Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

minecraft.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 478 posts

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#131

Post by hyghjiyhu »

nightpool wrote: post #112
LelouBil wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The devs for Java Edition really have mods in mind nowadays. - They left in the code debug features that they used to strip out. - They left in the code their testing infrastructure that they used to strip out as well. - They started making everything namespaced to differentiate contents between mods (like in this week's snapshot they made gamerules namespaced with the "minecraft:" prefix like items and blocks and wh…

That's definitely true, and I think that's a testament to Minecraft / Java's strong OO design—it dovetails very nicely with the Open/Close principle. However my view is that for a mod to be a mod, there's always going to be stuff that you can't/shouldn't implement just with datapacks—whether that's complex rendering features, new entity logic, or whatever. The Mixin processor makes it really easy to build these kinds…

These tools sound very powerful, could they find use for other Java codebases?

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#132

Post by Philip-J-Fry »

krackers wrote: post #61
NelsonMinar wrote: post #51

It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.

Me too. Having only a vague familiarity with the game, I thought that mods were using some official plugin system. I had no idea that minecraft modders (presumably kids/teens?) were not only reverse engineering things but also creating an entire ecosystem to work around proguard.

Most modders aren't reverse engineering the game. There's a small community that are doing the obfuscation and then everyone else is effectively working from normal Java code.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#133

Post by ok123456 »

xxs wrote: post #47
Traubenfuchs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have seen =tons= of obfuscation (non-minecraft). Back in the late 90s it used to be popular, unfortunately. Most of the stuff is like naming every method a or b, and using the fact they are overloaded, given one-letter-name or a reserved keyword like 'if' to classnames (or packages) was popular, too. Pretty much constant pool modifications w/o too much byte-code-editing. Overall cheap and unnecessary and has not st…

It's still pretty popular. Most large smartphone applications are obfuscated to some degree. At least for Android, because it's bytecode for a VM, it's still trivial to disassemble and understand what is happening at a high level.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#134

Post by einsteinx2 »

_vqpz wrote: post #54
NelsonMinar wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in 2010 Notch promised > Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. https://web.archive.org/web/20100301103851/http://www.minecr...

Notch has said he would do many things and rarely follows through with them. I'm still waiting for 0x10c.

> Once sales start dying

Has that part ever happened?

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#135

Post by skeaker »

jjmarr wrote: post #53
armchairhacker wrote: post #2

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…

Roblox had a phenomenal engine when it came out and its terrain destruction is still unmatched. In 2006, I could download the Roblox app and bam, I would play thousands of 3D multiplayer games for free that loaded near instantly. With fully destructible buildings and dynamic terrain. Somehow I didn't get viruses from remote code execution. That was groundbreaking at the time. In that era, I'd have to download Steam,…

In many ways it remains ahead of the curve. Kids that grow up making games in Roblox rarely survive the jump to a dedicated engine because Roblox is just so much easier to develop for in nearly every aspect. One big thing I've heard is that instantly getting working, robust online multiplayer by default baked into the engine is a major plus.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#137

Post by beachy »

userbinator wrote: post #90
NelsonMinar wrote: post #51

It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.

More proof that you don't need the source code to modify software. Then again, Java has always been easy to decompile, and IMHO the biggest obstacle to understanding is the "object-oriented obfuscation" that's inherent in large codebases even when you have the original source.

First time I have heard of object-oriented obfuscation.

I get it, but in general I don't get the OO hate.

It's all about the problem domain imo. I can't imagine building something like a graphics framework without some subtyping.

Unfortunately, people often use crap examples for OO. The worst is probably employee, where employee and contractor are subtypes of worker, or some other chicanery like that.

Of course in the real world a person can be both employee and contractor at the same time, can flit between those roles and many others, can temporarily park a role (e.g sabbatical) and many other permutations, all while maintaining history and even allowing for corrections of said history.

It would be hard to find any domain less suited to OO that HR records. I think these terrible examples are a primary reason for some people believing that OO is useless or worse than useless.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#138

Post by charcircuit »

quamserena wrote: post #124
1313ed01 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am terrified by Minecraft mods always being distributed from dodgy download sites and not rarely come with their own Windows EXE installers. And as far as I know there is no sandboxing at all in the game (uhm, no pun intended) so once installed the mod has full access to your computer?

Yeah mods are just regular Java .jars that can do anything. To circumvent this issue Mojang introduced datapacks but they are super limited in what they can do. They’re basically just Minecraft commands in a file along with some manifest files to change e.g. mob loot drop rates. These Minecraft commands are Turing complete but a huge PITA to work with directly, no concept of local variables or if statements, no netwo…

Bedrock has proper mod support and you can program with Typescript.

Re: Minecraft removing obfuscation in Java Edition

#140

Post by tripplyons »

ZeWaka wrote: post #94
NelsonMinar wrote: post #51

It's extraordinary to me that Minecraft is both the game that has the most robust mod community out there and that the modders were working from obfuscated, decompiled Java binaries. With elaborate tooling to deobfuscate and then reobfuscate using the same mangled names. For over a decade! What dedication.

To be fair, since 2019 Mojang has been providing the mappings instead of everyone having to use community-created ones.

It took me a while to find how to obtain the official mappings, but this article seems to have instructions: https://minescript.net/mappings

According to the article, official mappings can be found here: https://piston-meta.mojang.com/mc/game/version_manifest_v2.j...

Post reply on HN