Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
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Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#2If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is just irresponsible.
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#3If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is j…
An aside, but since you bring it up: if Minecraft was never out of Beta, I would still consider my money well spent, thank you very much. And, he does continue to work on it. He has a team now and they're all working on various things.
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#4The reddit thread http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/j6sr1/a_simple_and_e... has a bunch of good comments that outline why Notch isn't really in a position to post stuff like this.
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#5If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is j…
An aside, but since you bring it up: if Minecraft was never out of Beta, I would still consider my money well spent, thank you very much. And, he does continue to work on it. He has a team now and they're all working on various things.
I don't care whether you are happy with it or not. It is a poorly written product with many problems. There is a zero-day exploit in SMP allowing people to take over servers that they haven't bothered fixing in the months they've known about it, for example. So what if they are paying lip service to Minecraft development?
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#6If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is j…
Minecraft doesn't need money to be finished, it needs time. Hiring completely different developers to work on a different game will not affect the development time of Minecraft so I don't see how that is unethical.
The security holes is definitely an issue but that doesn't make Notch's criticism any less valid.
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#7If Notch wants to be picky about ethics, let's talk about spending money hiring for the development of a new game (Scrolls) before finishing a game players have essentially advanced him money to complete (Minecraft). Or about sitting on critical security holes for months. Euclideon may not deliver on its promises (it probably won't), but for all Notch knows they do have a novel technique and labeling it a "scam" is j…
Minecraft doesn't need money to be finished, it needs time. Hiring completely different developers to work on a different game will not affect the development time of Minecraft so I don't see how that is unethical. The security holes is definitely an issue but that doesn't make Notch's criticism any less valid.
If I send you money to work on project A, and you invest that money on into some other project B while paying lip service to project A then yes, I would say you have a bit of an ethical problem.
Notch's criticism is hypocritical, and invalid on the grounds that he doesn't have enough information to say that the project is a "scam".
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
An aside, but since you bring it up: if Minecraft was never out of Beta, I would still consider my money well spent, thank you very much. And, he does continue to work on it. He has a team now and they're all working on various things.
I don't care whether you are happy with it or not. It is a poorly written product with many problems. There is a zero-day exploit in SMP allowing people to take over servers that they haven't bothered fixing in the months they've known about it, for example. So what if they are paying lip service to Minecraft development?
If I was paying a subscription fee to play, I would agree with you. But I spent $15 a year and a half ago for the product /as it was/ and it was absolutely worth it. You are not entitled to updates, they're just nice to have.
And I'm not paying for server support or anything, so I don't necessarily expect rapid bug/exploit fixes.
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Minecraft doesn't need money to be finished, it needs time. Hiring completely different developers to work on a different game will not affect the development time of Minecraft so I don't see how that is unethical. The security holes is definitely an issue but that doesn't make Notch's criticism any less valid.
If I send you money to work on project A, and you invest that money on into some other project B while paying lip service to project A then yes, I would say you have a bit of an ethical problem. Notch's criticism is hypocritical, and invalid on the grounds that he doesn't have enough information to say that the project is a "scam".
You're framing the relationship between customer and game developer differently than I've ever seen it. When I give a developer money for a game, I'm not "sending him money to work on project A". I'm paying him for the game.
In bold print right on the Minecraft purchase page:
"Please note that when you buy the game, you're paying for the game as it is right now!"
Anyone who buys Minecraft under the delusion that they're contracting Notch to build them a game is, well, delusional.
There are only two contexts -- that I can think of off hand -- in which you pay someone to perform a specific task:
* Contract employment
* Hired staff
Any time you pay a company for a product, you're doing just that. You pay for the product, and the seller gets to do what they want with the profits.
Re: Notch on Euclideon: It's a scam
#10I think the unlimited detail refers to rendering speed, not memory requirements. The data has to be redundant to fit in memory. He also claims it runs on a laptop without GPU. So it can't be just octree or any other regular acceleration structure. So if it isn't scam, it's something new.
From the author (old post on Beyond3D): "firstly the system isn’t ray tracing at all or anything like ray tracing. Ray tracing uses up lots of nasty multiplication and divide operators and so isn’t very fast or friendly. Unlimited Detail is a sorting algorithm that retrieves only the 3d atoms (I wont say voxels any more it seems that word doesn’t have the prestige in the games industry that it enjoys in medicine and the sciences) that are needed, exactly one for each pixel on the screen, it displays them using a very different procedure from individual 3d to 2d conversion, instead we use a mass 3d to 2d conversion that shares the common elements of the 2d positions of all the dots combined. And so we get lots of geometry and lots of speed, speed isn’t fantastic yet compared to hardware, but its very good for a software application that’s not written for dual core. We get about 24-30 fps 1024*768 for that demo of the pyramids of monsters. The media is hyping up the death of polygons but really that’s just not practical, this will probably be released as “backgrounds only” for the next few years, until we have made a lot more tools to work with."