Creating a Texturepack: Part 1, Planks

"Why wouldn't I create a Minecraft texture pack?" I thought, faintly remembering my previous attempt that didn't get farther than cobblestone and planks...

Being in the middle of discovering the many possibilities of Tekkit and dreaming of steampunk I thought I could create a texture pack combining those 2 elements... No idea if I'll ever get this actually going.

In my enthusiasm I almost started changing every texture in the game to my heart's desire, but then I remembered something: it is quite some work.
So I had to make some decisions. First of all I would start with Vanilla Minecraft, changing only the original textures. I would also go for a 32x32 resolution (double the original 16x16) to have a bit more space to mess around with.

For the style I would like to have something steampunkish, but a subtle one. Not just placing a gear on every other block, that would just look stupid.
I also want it to be functional, meaning if you play regular Minecraft you will know what you're looking. I've seen packs that change stuff around (for example wool no longer being wool, but some decorative block) and that's not what I want.
Other than that I want to combine mechanical and magical elements, but not too much.
Once I've finished doing a vanilla pack I'll add Tekkit stuff, starting with Redpower (to have most worldtextures under my control and changing tungsten so I would stop confusing it for coal). So basically my aim is having a texture pack that is made steampunk by using it with Tekkit.

But first vanilla.

Where to start?

I always wanted to change the plank texture, as no plank ever runs on forever and is that straight. So there I have my first block to work on.

Wood planks: normal, pine, jungle and birch planks.

So that's where I started.
I eyedroppered the darkest color on the original planks texture, used that to draw some lines, divided that into planks, placed nails in, played around with the L of the Lab color picker and added a bit more texture.
Further was easy: copy the texture 4 times, use with different Level-layers, make the jungle wood more orange (I hate them being pinkish) and paste them in the terrain.png.

That was easy I thought.
Well, it turns out it's not that easy. I had some alignment issues to fix after the "pasting into terrain.png", because in older versions of this picture I had strips of the old texture running from top to bottom, meaning I had mispasted something. But for some reason I insist on having the entire pack unpacked in a projects folder with some template files sitting a folder above it. So every time I have to change something I have to open both terrain.png as the template files, paste the correct texture into the correct place, save both, zip the pack folder, cut and place the .zip into the correct folder and hope I didn't mess up somewhere.
After having done this a few times I started looking for ways to automate this. I downloaded 7zip for commandline zipping, learned some batch programming syntax, did some test runs, noticed 7zip likes to save a folder in a zip folder, so I have to give it every subfolder and every file one level below the level I want zipped (if you have messed around with it you'll understand) and after some time I came to this code:

  REM delete the original file
DEL %AppData%\.techniclauncher\tekkit\texturepacks\ThORVanilla.zip

  REM run 7zip and pack a new .zip file
C:\7-Zip\7z.exe u "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla.zip" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\achievement" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\armor" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\art" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\environment" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\font" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\gui" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\item" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\misc" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\mob" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\terrain" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\title" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\font.txt" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\pack.png" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\pack.txt" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\particles.png" "H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla\terrain.png"
  
 REM Move the new file to the texturepacks folder
MOVE H:\Projects\Minecraft\TexturePacks\ThORVanilla.zip %AppData%\.techniclauncher\tekkit\texturepacks\ThORVanilla.zip

 REM wait "some time" before closing in case there is an error message
PING -n 9000 ECHO OFF

I know I didn't have to make everything a direct path, but I wanted to be sure it worked. And it does so stfu.
So now I only need to run this .bat file to have my entire folder packed and moved to the correct place.

Next will be stones, but that will be for another time.

-ThOR

PS: if you figure you want to use this code don't forget

Games I would like to see finished

So, E3 is going on but for some reason I don't feel like paying much attention to it.
Why? Shooter, shooter, shooter and some other genres. Not much variety in there. I think the best shooter has been made years ago (the Half Life series for singleplayer, Counterstrike for multiplayer) so I'm a bit more interested in other stuff.

Let me make a list of the few games I'm actually waiting for to be finished so I can throw some money at it:

Fract

Fract is an adventure type game, from what I understood after playing their prototype. You walk around in an amazingly nice looking low poly world solving puzzles, getting old machinery working without actually knowing what they do and gradually discovering more of the world.
It will have real-time synthesized music that you'll be able to compose your own music with it (I kinda hope for a built-in recorder) presented in a very nice low poly look.

The art style of this game is enough for me to instantly want to buy and play it, but unfortunately it's still under development (like all the games in this list).

