Half-Life

Let me start by saying this is all my opinion. I'm not the most professional or the most subjective on this matter so I won't be mad if you disagree, that's where you can use the comments.

All pictures i use in this article are taken from their respective Wikipedia pages... 

So yeah, I've played through pretty much all official versions of Half-Life (Half-Life, Half-Life 2 (I'll abbreviate them with HL and HL2), Episode 1 and Episode 2) and I liked it.

Why?

Well, the games don't consider their players to be the largest retards ever. In the first game there wasn't a tutorial incorporated in the story (you could play the tutorial if you really wanted to know what ways of movement are possible but nothing too complicated...) and in the second one it was a very minimalistic one in a (later in the game unexisting) HUD popup (wsad to move and picking stuff up).
Further on there are no indication of where to go to, which way to go or what to do, you have to figure that out for yourself. Of course there's only one right way which becomes obvious after a few tries, but still, that isn't too obvious from the start.
The game does tell you a lot of things indirectly. When introducing a new enemy for example it does this from a distance and mostly while fighting something else so you already know how it attacks and how to avoid it. Usually there are a few health packs lying around for the hard learners and the usual way of killing it is by firing a lot of bullets at it.

The game takes its time to give you a weapon. In the first one you get the crowbar pretty early, but only receive a gun once someone carrying it dies. Later you may find a shotgun laying in some guard's locker or an assault rifle after you've shot a trooper... It's never handed to you, you have to "earn" it in some way.

Introducing new areas happens in an interesting way. For example Ravenholm in HL2. Before you even get there you hear the sentence "We... We don't go to Ravenholm".
Eventually you wander in and see some improvised traps, mangled zombie limbs and some booming voice you are not sure to trust. Combine this with a new howling zombie type, a town without any visible human residents and a pitch black night and you have one hell of a level.
Sure, everything is linear, But it doesn't feel that way. There are no invisible walls, if the level designer doesn't want you to go some way there is a pretty good reason for. A giant canyon, a huge wall or a radio-active river prevent you from wandering off course.
Sure, in the original game some level elements aren't logical ("Why is there a railing here?", "How would anyone get up here?", "Where was this ladder supposed to lead to?") but this is less the case in HL2. Not only that, but the source engine in HL2 was used to its maximum to show off that can be done. This with an improved level design makes HL2 one of the best looking games I can run on my laptop.

The Half-Life series ware also the inspiration for many mods that in some cases became even more popular than the original game. CounterStrike, Portal and Team Fortress are all spin-offs or mods from one of the HL games and have a huge player base.
There is even a Half-Life revisited mod available for free, called Black Mesa, that recreates the original story of HL in a more recent Source engine, making it more beautiful to play and still keeping as close as possible to the original story. Only the last chapter is unfinished and should be released some time next year.
The mod didn't just take all the original HL models and placed them in the Source engine like Half-Life: Source did? The team recreated most of the models and sometimes they used models from HL2 or Garry's mod. They also re-imagined most of the levels so every platform has a (closed) door leading onto it, every ladder seems to have a purpose and sometimes they improved the design of some levels to look better.

It made me ooh and aah more than once, laugh at some details and sometimes jump up from my chair when something jumps out of a dark corner... I'll embed their launch trailer which shows only in-game footage. It's just incredibly beautifu

There is even a comparison video that compares the first few scenes of the original with the Black-Mesa version. IGN did a commentary video with two Half-Life veterans where they give their opinion on what's awesome about the game.

Best part of all: Half-Life has no cutscenes. if you have a gun and a guard is giving you directions of where to go you can go and shoot him, cutting off his monologue and continue playing the game. If that guard was supposed to open up the next part of the level you're stuck. There is also a lot that can be going on in the background (a scene comes to mind where a scientist smashes a headcrab with a monitor, but still gets headhumped by one behind his back) which you can miss without being too much in a rush, which may be not optimal, but you as player of the game stay in control of your character at all times.
Compare that to some modern shooter (Spunkgargleweewee if you like) where you as Tanker McTank get bitchslapped around by some dude with only a handgun while you have a minigun on your back but can't use it because it's a cutscene...

Anyways, I like the Half-Life series a lot, if you haven't figured it out yet. I recommend you to go and play at least one of these games to know for sure what I've been talking about..

Thank you for reading all this and see you next time.

-ThOR

Angels

I've talked earlier about spirit, souls and bodies, and somehow I believe in angels. How could i possibly connect that as they are more than just material creatures and still manage to exist somehow on the material plane (you can call it the "dimension" of matter).

Well, inspiration for my view on angels come from the "His Dark Materials"-trilogy by Philip Pullman.

