Implementing a minecraft classic server is hard enough, but on modern versions? There are so many packets you need to handle, it’s amazing you were able to get it to a working state.
When I think about all the geniuses that work for free to make minecraft great, from hackers like this, to modders, to the people who build fantastic machines and worlds in game, to all those that host and curate great communities, I often wonder what it would take to get them to all migrate to another game. Even if it were just a 1-1 clone of minecraft.
Minecraft is badly implemented an inefficient, there are numerous mods and hacks that optimise parts of the code. It runs badly on linux if at all. Mojang had a reputation for breaking things for modders and not improving the things that modders need to make things work. I am not sure if Microsoft have improved in that regard as I no longer follow the situation, but I would be surprised. The biggest reason however is that a private corporation is making boatloads of cash off all this free work, and the fans of the people doing the work are paying for it, without all those that really make the game great getting any recognition or recompense.
Open source minecraft clones exist, I don’t know if they are any good, but at this time it does not appear that there has been any major migration away from proprietary minecraft. So what would it take? Is anyone still involved in the community able to shed light on this?
What would the modders gain from switching to a clone though? Unless it was API (AMI?) compatible and had all the features that Minecraft already has I don’t see people making the switch. As you said it is the mods and the custom servers that make Minecraft fun to play, and for how better optimized and more hackable an open source clone might be, it would take a lot of effort to make the switch appealing to the community.
Furthermore, this wouldn’t directly tackle the problem of the modders getting paid for their work; it’s one thing to say that there shouldn’t be a corporation making money off of a modding community as big as Minecraft and another to actually get modders paid for their thankless work. A lot of modders (try to) get funding independently via platforms like Patreon. I don’t think think there’s any game that has a system for getting modders paid for their work somewhat integrated into it that’s worth following. You could look at Roblox for something that kinda works, but as some recent investigations have shown it’s still a terrible system that preys on children and only lets the corporation backing it and a few of the most successful modders reap any of its benefits.
It’s not like Mojang/Microsoft have abandoned the game either; it’s still getting major updates, so obviously people would want to play the version that has the new blocks and animals and improved cave generation systems, so any implementer of an open source clone would constantly be playing catch-up with the original version. I could see it happening if Mojang abandoned the Java version, but not otherwise.
(As for the community insight, I do occasionally play Minecraft with friends but I’m not involved in the community further than that.)
Short term: Ownership of the code (community not individual), the ability for their users to use their product for free, better optimised code, the ability to define the API, cross platform support, no proprietary copyright, an end to surprise breaking change, escape from user and modder domestication
Longer term: A much more mod friendly API, systems for dealing with compatibility issues and conflicts, many other technical advantages.
(Disclaimer: The information in the following paragraph is based on an assumption that things haven’t improved things recently, I do not have up to date information) Microsoft releases updates, but much as Mojang did in the past they waste a lot of effort on content updates for vanilla players as those are a huge part of the customer base. They will add something like a new animal, despite that animal being available in a mod for years, a mod which also contains dozens of other animals. They rarely if ever release improvements for modders. They often make changes to the api which require modders to scramble to fix things. They do fix bugs which is welcome, but often bugs that affect modders are ignored in favour, again, of vanilla players.
Lastly, it is not about modders getting paid. Modders work fro free, they understand this when they start out and accept it. It is a labour of love. The issue is that Microsoft profits from their work. Microsoft’s only real contribution to that work is buying the IP (and the community). The minecraft modding community is vast, prolific and talented, they could upgrade a random independant project to feature parity with vanilla minecraft in a matter of days if they all migrated together.
Edit: I felt uncomfortable speaking for a community I am not really active in, so I went to the modders discord and put this to them. It appears a lot is wrong in what I have said. The main disagreements were that Mojang was never as bad as I implied, that Microsoft is making a lot of welcome improvements to the codebase, and that some modders do in fact get paid. In general people seem pretty happy with the current state of affairs and have little interest in migration.
At first people were very defensive, but after some discussion some shortcomings of the current situation were admitted to. There are issues with the modloaders and server plugin frameworks fragmenting (these are not officially supported and purely built by modders), issues with some features being hardcoded in a mod-unfriendly way, some resistance to implementing fixes and improvements requested by the community, and also some technical problems that went way over my head. They also played down the value of modders to the minecraft community at large. I am not sure I agree on this last point, there may be a sense of false modesty here.
Regardless, please take my uninformed views with a large pinch of salt.
Thanks a lot for reaching out to the mod community and requesting their views, I don’t play Minecraft but the interaction between big companies and people how do work for them for “love” has always interested me.
Witchcraft is technically a multi-threaded server!
There is no control over threads in Bash, so is it in fact sub-shells and multi-processes? It would be interesting to see how the inter-process communication is actually implemented and what kind of locks it uses.
I’m not here to kinkshame, but goddamn.
Seriously, this is some impressive hackery.
That’s terrible and amazing.
Next challenge: how to execute an RCE in the server entirely through the Minecraft GUI…
My god, this is impressive.