Castle story

We all (should) have heard of a terrifying game called Dwarf Fortress. I would have liked the game and have played it fully if only it had a more accessible interface. Luckily Castle story looks like it will live up to that hope. Sure, the developers don't have that much depth planned, but I'm pretty sure after this game releases someone will make a mod that adds all these functions to it. All the more reasons to wait for this game to be released.

0x10^c

The "New Game From Notch" (aka "oh ex ten to the cth", "Ox ten see",  "Oxy tensee" but actually its "0x" as in "the next number is in hexadecimal" and the "10^c" as in "that's 16¹² in decimal").
A space game, low poly graphics, sandbox, RPG, fully customizable spaceships with fully programmable computers, single and multiplayer connected via the multiverse, duct tape and lots of engineering. These were only a few features Notch has planned for it.
Together with the raging community this will result in piracy, epic space battles, player programmed Operating Systems, custom ships with a lot of references to movies or series, ... just way too much to think of.
The game is just in it's starting phase, meaning Notch barely has the general gameplay mechanics implemented (gravity, lighting, movement) while he often requests for community input. This means we all still can dream of what it will become.

It just recently got in development, so we'll see what becomes of it.

There are some alternatives to this concept like Rodina and Infinity-Universe, but even those are under development...

Minecraft

"Haha!" you may think, "You can't fool me, Minecraft is out for about half a year now!"
Yes, it is, but no it isn't out of development yet. The Mojang team is working hard on getting the game to where they want it to be, Minecraft development is far from done. Although I already threw a bit of money at it.
The effects of a Minecraft out of development are easy creation of mods, easy installing of said mods, optimized gameplay with lots of terrain features, a less raging community (since there won't be huge updates anymore), bug free playtime and much more.
Minecraft still has a bit to go until it's complete, but it already is one of my favorite games ever...

--
(end of list, for now) (hmm, I thought there would be a few more...)

Anyways, I think I talked enough about games, let's play them...

-ThOR

Downloading

There's been a lot of attention to it some time ago: Illegal downloading.
Lots of protests against SOPA and PIPA (what was ACTA again?), lots of lobbying to get it through anyway... Why?

Yes, I do download.
And some of those downloads aren't the most legal content.
But I must say: sometimes I want to play a game that's long gone from the stores (Homeworld, Descent: Freespace, ...) and knowing the original creators already got involved in bigger stuff, stopped caring about their first spawns or maybe just don't exist anymore I'd think they wouldn't mind that I enjoy their stuff and praise it without actually buying the game.

It's not that I refuse to buy the game... I'd buy it if I had the money. After all it's easier to do so than waiting for a few-Gig-file to download, installing the software, running activation blockers, or finding the folder the game got installed in to replace some files with cracked (and possibly virused) files. I'd rather insert the disk, let it run and play right away, while being assured of a decent support center when something goes askew...
Not to mention the (mostly) broken multiplayer you get with an illegal copy, which sometimes is basically the other half of the fun.

On the other hand, some software just is a tad bit expensive. Buying Adobe Creative Suit 4 as a requirement for your studies, using it for a year and then having to buy CS5 the year after was really an attack on my bank account...

But I still don't get why Big Companies are playing witchhunt on those who extend their software's user base and increasing potential buyers. After all, if it wasn't for illegal downloads I would've never thought of getting a Steam account where Valve could dangle some 5$ games in front of me, making it very attractive to buy more...

And what the hell happened to demo-versions? The only things you sometimes see when a game gets promoted are pre-rendered trailers and you basically have to rely on your computer to be strong enough to handle the software you've just bought...
For example: I (being a total hardware noob) am considering buying Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (purely hypothetically speaking). There is absolutely no way to test if my computer can handle the game or not, I have to rely on my own knowledge (very little) and the info given under "Minimal System Requirements" (note: unexistant on the main website) to understand whether my 5 year old laptop would survive it when I install such a thing. What do all those numbers and letters mean? I tend to figure it out, but I can imagine a lot of people who wouldn't know where to start...
A demo would be nice in those situations to see if your system is willing to handle all that violence and to see if the game is what you expect/want/like it to be. That's mostly what I use cracked games for: to see if my computer would run it may I want a good multiplayer.

(a small remark on MW3: Don't think I'll ever buy the game. The best military shooter has been made already (CounterStrike), now I would like a shooter with more challenge/imagination/creativity (Half Life 3 would be nice))

Anyways, I'm glad there are other approaches. For example (you may have wondered why I waited so long to bring this one up) Notch, creator of Minecraft has tweeted that he's pretty fine with someone pirating the game. "It's a minor offense in the scale of things". Sure, it's quite illegal, but in comparison to the number of people that actually bought it there isn't much reason to worry. Especially knowing Notch is currently a millionaire by making a (relatively) cheap but more than awesome game from scratch and with a completely new/original idea (something we don't see that much lately).