Angels are ancient and immortal beings whose true form is composed of intelligence and feeling, since they are structures of Dust. 

Angels are creatures with a spirit, a soul and a body, but their body is an abstract something. They don't consist of material, so their form is not fixed. They appear to us as we think they should appear, we see them as we expect them to be seen.
If you think they are all sexless and winged, then they are. If you think they are all child Putti like many baroque painters imagined them to be, then they are. There are many ways to perceive angels because they are immaterial, our minds give them an appearance.
What that appearance is is not important to them, but they still need some place in the world to occupy, otherwise they would not exist.

Believing or not believing doesn't matter. If your mind cannot give they an appearance they'll be just a voice if they need to transfer a message to you, or a bright light if they need to show you something or whatever you more can imagine, as that's what limits your mind from seeing them.

Why would they need to be seen, why would they need to contact us, why do they exist?
Those are big questions we can't even answer for ourselves, but important is that they with their knowledge and their existence in this world can transfer messages from forces even greater than ours.
So why?
God knows why, and we can only guess.

There's one angel that I find interesting. This idea is not exactly from the above-mentioned trilogy, although a slightly inspired. Death.
Yes, Death too is an angel.
Maybe a bit of rephrasing is necessary: Your own death is an angel.

There are many stories about people meeting their Death. Greek mythology had Thanatos, we have the Grim Reaper (not necessary cloaked skeleton with a scythe) and there are many more personifications to be found on wikipedia and seeing most of them predicts an untimely death, sometimes even creating a "self-fulfilling prophecy" (man sees his Death-vision, runs from it and because he ran he dies/passes away/causes a lethal accident/dies of a stroke).

A few interesting examples are the Japanese "Shinigami" (very close to the western Grim Reaper they represent a horrible creature, not necessarily a skeleton (not even humanoid) and haunt people dealing with death or who are about to die), the "Doppelgänger" (an unexisting twin who is often just seen by the person he's impersonating, sometimes by more, puzzling all of them, sometimes no more but a shadow of the person), known deceased friends (calling to join them in death) and many more.

Reason for so many "visions" of death?
They are angels.
They bring the message of "You're going to die" or "Remember you're mortal" which are basically the same.
Don't get me wrong, they don't kill people, they just tend to be present at those moments. And again, they rely on the mind of the person to be perceived. Some may be accompanied constantly by their Death, others may never see it. Or they may see one after they passed away to guide them to wherever they go after this life.

I often think immortal people are in constant company of their own Death angel. These immortals would have to find a way to live with their Death, even though they can't experience it. They can hate them and try to run away from them, or they could accept them and see them as an old friend.

Speaking of immortals, there is this Dorian Grey, a guy who sold his soul for immortality and transferring his aging to a portrait of himself. In some way this portrait also could've been seen as an angel of death, as it reminds Dorian of every year that has passed without him aging and keeping every wound that was inflicted to him.
This lasted until Dorian Grey couldn't bear to look at it anymore and put a knife into the portraits heart and so killing himself.

I have no idea what I will do if I ever see my own Death. Now I think I could live with it, but I'm afraid that may not be the case when the moment actually comes. Anyways, I'll write some more until that moment comes, so I'll see you next time.

-ThOR

Lecture - Literature

Let me start off by saying I haven't read a lot.
Very probably did I read more than most people of my age, but I still could've read more. I remember sitting on the bus/tram/train and wishing I had a book to read. It wouldn't matter what book, just anything to read.
Yes, I could spend that time listening to music, but my iPod is dying (barely a few hours battery life in normal (20°C) temperatures, "Back/REW" and "Play" button are refusing to work (thank you Center Button for not giving up on me), so I expect I'll need to replace it with something else by next year) and I often forget to stop by the library to pick up a book.
But thanks to friends I sometimes have something to read...

Anyways, back on topic.

Recently (today, that is) I finished the "Hunger Games" book. The first one that is (No, I haven't watched the movie, maybe I'll download it next year... or maybe I could convince someone to go to the cinema with me...) and I'm hoping my brother will find the sequels fast enough so I can finish the story.

But I don't like the writing style.

Don't get me wrong, it's a page turner once you get into the story (read it from begin to end in less than 2 days) but there aren't any passages where you can feel the translator had a hard time translating something that is very specific for the English language.
Yes, I read a Dutch translation, but I don't expect reading it in English would improve the story in any manner.

Let me bring in another story for comparison. One that many know, that isn't too complicated and that also has a movie coming up. (Sheesh, did I get distracted for a few hours while trying to copy that link...) (To those hesitant to click the link: it's "The Hobbit")
I've read the story in both Dutch and English and believe me when I say that the latter is way more enjoyable. The first time I read it I needed a dictionary to figure out some words (oh, the synonyms for walking) but I liked it all the more.

