1.6 is likely to be a bug fest. So i wouldn't jump up and down for it. Notch's changing/fixing to meny things for him not to introduce more bugs. If he did proper testing before releasing patches then you would get less bugs each release, but given its Notch it will be a bug fest.

I have lost all interest in anything other than multi-threading.

I have lost all interest in anything other than multi-threading.

DavH27

Only problem with that is that Notch isn't the most competent programmer. So id doubt he would make it thread safe. So you would likely have bugs which are very hard to find because of it.

Note: For anyone that has no clue what thread safe means, basically when you have 2 or more threads running on separate cores you run into the problem of both threads trying to read/write to the same variable. Both cores would be executing one line at a time so you can have a situation where for example one core sets something to nil (Nothing) and the other core (Which checked to see if the thing existed before the first core set it to nil) could try and use it even though it now doesn't exist.

You can easily get around the multi-threading problem by designing your applications differently. But you still need to know what your doing(If you don't you can have a situation where your application or some of its threads are frozen indefinitely). So Thread Safe means that your code is not prone to the problems of muilti-threading.

i voted other. because i'd rather notch fixed these damned bugs than introduce (or reintroduce in this case) more features.

guys...... this is beta WE ARE THE THE TESTING

guys...... this is beta WE ARE THE THE TESTING

Kyn.A.N.

*ZippyG approves of this post*

I want the nether really bad however i really really dont want to have to go through the bugs that it will cause adn the insane ammounts of lag it will cause.
For those of you who were there do you remember the ghast problem in the nether that was casuing the lag and we ran out of arrows so we used fishing poles
I really dont want to have to go through that again even though it was fun the lag was unbearable

Notch needs to fix stuff in 1.6 and it needs to come soon we dont need the nether it can wait untill 1.7 so much for a mainly bug fix

guys...... this is beta WE ARE THE THE TESTING

Kyn.A.N.

Dumb Statement. Rearly Dumb. I expect this on the official minecraft forums but not here.

While it is a Beta test (Its technically an Alpha test still) that doesn't mean that you don't do testing. Seriously, you don't expect programmers to write code and not do proper testing before you hand it out to your end user testers?????

What is meant to happen (Based on what proper companies/competent people do) is that the programming team actually does testing themselves so that they can catch bugs as soon as possible. This is so that you catch them before you write code on top of the bugs, which makes it harder to find them.

If you look at pritty much any beta test, you will notice that while there are bugs in them, they don't have to release multiple MAJOR patches within an hour of release because they actually test stuff.

Its counter productive to release completely buggy stuff that you could catch yourself. The point of beta testers is to find bugs that are hard to find, not to find blatantly obvious stuff. If you have them find the obvious stuff then they will never find the hard to find stuff.

The programmer is the first line of defence against bugs, not the testers. They are the last line of defence.

Once Minecraft has its Beta tag removed i doubt anything will dramatically change. The problem is that Notch unlike most programmers doesn't seem to believe in testing himself and that leads to a far more buggy product. All he needs to do is dedicate part of a day to see if a patch should be stable. Instead he has in the past programmed right upto the time of release, which increases the chance of a major screwup.

what you say my friend is very true and i have studied and done programing myself (HATE JAVA SOO MUCH) so i know.
however notch has still not gotten out of his one man programing routine and most likely wont do so till there is at least 5 people working with him on mc. currently mojang is like 9 people only 5 of which are coder's and half of them are working on another game, so until he hires more skilled people or sets up his error reporting in a far more productive way i don't see things changing

^ agreed stucuk

I've been a beta tester for...... (counts in head) 9 online capable games now, and i've never EVER experienced such flat out disregard for the player base. all of the Alpha's let alone beta's i've tested had less issues.

Notch I think is lucky in that his sales are one off. If people were signing up to a subscription game, i seriously doubt many would pay for such issues for long. Personally i just cancelled my Xsyon subscription after forking out $30 for the game (with an additional $15 per month subscription) as there was no demo but i got sucked in by the media making it look better than it was. frankly, i'm not prepared to pay that much for a game that is far FAR and away from completed and with sufficient content.