Especially knowing this I don't quite get why the Big Companies keep hammering on "their intellectual property" and how no-one else should have the right to do anything alike except for themselves. Want some more info on what copyright has currently come to? CGPGrey did a very nice instructional video explaining what the current laws are capable of doing.



(Ahh, the joy of successfully embedding videos in you own page)

This post is goining on longer than I originally intended.
Let me wrap this up...

I do download different stuff.
I don't like Big Companies with a lot more digits of income limiting us in distributing/recreating stuff they made.

Heh, that's about it.

Thank you for reading all this.

-ThOR

Weekly TWP article dump

Hmm. I don't know if Issue 8 of the Weekly Pickaxe has been released yet, but I'll release my articles already.

Mojang news:
Carl Manneh signed lots of stuff this week: Not only a contract for the new Mojang office, but he hired no less than 2 extra developpers, bringing the total count of Mojang employees on 20.
To anyone waiting for news on the Minecraft Xbox release: the coverart is more or less finished. of the release of it there isn't really a date, only "spring", so we'll have to wait a bit more.


Minecraft Snapshot 12w05b

Weekly Snapshot!
No new additions, mostly tweaks and bugfixes:
- Mob related bugs got fixed.
- Some new mob behaviours got added, for example to the creepers: now they also have the new pathfinding AI.
- Villagers will try to detect village houses and will try to live in them. So when it gets dark villagers go inside to hide and come out again when it's light again.
- Villagers are able to open and close doors. This ability could possibly be extended to many other mobs, but for now it's a villager only feature. There is a small bug with this: they can't register wether a door is open or closed, which may lead to villagers being stuck opening an opened door...
- Ocelots are easier to tame and cats can be told to sit.
- Creepers run away from cats and wild ocelots, so they are useful after all.
- Updated language files (now with 50% less profanities!)
- Lava received sounds: well, bubbling in particular, but this will make it easier for the player to know when there's lava around
- Abandoned mineshafts received an extra generation feature: When they cross ravines they won't have any more floating poles, since it will generate bridges between the two ends.

This snapshot has been reuploaded pretty quickly because there was a fatal bug that made the game crash on startup...
Also there were some gameplay bugs that accidentally were added and got fixed in an other release of the snapshot, resulting in a "B" in the end of the current version. these bugs was the Shift-Clicking while crafting consuming all items and giving only one crafted product in return. with this upload also came the ablility of making the cats sit with an empty hand.

Downloads for the client and the server are available for download as usual.

For the next update some flaws are already being fixed. Jon tweeted that the AI will know if a door is open or not.

-TheOtherRetard

Minecraft news

Anyone having the Minecraft pocket edition?
Well, if you have it expect an update during the next week.

As you noticed, there's a bit of door changes comming up in a next update. Jeb has already posted a reddit thread explaining some difficulties on doors in Minecraft (the right hinged doors in a double door are actually lefthinged and opened when closed. This is why they react weird to redstone). this may be changed in the next update but it will require you to check all doors in your world to check if they are still like they should be.

-ThOR

TWP Articles

Oops, I forgot last weeks articles...

Adding them now

Snapshot 12w03a

As punctual as ever Jeb has released a snapshot where
- ladders have regained their collision boxes
- vines are climbable if they have a solid block behind them
- a new jungle biome with new tree types and leaves
- language files got updated
- dispensers with mob eggs will place the mobs instead of giving the egg
- zombies have new path-finding AI
- Wolves have new AI and can be bred

Now I need to update previous written articles... thanks a lot Jeb!
Anyways, I have absolutely no idea why the ladder regained the collision box, but I guess it has something to do with the vines being climbable now...
The jungle biome will eventually also contain biome specific mobs, but they aren't in the snapshot yet.

Go try it out wheneveryou can with the client and the server.

The_Other_Retard, News reporter

Minecraft News

Jon (Kagstrom, the AI programmer) has figured out some of the code and has separated the mobs' viewing direction from their walking direction. This means that when enemy mobs notice you they will keep looking at you while they will follow a path.
Still not sure what this means? Enemy mobs won't walk towards you in a straight line anymore, making it more difficult to predict where they're going and thus making it more difficult to beat them.
For anyone who wonders how this works, go try the newest Snapshot Jeb released, it has the new AI implemented for testing.
Enjoy!

The_Other_Retard, News reporter

Mojang News

The web team has announces that they are working on a decent a support system and account integration, so anyone who has problems with their accounts may be able to have them fixed soon.