If we go even further down the way of literature we find Gormenghast.
I've read it a few years back, but I must say I'm still impressed by what the writer (Mervyn Peake) did with it.
It doesn't have a clear theme in which it's written. At first sight you may say it's "Fantasy"... But once you're reading you notice there isn't any magic happening, there are no characters that aren't human by definition (although lots of them are brute caricatures of humans) and everything seems plausible, since it may happen if some castle would've grown from the roman age and slowly progressing in size, building styles, functionality and weirdness to finally end up like the humongous castle that's described.
"Fiction" covers too much of what the book actually is and "Historical Fiction" isn't correct as there is absolutely no attachment to our existing world. In my opinion "Surreal" is the most fitting description.
Let me give you a quote from the book (found on the Wiki):

Mr. Flay appeared to clutter up the doorway as he stood revealed, his arms folded.... It did not look as though such a bony face as this could give normal utterance, but rather that instead of sounds, something more brittle, more ancient, something drier would emerge, something more in the nature of a splinter or a fragment of stone. Nevertheless, the harsh lips parted. "It's me," he said, and took a step forward, his joints cracking as he did so. His passage across a room -- in fact his passage through life -- was accomplished by these cracking sounds, one per step, which might be likened to the breaking of dry twigs.

Here is described one of my favorite characters is the series.
I bet none of you know anyone like this Mr. Flay, now try to imagine him... May be kinda hard, lacking a lot more info on it, but I imagine most of the characters as cartoon characters instead of trying to compare them to real people.

But the book provides more than just strange characters. If you plan on reading it be prepared for pages filled with descriptions of a river running through a landscape, "hopping" from character to character while you're reading (you start with one, he meets someone, you hop on to that character, another encounter, another hop, and so on...), passages of "Internal monologue", changes in telling perspective, ... A real feast for people enjoying the art of writing.

And here's the big thing I miss in a lot of stories. The art of writing the story. Not just telling it in a way so we know what's happening, but using the language you're writing in to the fullest to tell the story.
Sure, the Hunger Games lured me in because of the story, but I miss the joy of language. The playing with sentences to make some parts stand out, the vocabulary enrichment I kinda expect every book to be...

But hey. I'm not going to ignore books because of this, I just wanted to point out some things I would like to see more in modern literature.

I'm not saying my parts here are pure literature... I don't really think about the sentences, I just write whatever comes into mind, as some may have noticed...

But I'd rather read something more complicated (Maybe I'll once try to read Finnegans wake, but not very soon) instead of another "high fantasy" story where Elf and Dwarf and Man fight with/against each other and Light tries to defeat the Dark...

Anyways, I said enough on this topic for now.
If anyone has propositions for books to read, tell me in the comments.

Thank you for reading.

-ThOR

The Other R*****

Dear readers.

A few days back I happened to be in the center of a heated discussion concerning my name.
Quite unsettling for me as it's the very first discussion on the internet with me in the center of it (mostly I'm what some call a lurker, I don't really say much)

I had registered on the forum of Notch's new game (0x10^c, may you wonder) and I posted a small introductory post saying hi and stating who I am...

First reply is made by someone named Comet:

Nice post, but please let me know if your name is intended to be funny or an attack at people who think it is? If it's the prior, change your name. It's offensive, and even though i take it you don't mean it, you should know better.

Until now I still don't actually know what the guy meant, I just sent him a PM as a request for more information on his arguments.

And why could I use my name for about 3 years without anyone pointing this out to me?
A short list to all my identities as TheOtherRetard or alike on the internet:

• CounterStrike (and Steam in general) 
• LeagueOfLegends 
• O-Game 
• Minecraft
• CastleStoryOnline
• Twitter
• Youtube
• here
• Wikis
• Weekly Pickaxe
• ... (This is just what I could remember from the top of my head, if you Google me you may find even more...)

So yeah, on all those communities, on all those websites, after my 400+ posts on the Minecraft forum only 2 have openly opposed and demanded me to change my name because of possible offensiveness...

First of all: I don't use the word Retard as an offensive word. In my opinion it's used for someone who acts stupid. And I do lots of stupid stuff...

Let me tell you a bit more about myself.
I know what it's like to be called names. I was that one kid that liked to play alone, I was that kid that was the first one of my class to wear glasses (at the age of 7), I was that kid that didn't do or say much during lessons, but still could score above average on most tests...
Per definition I was the one they (the other kids, you know which ones) picked on. Well, me and the fat kid. And when they were picking on the fat kid I never participated, just because it wasn't as fun as they made it look like...

