.

Stagnant? I don't think you play or know the game at all.

Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and sticking to them when posting here? Personal attacks aren't ok on HN. But more interesting is: "Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." If you know more than another commenter, the best way to express that is to share some of what you know, so we all can learn.

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