Also, a web developper we announced to be joining Mojang, Wollay, decided not to join them after all. He valued his independence more and Notch did the same thing when starting Mojang (Notch would've been hired by Valve if he would've accepted the offer).

For anyone who wasn't online on wednesday the 18th: many of our beloved websites (Minecraft.net, Mojang.com, Playcobalt.com, ...)shut themselves down (even Wikipedia participated) to show people what the net may look like if the SOPA and PIPA bills would've passed in the USA.
Actually this is pretty confronting, because lots of owner of the websites tweeted that they wanted to check out their sites and only remembering they took it down for a day when staring at the blacked out screen.
Minecraft logins weren't affected (as we all noticed), only the in-laucher news feed was bloodred out of protest...
For more info: check Wikipedia or check out the various video's (check TotalBiscuit's here) on youtube. Google is still your friend, don't forget to ask him abouth this.

That's about it for this week, don't forget to check us next week, we will be back with more.
The_Other_Retard, News reporter

Now checking the scheduling options. Makes me forget less...

-ThOR

Weekly Pickaxe articles 14/01

And my most recent articles, as promised, a day after official release of the Weekly Pickaxe.

Minecraft Update 1.1

Finally, an official Minecraft update has appeared. Everything that was in the snapshots has now been added to Vanilla with some extra's and some bugfixes. Let me sum them up:

- Bow enchantments (more on that in Bow Enchantments)
- Flaming arrows will set mobs on fire
- Cheaper Golden Apple recipe (surround an apple with gold nuggets)
- Leaves of normal trees now have a slight chance of dropping Red Apples
- 56 language translations
- Flat world option added, for super flat creative worlds.
- Slightly smoothed color transitions between biomes (No more hard edges on swamp biomes)
- Improved world generation (more hilly landscapes, beaches, ...
- Reduced brewing time to 20 seconds
- Added spawn eggs to creative (the colors of the eggs even look like the mobs)
- Added world type options (currently only super-flat and default)
- Removed collision box from ladders
- Adjusted the collision box on fence gates
- Fence gates react to redstone.
- Sheep eat grass and regain their wool
- Walking on farmland will not trample it, only falling will
- Pumpkins and melons do not need tilled land anymore to grow onto, dirt is fine enough
- Magma Cubes drop magma cream now
- NPC villages now spawn treasure chests in blacksmith shops
- New server settings in Server.properties: level-type, spawn-npcs, generate-structures

But a new update also means mods need to update. Just give the modders some time. No one can predict how fast they will update, just keep in mind modders are also human...

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Bow Enchantments

New thing in the latest Minecraft Update: Bow enchantments! Never mentioned, few times requested, but in the update anyway.
There are 4 enchantments available for the bow: Power, Punch, Infinity and Flame. The names sound pretty obvious, but I'll explain what they do anyway.
Power is simple: arrows shot with this bow deal extra damage. There are 5 levels of this enchantment and a fully charges shot with Power V will one-shot kill any passive mob.
Punch adds knockback to mobs, maxed at level III.
Infinity is maybe the most interesting of all bow enchantments: As long as you have at least one arrow in your inventory you will be shooting infinite arrows. Arrows shot this way are unretrievable, so you can't use them to farm arrows, but hey, you'll have infinite arrows. Only one level available because you can't have more than infinite arrows.
And the last one, Flame, is applied to any flaming arrow in game, so if you shoot an arrow (or a dispencer shoots it) through lava it will automatically receive this enchantment. It's effect is pretty clear: whatever mob the arrow hits will be set on fire. This should be tested on the Enderdragon. This enchantment also has just one level.

After doing some tests on my own (with SSP commands) I concluded it is possible to have a bow with all enchantments in one, you just have to be lucky enough to get it. I got lots of bows with only Power or Punch, got one with Flame and got one with Power V, Infinity I and Punch II... One shot kills on most mobs (zombies need a finishing shot and Endermen are just a genuine Pain In The You-Know-Where) and unlimited arrows as long as the bow isn't broken... I enjoyed myself...

So there you go. Everything on the new bow mechanics.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Minecraft News

So, with the new update all previous snapshots became Vanilla. Now you can spawn mobs with their respective eggs, you can enchant bows and you can't bump into ladders anymore.

Minecraft Pocked Edition will receive an update in early february (february 8th according to Daniel Kaplan) which will include mobs and new blocks. Minceraft Pocket Edition will be going more survival than creative, unlike what the original idea was.

On Minecraft Merchandise: There is already lots of stuff for sale, but there might be added a soon-to-be-released Creeper Plushie (https://twitter.com/notch/status/156007083370745856). the picture is of a test product (with santa hat added) that Notch borrowed from the office. And by borrow he meant steal.