Anyways, this made me have quite an aversion from calling names cursing and stuff, which I still have (if you hear/read me cursing you know I'm agitated...). So when i use the word Retard I mostly just refer to myself...

Oh, I didn't tell about the creation of TheOtherRetard.
It dates a few years back, to when I was playing Counterstrike 1.6 with my (younger) brother. One day we had the idea to name ourselves alike and have some kind of a "clan" feeling. After some suggestions we stopped on "Retard", since we never took ourselves quite seriously and did a lot of stupid stuff while playing the game...
This discussion was followed by a few days of me being away from the computer and when I came back my brother had taken "The_Retard". I quickly settled for "The_Other_Retard" and we went on shooting...

And I liked being the Other Retard. No-one expects much from me, so when I screw up they can say "What a retard!" ending up with me smiling.

One letter too long to fit on a sign...

Ever since that I kept on using the name for pretty much every other game I played, just to have something of a continuity. After the realization that my name was 1 letter too long to fit on a Minecraft sign I dropped the underscores in other games and went on playing.

It never occurred to me people could consider my name as an insult as I clearly name myself a retard, and no one else.

After all that time I'm proud of that name, I'm identifying myself with it and I don't plan on dropping the name because 2 people (of the millions on the internet) want me to change it.

I ended up changing my name as they added "Slurs and insults" to the Forum Name Rules, so I'm now registered as "ThOR"...
I won't fight this decision, there's been enough discussion on it. I'll still use "TheOtherRetard" as a first choice, "ThOR" if Retard is considered insulting and if that's taken I'll think of something similar.

Anyways, thank you for having read all this. If you have any comments, please post them, I'll respond on them as soon as possible.

-ThOR

PS: The story hasn't ended yet, there is a Part 2 of this post.

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

Religion

I want to tell you about my opinion on religion.

I believe in a God, in an allmighty being. How to call this being doesn't matter to me, be it God(s), Allah, Jehovah, Zeus and Hades (and an entire parade of other characters), Mystical power(s) of Nature or whatever name you want to give it...
I call It for convenience God.

But I admit I do not (and can not) know for sure what It is, or even if It's aware of us.

To clarify this I've heard a very good comparison:
So you have the 3 dimensions. you can observe these 3 dimensions, move in them, feel everything that's in those 3 dimensions and manipulate it with the right tools.
Now, if you think logically the next dimension is time (as I said in an earlier post). None of us (beings in these 3 dimensions) have control over Time. We know it's there, we know it goes on, we can name it and imagine grasping it, but we can't control it.
Now imagine a being that HAS control over time. It lives within these 4 dimensions and can  observe it,  move in it and manipulate it. This being is everywhere, knows everything and can observe the limits of our 3 dimensional space.
This being would be God.
This being may also be not only in his kind.
But we don't know all of this because we're like the Flatlanders looking at the 3rd dimension.

Remember Flatland?
The world where everything is two-dimensional.
Where two-dimensional beings reside, live, die, ... are.
We can kinda imagine something like it, because we can represent it by taking a sheet of paper and draw something two-dimensional on it.
But still, these Flatlanders...
We've never seen them and we don't know if we ever change things in that Flatland they live in.

And that may be the same with the 4th dimensional beings... They may have the freedom over Time, but they may have no idea if and how they influence us...

Or they may, we can't know...

But anyway, back to religion.

As I'm raised as a Christian (Greco-Catholic I think, it's hard if you have eastern European roots) I know and accept Christian faith as my own. Yet I do not judge others based on religion or from the point of view of the religion.
As my friends tend to be quite various in their belief: Mostly atheïst, a few Muslim, some Christian and even a Jehova's Witness, all in one group of friends. Yes, we do have differences in opinion and we acknowledge them, but we won't fight each other just to get the others to believe something else.
This is how I would see the perfect community.

But then again. We aren't more than people, we have flaws and that's why the Perfect Community will never exist on a bigger scale.
These imperfection is also why I don't believe in the Church as an institution. Going to church isn't that important for me, actually believing is harder and gives you more...

On a side note: I don't quite believe the "God creating us after his image". I think this is humanity giving God a relatable figure, as we tend to personificate quite a few things...

I see believing or not believing as a matter of opinion. It's completely personal and it shouldn't be used to attack and kill others because they tend to disagree with your belief/opinion. Just accept that other people may tend to disagree with you...

Heh, turns out my opinion on religion is that it's an opinion.

Phew, I think this post deserves the label "long"...
If you tend to disagree with things I said you may use the comments to tell me what you didn't like about it...


-ThOR

P.S.: Let's add something:

tl;dr: I believe and that's an opinion. Face it.

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

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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.



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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

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.