Now i need to finish on a half praise after that rant I love minecraft. i haven't been hooked on a game like this since Diablo 2 was released (and later the LOD expansion), Wurm came close but lack of new stuff got me bored. It's just the bugs now, hence why i've not been online much the past 48 hours, getting fed up of stalls and lag (which to Broonie's credit isn't his fault but by eck is he trying to sort it!) when MC is mostly about the creation, and c'mon, who can spend ALL their time mining without creating?, but when stalls, lag and crashing breaks your creativity during a build you do want to just say "stuff it!" and walk away. even for just a short while. it's not good!

however notch has still not gotten out of his one man programing routine and most likely wont do so till there is at least 5 people working with him on mc. currently mojang is like 9 people only 5 of which are coder's and half of them are working on another game, so until he hires more skilled people or sets up his error reporting in a far more productive way i don't see things changing

Kyn.A.N.

I have maintained a game called Original War since 2005(Completely volunteer work, i don't get paid). I have never spent any money (Except for website hosting), i don't have 2 million testers, yet i have a far better track record when it comes to bugs than Notch does. Im one guy with a handfull of testers(Which i could proberly count with my hands).

So i don't belive it has anything to do with team size. With one person you can debug your own code. The secret is to regularly test stuff(I don't mean spending 5 years of your life on testing, but doing regular short tests rather than 1 long test per year). Not just the code you just wrote but the whole application. When you modify/add code you can effect other things which you never realised was connected at the time.

Note: While im a skilled programmer i am not what you would class as a professional programmer, everything i know i have learned by trying things, no fancy degree's or training. So if i can do testing i don't see any excuse as to why Notch can't considering that he is part of a team and worked as a programmer for a company in the past.

Notch I think is lucky in that his sales are one off. If people were signing up to a subscription game, i seriously doubt many would pay for such issues for long.

diablothe2nd

You are completely right. It was only because Minecraft was cheap that i tried it in the first place(Creative wasn't enough to work out if Minecraft was good or not).

While it was fine that he didn't do massive amounts of testing at the beginning because he had no income, now that he has more than enough money to hire people, he has no excuses.

His problem is that he knows what he should do. He just doesn't seem to do it unless he has to(i.e Upgrading the server before the free weekend. He stated it needed to be upgraded but never upgraded it until it was so overloaded it was down for days).

I love minecraft

diablothe2nd

I think Minecraft is a very good game. I just wish someone else was the creator as Notch is far from ideal.

i voted i dont care, because the nether doesn't add anything specific to the game, not for us donators atleast. if it gets fixed however, it would bring in an interesting momentum in the game. no more need for rails, as one can simply build an obsidian tunnel trough the nether to wherever you are headed from spawn.

er aren't the nether and above ground related in terms of coords? iirc the portals transfer you to the same location in xyz as above ground, so you'd still need long railes whether from nether or top side?

agreed stucuk

er aren't the nether and above ground related in terms of coords? iirc the portals transfer you to the same location in xyz as above ground, so you'd still need long railes whether from nether or top side?

agreed stucuk

diablothe2nd

No, there is an 8 to 1 ratio of travel. So, if you travel 1 block in the nether, walk into a portal, you emerge 8 blocks from your starting point on the normal map. Its a fast way to travel. For instance, my home at 2500 blocks from spawn takes a minecraft day to walk, if you were able to walk in a perfect straight line the entire time, with no hills or mobs attacking. The distance needed to cover this distance via portal/nether world would be 312 blocks... not even 5 minutes of walking.

I think they could replace some long distance tracks in the real world, but below ground, there are a host of dangers to people walking on feet. We could build a point to point rail system in the nether that is completely covered from ghasts, and save 1/8th the rails.

This all assumes, however, that there will be a true fix for the nether, not just a botched patch-up job like he did when he first put the nether in MP. Both worlds ran on the same processor core, making the load too much for the server. I am going to assume this will not change, since Java is not a great environment for dealing directly with today's multi core processors.

ahh i see, great idea!