That's about it for general news for this week.
Don't forget to check us next week and see ya until then.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter.

That's about it...
You'll see when I post more.

-ThOR

Turd (yes, anal humor intended) TWP dump

And more incoming:

16/12/2011
Minecraft awards.

Since Minecraft recently won the Video Game Award of "Best Indie title" I would like to do a small retrospective on the awards Minecraft got until now.

When Minecraft still was in alpha it already was recommended to be played by Rock Paper Shotgun, the Daily Record, Penny Arcade and Good Game. After this it only got better.
In December 2010 Good Game selected Minecraft as their choice for "Best Downloadable Game of 2010" title and Gamasutra named it the eighth best game of the year as well as the eighth best indie game of the year. More awards for "Best game of the year" were from Indie DB, Rock Paper Shotgun and PC Gamer UK.

At the March 2011 Independent Games Festival Minecraft was nominated for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize, Technical Excellence, and Excellence in Design awards and received the community-voted Audience Award. At Game Developers Choice Awards 2011 Minecraft won the award for Best debut game, Best downloadable game and Most Innovative game award, winning every award for which it was nominated and also winning the GameCity's videogame arts prize.
On May 5, 2011, Minecraft was selected as one of the 80 games that will be displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum as part of "The Art of Video Games" exhibit that will open on March 16, 2012. And as we reported last week: even TIME Magazine has awarded Minecraft as highest in the top10 Games of 2011.

The most noted qualities that are cited for describing the awesomeness of Minecraft is primarily the freedom you get when playing the game as well as the simple but innovative way the game is designed. The biggest flaw is the lack of tutorial. Yes, you can find tutorials everywhere on the internet, but you must actually tab out or close the game, google it and find a instructive one as opposed to an easy ingame one...

And so all this lead to the VGA of 2011 wher Minecraft won the award for Best Independent Game and received third place for best PC game.
It has to be noted that since Minecraft development still is going on thanks to Jeb this may not be the last of awards Minecraft will receive.

I'll continue keeping a close eye on Minecraft news for you.
The_Other_Retard

Weekly Snapshot 11w50a

As weekly a "snapshot" is released by Jeb, with the client.jar (http://bit.ly/scPOSm) and the server.jar (http://bit.ly/sT51vw) downloadable for testing.
Much wasn't added, as Jeb was squashing some bugs that were in the previous Snapshot.
The changes in this version are: the sheep's grass eating has been expanded to tall grass, the Language support has improved, a few multiplayer spam protections were added and a few lines were added to the splash texts (those little yellow lines that bounce on the Minecraft Menu screen).

One thing I failed to tell with the previous Snapshot was the addition of mob-spawn-eggs. This gives you the ability to give yourself "mob eggs" in creative mode which spawns a mob when right-clicking and since they won't despawn anymore you can make add mobs to your custom maps and be sure they will still be there when someone plays it.

The_Other_Retard

Mojang News

The Mojang team and Oxeye Game Studio are working hard on getting Cobalt ready for pre-orders. For now the game is Windows only and heavily under construction. At the final release it supposed to have a full game editor to make complete game levels from scratch as well as new characters and npc's. The release of the pre-orders should also mean the new Mojang Account system will be up and running.

Mojang also started hiring more people to become "the most influential indie game development studio on Earth". They are only looking for developers at the moment, but this might change as the company will grow. Carl Manneh had more than 3000 applications to review and respond to in a few days. One is already hired, but he will only be revealed once the contracts are made.

People playing Minecraft in Europe at early hours (or very late in America) may have noticed the login servers were down a few times to update them. Everyone was warned by a big red box in the Minecraft News feed in the launcher. Everything went well thanks to Mollstam doing all-nighters.

We will be watching Mojang and Minecraft for you, tune in next week for even more.

The_Other_Retard

--------------------------------------------

Griefers

You may already have heard the next about Minecraft: "It gives the player complete freedom to do what they want". Like it or not, this also applies to griefers. Minecraft restricts very little in how much you can manipulate in the game. This was like this in alpha/classic and still is in the released version.

Do I support griefers? Yes and no.
Yes: they are playing and enjoying minecraft in their way, I can not forbid them from doing so.
And no: I wouldn't like them on my server or on a server I'm playing on.
But since Minecraft allows all this any server Admin should have the sense of limiting the actions of griefers. For example by adding a whitelist, by installing mod-monitoring tools (tools that allow mods and admins to see what modifications other players have while they're playing on the server (like x-ray mods, speedhacks, minimaps, Buildcraft, ...)) or simply by being online most of the time and banning griefers whenever they see one.

