He did another huge interview for Reddit.
Hi!
1. Zifnabxar asks- Any advice for aspiring indie game makers?Yes, I have several. The best one would probably be "don't listen to advice". One thing indie game developers really can do is to go their own way and try to define their own product. I've got some more practical advice, though, such as make sure to actually finish a smaller product before you get started on a larger one. For this, I find joining in on game development competitions can help a lot. For example, by doing the 48 hour game development competition Ludum Dare, you can learn a lot about how long it actually takes to develop a game, and what you need to focus on to actually get something playable done. Other than that, just make a game you'd want to play yourself, and you'll know you've got at least SOME people that are interested in your game. The internet is huge.
2. DrBulldogPhd inquired on your thoughts on Manic Digger and Cubelands, do you support these projects or are you enraged at them?Politically, I strongly believe that people should be allowed to be inspired by good ideas and make their own version of it. That's how ideas spread and get improved, and it's gotten us really far as a civilization. Besides, if that wasn't allowed, we'd never seen BioShock or Braid or Civilization 5 or any of the other hundreds of great games that take existing games or ideas and perfect them. With Manic Digger, I was a bit surprised to see exactly how close it was to Minecraft, with the same player models and skin format, and even the ability to connect to the same servers. To me, that crosses a line. There's absolutely room for more games, but effort should be spent on differentiating, not on converging.
3. ItsOppositeDayHere and many others were curious what your plans were with your sudden influx of cash.First up, we're hiring some people, getting an office, and buying nice computers to work on. Personally, I'm looking into buying an apartment in Stockholm, and then there's the wedding next year which is starting to look like it might be pretty expensive. If there's still money left after all this, I honestly don't know what I'll do with it. Perhaps finally afford to pick up Magic the Gathering again..
4. Shock-value asks- How do you like Java as a language? In what ways is it a positive and in what ways is it a negative compared to a lower level language like C/C++, especially as related to the development of Minecraft? Alphakamp asked a wonderful followup question- Do you think you will stay with java or will you ever restructure the code base with a different language?I love java! I'm a bit worried now that Oracle owns it, and they haven't exactly shown any great interest in the client side of it. Sun used to speak to me all the time, even way back when me and Rolf made Wurm Online, but Oracle hasn't said a word to any game developer as far as I've seen. The biggest technical advantages with java is that the development speed is extremely fast with almost no compilation times and an excellent code hot-swapping in debug mode. The disadvantages is a slightly lower speed than C/C++, and less than perfect support for OpenGL. The LWJGL guys have done a great job with the binding, but java still suffers from rather large per-call overhead in JNI. Or in English; OpenGL calls are slow in java.
5. Up2Eleven asks- When will you have the ability to accept credit cards directly on your site, or at least have an alternative to Paypal?I don't know exactly when! We've spoken to the bank and to a payment provider, but we need to finish up registering the new company, setting up a bank account, and actually implementing the solution. We'll keep PayPal as an alternative, and there might even be some other ways to buy the game in the not too distant future.
6. ToggleOff was curious what your ultimate direction for Minecraft is, Survival Single Player and and Multiplayer. Sombersunday had a follow up- Is it different then your original goal for MineCraft?The game seems to be staying somewhat close to the original vision. I'm going to spend time making single player and multiplayer even more integrated, to the point of you being able to invite friends directly into your single player game. I'm also most likely going to add some kind of narrative to the game so that the player has an actual goal. It might not be easy to accomplish this goal, but at least it will add some sense of direction. One aspect that's kind of evolved over the time, and still isn't in place, is the idea of competitive multiplayer with game modes like Capture The Flag or Team Furnace. These will appear when I add the modding support sometime during beta. I will implement one or two game modes as open source reference implementations, then we might possibly approach mod makers to include their mods into the official game.
7. Damnyoureyes asks- Any plans for more minerals?Yes, if we can figure out what they should do. Redstone is a great example of a new mineral with a new purpose, even if the new ones don't need to be as complicated in any way.
8. Darchinst asks- How many items do you see yourself making available for us to craft in the end?I'm not sure! At the moment, there's about 90 items and 75 blocks in the game. If I had to guess, I'd say the numbers would at least double, but it really depends on what tools and items are required in the game. New items don't need to be useful, though. I wouldn't mind having more decorative items that you can create, and perhaps craftable shelves so you can show off your possessions without worrying about them vanishing after five minutes.
9. Many Redditors have theorized on possible gears, steam power, etc... even so far as creating an animated example of what it may look like http://mine.freelanzer.com/machine.gif That in mind Searin asks- Is there a possible future for more mechanical devices?That gif is one of the coolest concepts I've ever seen for Minecraft. I doubt the gears and so from it will make it into the game, but I really like the idea of larger structures like windmills. The reason I'm resistant to add that is that it's a bit of a huge change, it overlaps a bit too much with redstone, and I want to try to push the game towards beta now. But we might revisit it in the future once there's more than just one programmer.
