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Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

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Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#22

Minecraft, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Trackmania...these are games that succeeded because of their communities. Alone, they don't provide much for the average player, but creative players build interesting things that appeal to everyone. I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal ex…

> I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal experience, I've heard this about VR in general). If you want to build a community, you must make development easy for hobbyists and small users*. I believe this has held even for the biggest companies, case in point the examples above.

Unity and UE have pretty good VR support nowadays, and even godot is getting there. Plus making a custom engine for VR was never that much harder than for a normal 3D game (well, once some API like OpenXR got normalized).

The big issue with VR right now is that it is more costly to develop for than normal apps and games, while having less user. It makes it a hard sell. For some indie dev, I allow them to profit from a market that is not yet saturated (right now, with no good marketing, you just get buried on steam, any app store, etc). There are many factors that make it more costly, like having to support several mobility and accessibility features for games (for example smooth and jump locomotion, reduce fov when moving the view, etc), that you usually don't have to care for in other plateform. And there is the issue of interactivity. UX (and in many ways UI) is still very far from ideal. Most VR apps and games just try things out, but there is still a world of pattern and good practice to build up. This makes using anything VR often an annoying experience. Especially since some issue can be an absolute no-go for some user. As an example, displaying subtitle in a 6dof environment can be tricky. Some game put it at a fix point of your view, which can cause nausea and readability problem, some move still follows the head/view but with a delay, which reduce nausea issue but can be distracting and also has readability issue (the subs can go out of view).

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#23
post #9

Minecraft, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Trackmania...these are games that succeeded because of their communities. Alone, they don't provide much for the average player, but creative players build interesting things that appeal to everyone. I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal ex…

The other reason being that nobody is asking for The Metaverse, and definitely don’t want to spend huge chunks of cash on a funny hat to wear in order to access it.

A lot of people seem to be spending huge chunks of cash on enormous monitors, dual monitors, curved monitors, etc., and the appeal of that is mostly that it gets you a little bit closer to wearing a head-mounted display.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably virtually the same. If I recall, the "obfuscation" was mostly mangling

Luckily I have never had to deal with obfuscation, but from what I have seen there are some grotesque things like defining every single randomly named method call in an array or map with random order or weirdly combining or tearing apart methods. The only time I encountered it was when I was working for the government, we were working on the rules that decide who gets audited in depth by the tax police. The .jar it c…

My decade-old recollection is also that Minecraft's obfuscation didn't do anything structural, just mangled class and method names. Think of it more like JavaScript minification than a serious attempt to thwart reverse engineering.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#25
post #16
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other reason being that nobody is asking for The Metaverse, and definitely don’t want to spend huge chunks of cash on a funny hat to wear in order to access it.

Some people are asking for The Metaverse. Currently, the entire VRChat userbase. But you're right that there is not a large population of people willing to throw cash at it outside of a minority of virtual furries

Probably half the people who grew up with Instagram cat filters are furries now.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#26
post #23
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other reason being that nobody is asking for The Metaverse, and definitely don’t want to spend huge chunks of cash on a funny hat to wear in order to access it.

A lot of people seem to be spending huge chunks of cash on enormous monitors, dual monitors, curved monitors, etc., and the appeal of that is mostly that it gets you a little bit closer to wearing a head-mounted display.

Makes sense that a primate with front-facing eyes that is both predator and prey would prefer to look at things at arms length rather than encase their head in a cocoon that is designed to block environmental awareness.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#27
post #21

I wonder if they'll ever just open source the Java Edition on GitHub. People will buy Minecraft on every platform it is released on, just like Skyrim.

It sounds like you might be looking for Minetest/Luanti.

no, I think they're looking for the official game to be open sourced... that's much more appealing than a knockoff since it's the version everyone actually plays.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#28

I wonder if they'll ever just open source the Java Edition on GitHub. People will buy Minecraft on every platform it is released on, just like Skyrim.

More games should be open source like doom. It doesnt effect the art assets which are still copyrighted.

Amusingly, Minecraft is a counter-example. It has very few assets and they are hardly essential to the experience.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#29

I wonder if they'll ever just open source the Java Edition on GitHub. People will buy Minecraft on every platform it is released on, just like Skyrim.

More games should be open source like doom. It doesnt effect the art assets which are still copyrighted.

[deleted]

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#30

Minecraft, Roblox, Geometry Dash, Trackmania...these are games that succeeded because of their communities. Alone, they don't provide much for the average player, but creative players build interesting things that appeal to everyone. I think one of the reasons Vision Pro and metaverse have been struggling is because their engines are bad. Not just locked down, but hard to develop on (although I don't have personal ex…

You can add the Flight Simulator series to the list, which spawned a vast ecosystem of add-ons, both free and commercial.

I believe though, that what you actually need as a big or small company, is good game first and foremost; the engine is secondary. When the community around a game reaches a critical mass, the very small percentage of its members who have the skills to modify things becomes significant as well.

For instance, Richard Burns Rally was not intended to be modded at all, yet the fans added new cars, new tracks, online scoreboards, etc.

In the Luanti [1] community (a voxel games engine/platform, designed to be moddable nearly from the start), one begins to see something similar as well: notable games gets mods, others don't (the former default game is a particular case; it is not exactly good but go tons of mods because of its status, and games based on it benefit from that ecosystem). Yet all use the same engine (perhaps Roblox is similar in that respect, I'm not sure if they have "reified" whole games like Luanti did).

[1] https://www.luanti.org/

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