Also: don't provoke griefers. If you make a forumpost and type: "Iz hav new server, NO GREIFERZ!! I KILL THEM!!" you may expect griefers logging in to see how well you are at killing them while they grief the hell out of your server.

Another also: People tend to forget Minecraft is a game that comes with griefers progammed in the system (Creepers, Endermen and not to forget the Bane of Wooden Structures: Lightning), so being angry at player-griefers isn't that much of a point worth defending.

In short: a griefer destroying stuff on a server is not the griefers fault, he's just playing the game how he wants it. Whose fault is it then? The server admins for allowing these kind of players to the game.



--------------------------------------------
7/01/2012
Notch News:
Since there is very little news on Minecraft since our last issue so I bring you Notch news.

As he did a few times now Notch has joined the Ludum Dar contest where programmers receive a theme on which they must deliver a working in 48 hours. Notch liked his entry more than usual and continued it, making a christmas version of it and renaming it from Minicraft over to finally Minitale (and "snagging" the .com and .net domains for it). Only Notch knows where this is going.

In slightly related news: Notch has been voted "Person of the year 2011" on IGN.com. Yes, there were jokes and there were too much stating "Person of the Year is Persson!".

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter

Minecraft News
Most recent news states that Jeb finally has figured out what the imperative "fix ladders" meant (as stated in many tweets adesed to him) and he fixed it right away. Since Twitter doesn't allow very long messages the report itself is pretty cryptical and it's not shure what exactly got fixed.
Jeb and Notch both stated that the collision box for ladders got removed, what might result in some adventure-map puzzles becoming a lot more difficult, but this still isn't really confirmed.

Jon Kagstrom, the new AI programmer in Team Mojang is currently working on improving the AI in Minecraft (not yet in the Snapshot). His work will make it easier to add new behaviours to mobs. First goal will be adding breeding support to wolves, after that will follow more useful/interesting villagers.

Once I know more I'll report here.
The_Other_Retard, News Reporter

Mojang News:
Mojang hired some new people! Kristoffer Jelbring (@KrisJelbring) and Jon Kagstrom (@jonkagstrom). Jelbring is "a true Javascript ninja" according to Carlmanneh and will be mostly working on web stuff, while Kagstrom appears to be the promised AI programmer for both Minecraft and Scrolls. They haven't got a Mojang cartoony avatar yet, Junkboy should be working on it.

In other news: Cobalt is releasing smoothly, so I guess, since there's still no counter to see how many people already bought it. On Youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDKFG8TzdO4) there are bugs being pointed out, custom maps being developed, just like custom map building tutorials...
During alpha (the current stage) Singleplayer and co-op General campaigns should be developed decently, just like multiplayer maps. For the "customizeable content" only the level editor is planned, while character, sound, weapons and background editors will follow after beta. The prices for Cobalt will be pretty much like Minecraft: 10 euro in alpha, 15 in beta, 20 after release.
For anyone who wants to check it out or play it in alpha: Cobalt Homepage (http://playcobalt.com/).

And Mojang hired one more. Now it's Wollay, currently making Cube World (http://wollay.blogspot.com/). It's a big, procedurally generated world, made of cubes, where you can mine, craft and build. BUT it's an RPG and not even playable except for the lucky few that help programming it. Notch has stated (http://i.imgur.com/OcGYF.png) Mojang will connect a keyboard to Wollay's brain and sell whatever game comes out. Except for that part everything is looking good for Mojang.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Weekly Snapshot 12w01a

And another Snapshot got released with the following updates:
- Languages have been updated
- Color transitions between biomes got "slightly smoothed" (I sure hope they fixed the swamp transitions).
- Brewing time is now 20 seconds
- Enchantment tables are less random (still trying to figure out what this means)
- spawning eggs got colors more representing the mob they spawn
- Biome changes! In general they got more varied, but when starting a new world you can now choose between 'super-flat' and 'default'
- collision boxes on ladders got removed
- collision boxes on fence gates got aligned with the fences

Modding API is underway, but far from implemented...

The_Other_Retard, your favourite News reporter

 That's about it. I'll be posting all new articles the day after the Weekly Pickaxe will be updated

That's all for now

-ThOR

Second TWP Articles dump

Dumping more

As many of you probably have heard or argued: Minecraft looks a lot like Lego. It invites for creativity, with a couple of blocks and some imagination you can make interesting stuff and the possibilities are almost endless.
Now Minecraft and Lego are getting even closer together.