If anybody else is interested in writing Minecraft tools, there is a community wiki for reverse-engineering Minecraft.
Implementing a minecraft classic server is hard enough, but on modern versions? There are so many packets you need to handle, it’s amazing you were able to get it to a working state.
This endeavour redefines the term ‘masochism’.
When I think about all the geniuses that work for free to make minecraft great, from hackers like this, to modders, to the people who build fantastic machines and worlds in game, to all those that host and curate great communities, I often wonder what it would take to get them to all migrate to another game. Even if it were just a 1-1 clone of minecraft.
Minecraft is badly implemented an inefficient, there are numerous mods and hacks that optimise parts of the code. It runs badly on linux if at all. Mojang had a reputation for breaking things for modders and not improving the things that modders need to make things work. I am not sure if Microsoft have improved in that regard as I no longer follow the situation, but I would be surprised. The biggest reason however is that a private corporation is making boatloads of cash off all this free work, and the fans of the people doing the work are paying for it, without all those that really make the game great getting any recognition or recompense.
Open source minecraft clones exist, I don’t know if they are any good, but at this time it does not appear that there has been any major migration away from proprietary minecraft. So what would it take? Is anyone still involved in the community able to shed light on this?
What would the modders gain from switching to a clone though? Unless it was API (AMI?) compatible and had all the features that Minecraft already has I don’t see people making the switch. As you said it is the mods and the custom servers that make Minecraft fun to play, and for how better optimized and more hackable an open source clone might be, it would take a lot of effort to make the switch appealing to the community.
Furthermore, this wouldn’t directly tackle the problem of the modders getting paid for their work; it’s one thing to say that there shouldn’t be a corporation making money off of a modding community as big as Minecraft and another to actually get modders paid for their thankless work. A lot of modders (try to) get funding independently via platforms like Patreon. I don’t think think there’s any game that has a system for getting modders paid for their work somewhat integrated into it that’s worth following. You could look at Roblox for something that kinda works, but as some recent investigations have shown it’s still a terrible system that preys on children and only lets the corporation backing it and a few of the most successful modders reap any of its benefits.
It’s not like Mojang/Microsoft have abandoned the game either; it’s still getting major updates, so obviously people would want to play the version that has the new blocks and animals and improved cave generation systems, so any implementer of an open source clone would constantly be playing catch-up with the original version. I could see it happening if Mojang abandoned the Java version, but not otherwise.
(As for the community insight, I do occasionally play Minecraft with friends but I’m not involved in the community further than that.)
Short term: Ownership of the code (community not individual), the ability for their users to use their product for free, better optimised code, the ability to define the API, cross platform support, no proprietary copyright, an end to surprise breaking change, escape from user and modder domestication
Longer term: A much more mod friendly API, systems for dealing with compatibility issues and conflicts, many other technical advantages.
(Disclaimer: The information in the following paragraph is based on an assumption that things haven’t improved things recently, I do not have up to date information) Microsoft releases updates, but much as Mojang did in the past they waste a lot of effort on content updates for vanilla players as those are a huge part of the customer base. They will add something like a new animal, despite that animal being available in a mod for years, a mod which also contains dozens of other animals. They rarely if ever release improvements for modders. They often make changes to the api which require modders to scramble to fix things. They do fix bugs which is welcome, but often bugs that affect modders are ignored in favour, again, of vanilla players.
Lastly, it is not about modders getting paid. Modders work fro free, they understand this when they start out and accept it. It is a labour of love. The issue is that Microsoft profits from their work. Microsoft’s only real contribution to that work is buying the IP (and the community). The minecraft modding community is vast, prolific and talented, they could upgrade a random independant project to feature parity with vanilla minecraft in a matter of days if they all migrated together.
Edit: I felt uncomfortable speaking for a community I am not really active in, so I went to the modders discord and put this to them. It appears a lot is wrong in what I have said. The main disagreements were that Mojang was never as bad as I implied, that Microsoft is making a lot of welcome improvements to the codebase, and that some modders do in fact get paid. In general people seem pretty happy with the current state of affairs and have little interest in migration.
At first people were very defensive, but after some discussion some shortcomings of the current situation were admitted to. There are issues with the modloaders and server plugin frameworks fragmenting (these are not officially supported and purely built by modders), issues with some features being hardcoded in a mod-unfriendly way, some resistance to implementing fixes and improvements requested by the community, and also some technical problems that went way over my head. They also played down the value of modders to the minecraft community at large. I am not sure I agree on this last point, there may be a sense of false modesty here.
Regardless, please take my uninformed views with a large pinch of salt.
Thanks a lot for reaching out to the mod community and requesting their views, I don’t play Minecraft but the interaction between big companies and people how do work for them for “love” has always interested me.
the “(in Bash)” part is realy hackery.
There is no control over threads in Bash, so is it in fact sub-shells and multi-processes? It would be interesting to see how the inter-process communication is actually implemented and what kind of locks it uses.