10. Coestar wrote- What is the ETA of the beta? Alternatively, what achievements feature-wise would you consider the turning point for moving from alpha to beta?I don't dare mentioning an ETA.. Some people have a tendency of ignoring the E in ETA, and get really upset when I miss it. Once survival mode multiplayer works as well as singleplayer, the game will enter beta. During beta, we'll still add new features, but the focus will be on optimizing, balancing and tweaking the game.
11. Ahawks This may be "confidential" information, but I have to ask: As a developer, I am amazed at the amazing world that's created dynamically. Towering mountains, twisting caves opening up to caverns, islands, precious ores sprinkled throughout, etc. Notch, could you explain at a high level how the world generation algorithm does this?I'm not sure how to explain it without getting technical.. The complicated high level technical version is: First I generate a linearly interpolated 3d perlin noise offset along the y axis. I fill that in so that everything except the top x blocks is stone, then I do a second pass to add features like grass, trees, gravel, sand, caves and flowers. The world is generated in chunks of 16x16x128 blocks, based of pseudorandom seeds that are a mix of the level base seed and the chunk location in the world. This ensures that you always get the same terrain in an area regardless of what direction you traveled there from.
12. Guest101010 wrote- Could you please reveal to /r/minecraft a feature that you haven't yet publicly disclosed? Even a hint would suffice.I can't really think of one I haven't talked or hinted about in the past.. Well, I'm considering possibly adding square rainbows. Not a great secret, but.. well. There you go!
13. DaGreatOvechkin inquired what we as a community can do to help you in the development of Minecraft?Because the game has grown so much lately, the support is really bogging us down, so we'd like to set up some kind of public support / issue / bug / suggestion tracker thing. It would be really awesome if the community would be willing to help manage that, sorting out duplicates and replying to threads. Once we get started on actually improving the website, we'd also like to know more about what kinds of community features you'd like it to have. Other than that, just keep talking about the game.
14. Shamecamel asks- Is there something you've wanted to do/add/include/etc just to mess with all the minecraft players? And I had a followup if you'll indulge me- Is there something you wanted to include but have given up on for whatever reason?I've done so before in the past! Like when players wanted me to add the ability to ride pigs, I did! But they forgot to specify that they wanted to be able to control the pig. As long as it's harmless fun and adds some uniqueness to the game, I can definitely see myself adding more things like that. As for features I've given up on, I'd say water and large monsters. Water as it is now kind of works, but it's far from perfect. Making it behave nice and run fast is starting to seem like an almost impossible problem. I've done some experiments with large monsters, but the current monster physics just don't play well with it. You can currently see it in the game if you find a large slime monster and try to attack it or move into it from diagonal angles. I need to figure out how to solve this, as I want to eventually add megabeasts.
15. In addition to some wonderful questions the thread attracted a large number of suggestions. As they are not exactly questions I'll just include some of the more popular ones here for you to peruse and comment on as you see fit.
* Gargleblast Will I be able to move my spawn point?Not sure! There are some interesting economics that arise from not being able to move it easily. For example, teleporters would become terribly valuable, and death becomes more and more costly the further out you are.
* Jesuswithoutabeard I am wondering if infdev will one day really be infinite [vertically as well as horizontally].It will never be truly infinite. For the horizontal plane, it's much larger than anyone would ever need (PLEASE prove me wrong, that would be awesome!). On the vertical, there's a whole host of issues that more or less force it to be limited in size, mostly related to lighting and downfall, but also because entities can fall very fast compared to how fast they can move horizontally.
* Sirris [You] mentioned adding alchemy at some point. Is that really going to happen?Oh, yes! Absolutely!
* Lukan Would you consider making it so that the items that I'm carrying when I die never disappear, or, at least, last much longer?No, that would clog up the world too much. I might possibly add some workarounds for this though, like if you keep a Stone of Holding in your inventory, a chest spawns where you die, containing all items except the Stone. Or something like that.
* Rhkdmbd Can you please add the ability to craft some kind of watch so I know when it is day/night?Coming soon(tm)!
* IXISIXI Are there plans to introduce epic monsters that might live deep underground?Yes. They will not be fair.
* Unitconversion Will we be able to build upon the boat to make massive ships?Maybe! I'm considering a craftable super entity made up of 16x16x16 blocks. The idea would be that you can use this to make huge doors, or boats, or elevators, or whatever else you can think of. I don't know if I'll be able to solve all the technical issues with it, but hopefully!
* PvtChunders Will you consider adding a slider to adjust the gamma at any time?Yes, I will consider it. There are technical problems. I might be able to solve it in software.