Lego recently launched a new service, called Cuusoo where subscribers can post ideas for "the next lego product". After some heavily supported ideas of the Minecraft community Mojang decided to add their own entry. Mojang also encourages the community to come up with creative ideas on what could be possible done with Lego, as some already have showed.

How well was the response for the Mojang entry? Well, it got the required 10.000 supports in less than 2 days and caused at least 3 server crashes at Lego because of high traffic.
The Lego Cusoo team responded the Minecraft idea went on to the "review phase" where a professional Lego Jury will examine the concept on general Marketing strategies (as any other Lego product must go through). It may take 2 weeks before a go/no-go decision will be made.
After this comes the Design phase, a Production run and finally the release after several months.
This may seem a long time, but hey, you'll be able to play Minecraft even in Real Life!



by The_Other_Retard
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Weekly Snapshot 49

As promised a Weekly Snapshot got released again. Now sheep eat grass so their wool regrows, the farmland problems got fixed together with some bugs and last but not least: Languages got added.
Now for the languages, they aren't finished yet, so there might be some bad translations, some may be missing and some may be just plain ridiculous. Originally Jeb relied on the entire internet for help on translating the stuff, but since the entire internet isn't famous for being nice the file got griefed and it became limited to dedicated members of the community.
Client .jar is for download here
Server .jar is for download here

For anyone wondering: the version number is YYwWWx, where YY is the current year, WW is the current week (yes, it's the 49th week already) and x is "a", but may turn to "b" or even "c" if there are more snapshots released in that week...

The_Other_Retard
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Mojang News - Account Overhaul

As Mojang is expanding, developping new games and attracting more people they decided to improve their account system, so it will be useable with all Mojang Games (Cobalt, Scrolls and maybe future ones).

With the new account system Players will be able to have multiple profiles on one account.
The sign in name will be the e-mail adress, while profile names will be changeable but they will be unique for every Mojang game. There's been a discussion going on on Reddit for anyone who wants to comment on it. A problem that surfaced was the whitelisting of accounts: if you change your name you may not be whitelisted on your server anymore (Mollstam is looking into it).

The reason for this change is to keep it simple for people playing minecraft and want to play other Mojang games and to be able to have several Minecraft profiles under the same roof.

This account change will happen some time soon, so Cobalt will be able to use it, while the almost 18 million (4 million of them premium) Minecraft accounts may optionally (starting an undefined date) do this until a big overhaul early next year.

The_Other_Retard
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What's going on with Minecraft?

Notch may still be on vacation playing Skyrim (as stated by himself at the end of an interview), but Jeb is giving Minecraft the development that was promised us. He has rementioned a idea that was mentioned by Notch some time ago: in-game books with customiseable content. This will be helping adventure map maker a lot, since they wouldn't need to cover entire walls in signs or add a load of message.txt files to their maps so they can tell a story (maybe even custom made paintings that notch has mentioned to have the same file-handling system).

Minecraft Pocket edition for Android was on sale for 10 cents in euro's, pounds or dollars for a day. A survival mode for the Pocket edition is officially anounced, but they warned it will be a bit different from the PC version to fit the touch interface. No dates are anounced yet.

Reviews keep praising Minecraft and not just on the usual Gamer websites. Wednesday was announced Minecraft received the first place in the TIME's Top 10 Games of 2011, rated higher than Portal 2, Skyrim and Battlefied 3.

That's about all for this week, I'll be back next week with more news

I hope the HTML codes translate well when posting

-ThOR

First TWP articles

Ok, I noticed I actually also write lots of stuff for the Weekly Pickaxe. I decided to also post articles I wrote on here, to have a bit of an archive of stuff I wrote.
This will first of all be a dump of articles of previous issues...

First is the first few articles I wrote for TWP

 Minecraft News December 2nd 2011
By The_Other_Retard.

Minecon is over and Minecraft finally got released, now what?

Well, Minecraft development goes on, even if Notch is taking a break for a while Jeb is full on squashing bugs where Wiki members point him to.

But even if Minecraft 1.0 is already out for almost a week there are still some mods waiting to be updated. Main reason was the dependency of lot of mods on Minecraft Coder Pack, which got released only a few days ago. Lots of modpacks still are waiting for some core mods to be updated
The Technic pack for example still is missing an IndustrialCraft², as Buildcraft is already available for the Final Release.
Because of this lots of mods provide support for earlier versions of Minecraft, especially 1.8.1, while Minecraft Nostalgia and Minecraft Downgrader enjoy lots of downloads...

