3581

Amazing sales figure for the way he started with it.

3582

You’d figure it would be slowing down but if anything it’s going faster. 2 million was only months ago, right?

Another awesome thing they can do is see what ‘retention’ they’re getting of players, since every time you play you have to log-on to their servers. That would be pretty interesting data, methinks.

3583

yep, April 24th was the 2 million milestone

sales defiantly increased, and the free trial attached to the humble indie bundle , is probably helping a lot also.

3584

I remember that

That’s fair, but I don’t see this game making over 150,000 copies. Hell I have no clue how he even reached 85,000. If it’s word of mouth over the internet, he’s coming up on a roadblock. It’s not a particularly mass-marketable game, and the copies have been already sold, so what the fuck, Valve?

Hehehehe…

3585

Heh. We should have had a wager on this.

I knew it was going to sell well, just not this well. If it continues at this pace it will soon be on the top ten list of best selling PC games.

3586

Notch is showing off some 1.8 features live from PAX here. And I think the plan is still to expect the 1.8 release a week or so after PAX. Edit: In the stream they’ve said they aren’t committing to a date, but “not far away.”

3587

Can anyone provide info for the stream-impaired at the office?

3588

From what I can remember:

  • Showed the Endermen in action. They start attacking after you look away, but looking back at them again doesn’t stop them once they’re after you. They die in water, though. They pick up and drop blocks randomly.
  • New ocean, river, and extreme mountain range biomes.
  • New lighting system, with tinting to the lights and you can carry a torch and project light around you while moving around.
  • Villages, though no NPCs in them yet (post-1.8, probably). I swear I saw one village spawn in the middle of a river…
  • Saw sprinting in action quite a bit, making you run faster for short durations.
  • Shooting arrows requires you to ‘charge up’ your shots. That better apply to those goddamn laser-accurate skeletons, too!
  • A hunger bar, filled by eating, and if you’re sufficiently satiated, you will regenerate health automatically.
  • Can now grow pumpkins.
  • Cobwebs now spawn naturally in the world, in places like abandoned mineshafts.
  • Monsters drop xp orbs, but nothing is tied to the xp system yet (another likely post-1.8 feature).
  • The cloud layer is higher now.
3589

I went by their booth. The level generation includes rivers and canyons (death traps). Looks cool, I’ll have to start a new world in a patch or two.

3590

Sounds substantive, I’m happy. Any changes to dungeons?

3591

From ign:

Quests, NPCs and Experience

No quests or NPCs were on display in the PAX demo, but representatives from developer Mojang said that NPCs will be added in the update. Players will then obtain quests from these NPCs. No details are available as to the nature of those quests, but it should give players more to do than build yet another effigy to whatever nerd god they worship.

Killing monsters and other creatures will yield experience, giving players skill points. How skill points will be spent is still being decided, but Mojang has decided that experience will be lost if the player dies. The goal is to make death even more costly, making survival all the more precious.

3592

This seems awesome.

Will be a shame to have to redo my world, since my magicians tower (although without any magic in the world?) is almost completed. Takes a while to dig out a mountain range by hand while trying to stay alive.

What I need is mountaintop removal mining with explosives.

3593

Those things sound good, but most of those things were already under discussion and up in the air in June. I’m a little surprised so little progress has been made in two months either code-wise or design-wise.
(Note: Just observing, not whining)

3594

It’s because only Notch and sometimes Jeb are working on Minecraft. The rest of the company does the other project.

3595

Does anyone know what texture pack they were using in that Middle Earth vid?

3596

Looking forward to the update. I’ve been back playing some minecraft and it will be nice to do some new things without mods. My daughter is already freaking out about the endermen, (they’re creepy dad!) will be fun watching them play.

3597

So do you still not see the name of an object when you mouseover it in your inventory? This was my #1 peeve with the game last time I played.

3598

They added ‘tooltips’ type text identifying things back in a few patches ago.

Watching video of the 1.8 update from PAX, I’m pretty ‘meh’ about it. For a lot of big talk, there really isn’t much new meat in this version. The endermen are going to be really rare. The experience orbs don’t do anything yet. The power up the arrow to shoot takes no time at all. The new randomly generated towns have no inhabitants. Rivers and Ravines are new, but don’t really do anything for gameplay. Not meaning to sound too negative, anything new is cool of course. I was just expecting there’d be a lot more to this given the time between updates and what they’ve talked about so far.

And meanwhile the modders continue to pile on all kinds of amazing new toys, features, and content.

3599

I’ve heard since that there will actually be NPCs, they just weren’t in the older build that they used for PAX, but should be in the final 1.8. Or maybe 1.9, you can never be sure exactly what actually makes it in…

And Notch will never be able to compete with the modding community in terms of sheer amount of content, short of hiring them all and turning Minecraft into a 100-man operation. I don’t know if you really meant it as a criticism or not, but it’s strange how in some circles public opinion has turned against Notch, labeling him a fat, lazy, incompetent hack because he can’t personally do everything the mod community does and just as well.

3600

There are some modders you could pick out and put one on one against the content notch & Jeb have come up with - like say the Better than Wolves guy, that have really outpaced and outshined the core game in the same time period.

Of course I don’t mean to compare the modding community as a whole to the work of two guys.

My favorite bit of ‘news’ from the PAX weekend was notch tweeting that jens would be lead on mine craft for a while as he was going to work on some new top secret prototype - to which jens immediately said “Does that mean I can go on vacation?” ha ha.