A very positive aspect of the most recent update is the absence of th usual patch-updates. There's been only one and only for the server.jar, so most Minecrafters are still playing the 1.0.0 version. The reason for this almost unusual update is the "leaking" of PreRelease files, basically unfinished versions of the game so the Minecraft Community could test the game for bugs and glitches. Most of it was communicated with Jeb through MinecraftWiki pages, which resulted in a very smooth Minecraft release.
A fun fact with these PreReleases was the accidental presence of some debug features, like the 1x1 glass towers in Prerelease 3, or the Camera Mode in PreRelease 5. It was very quickly communicated (mostly through Twitter) that they were debug features.

One feature Notch said he felt sorry for not being in the most recent update was the Modding API, as he was promising this for a long time, but it should be added very soon.

Yesterday (December 1st) Jeb released a "weekly Minecraft snapshot", a .jar file of minecraft with the version of Minecraft Jeb is working on at the moment. This gives voluteers of the Community the opportunity to dive in and search for bugs to help Jeb in debugging it further. Downloadlinks are on the [url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/topic/833222-new-prerelease-is-available/]Minecraft Forums[/url] and on [url=http://twitter.com/#!/jeb_/statuses/142250239871561729]Twitter[/url].


-----JUST IN-----

Notch has anounced on his [url=http://notch.tumblr.com/post/13633493969/och-med-dom-orden-sa-passar-jag-micken]Tumblr Blog[/url] that from now on Jeb will be the lead developper of Minecraft. This in fact doesn't change much as Jeb already was doing the major part of the development, but now he will be officially in charge of Minecraft while Notch will be helping out as well as starting a new project.
So Jeb will working on Minecraft by himself until January when a new programmer will be joining him. Jeb feels his main responsibility now will be creating a Modding API, but he warns the release will be not sooner than March.


That's about all about the state of Minecraft at the moment.
I hope to write more.

- ThOR



Outtakes:

For those who didn't or couldn't make it to Minecon there are lots (really LOTS) of video's, blogs, vlogs, tweets, threads and post to be found only about it. Just a simple Google search will do to give you enough stuff to fill some hours of not playing Minecraft.(didn't want to add this as it's pretty obvious for everyone who follows minecraft stuff)

 That was one ... I think I'll need a few posts to dump all this...

*opening next .txt file*
Hrrm, even more...
Ok, next one will be spread over 2 posts.

On Minecraft

The context you may find my name most in is probably Minecraft.

For anyone who doesn't know what it is: Minecraft is a voxel based sandbox game, sandbox in a way that every block your world is made of can be picked up and placed elsewhere. As stated a few times, it technically isn't a game where you get to complete a set goal or kill baddies all the time. Sure, sometimes the baddies pop up and you wave a sword at them until they go away, but that's mostly not why you are there for.
I'm there for experimenting, for building, for community and awesomeness. A dragon-rollercoaser-mountain, some TNTcannons, a viking-styled longhouse, a Sphinx and an underground jumpy-dangercourse are some of my builds and I enjoyed building them, trying to figure out how to get some stuff to work best.

One thing with Minecrafts highly propagated freedom is you are also free to join a server and annoy other people for your own fun. One (popular) example is Team Avolition on Youtube. As I wrote in a story for the Weekly Pickaxe I do not hate them for doing their stuff, I must say I enjoyed watching Team Avo's videos, but I DO hate them for destroying my stuff.
But hell, I can't blame them, the only one to blame is the server owner for not protecting their server well enough.
And I'm glad I don't own a server.

Anyways.
For some reason I really like playing Minecraft.
I like it so much that I'm still actively playing it after having it for over a year. Only CounterStrike 1.6 has done longer... Well, the main reason most people play is because there still are updates to the game's content. For example my brother got bored playing Minecraft a few months ago and a few days back decided to fire it up again. Now he's amazed by the ravines (he already covered the walls of one in wood and made it his home), he's digging through the forums and the wiki just to see what he missed and he keep bothering me with questions.

I even am participating in a Minecraft Magazine (as said before, the Weekly Pickaxe) as a news writer. Also, I have to say, while typing all this I actually should be promoting it as it's fourth issue is ready. Anyone who wants to follow Minecraft news, read Minecraft stories or just see some Minecraft stuff: head over there. Weekly updates will keep you up to date.

I'm trying to figure out what else I could say, but I think this is about it.
To anyone reading this: I hope you enjoyed it and till the next time.

-ThOR

Online Activity

Oh, and might anyone wonder: Yes, I'm the same as The_Other_Retard on Minecraft and the Minecraft forums. And yes, I'm also the news reporter on the Weekly Pickaxe.
Yes, I'm also on Steam, all with the same name (underscores may be optional).

That's all for now

But I'm dissapointed by the way too small entry...

-ThOR