Roblox (talking in past tense; not sure how much of this is still true) allowed you to create "Places", which were basically 3D interactive universes that consisted of a few primitive parts (rect. prisms, cylinders, etc.) arranged and connected to each other, as larger solid objects, or with hinges. It was, in other words, a multi-player physics sanbox. Also, the use of the word "place" instead of "game" is interesting to note; as a child, it felt like they could really be anything, with no particular expectations.
I don't remember when Lua scripting was added - I think it was around 2008-2009 or somethng - but it allowed you to perform simple event-based programming, registering clicks/deaths/collisions/etc and manipulating the game world. As a child I saw this as a form of magic. What would otherwise be a physics sandbox with inanimate objects interacting in a strictly mechanistic fashion became one in which anything could happen. You know, magic. Maybe that sounds stupid, but that was my thinking.
So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard. I am still pursuing this goal. Also, RIP Erik Cassel. His tutorials were one of my first - if not my first - introduction to programming ever. He died too soon.
You may have already found it, but Fred Brooks's little essay on why programming is fun has always resonated with me [0]:
> The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. [...]
> Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.
It follows that, maybe we programmers should see ourselves as working class poets or writers.
Weaving our magic words like wizards casting their spells, with every line written, we watch as our work of fantasy hardens into reality.
Our faithful computer always does our will.
With infinite patience, it takes our every instruction until each one has been precisely executed, down to the last word.
A bit idyllic, true, because there is always the dark side, the bugs. But otherwise, pure magic.
And, nothing wrong with other professions, but, more that 20 years after starting out, I can still remember why I wanted to be a programmer.
>So I became a programmer because I wanted to be a wizard
that's a classic MIT AI lab idea.
"We'll actually see that Computer so-called-Science actually has a lot in common with magic."[0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY 0:40, and a lot in the SICP textbook
all your rblx info is still true, by the way. there's a lot more you can script with too, including internal and external API integration, inter-game info transfer, transactions, all kinds of stuff.
And yes they moved the license server from a Mojang server to the MS login system, but what is the real difference here? You still have to login, you just don't like MS for unrelated reasons.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server
It's getting there, though. They recently introduced the framework for more advanced mods. Heck, Create Mod is even available on Bedrock now.
I started programming with Bukkit and hMod in Minecraft, so I am so happy to help others learn to program with Minecraft!
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/minecraft/creator/document...
> Minecraft mods were how a lot of teenagers got acquainted with scripting, and it's a lot harder to get started with your own server since MS bought it and forced it to authenticate through Azure.
First off, the pivot from mods to running a server is sort of related, I guess? But it's not at all clear how your complaints about servers have any bearing on the modding, which is still very much there. The Minecraft Forge docs are better than ever [0], there are 3000+ mods on Curseforge already compatible with 1.21 and 5000+ compatible with 1.20. That a lot of kids have moved to other games has more to do with the ephemeral nature of childhood entertainment than it does with Microsoft stifling modding in any way.
Second, I'm not at all sure what you mean about servers being harder to set up. Here are the instructions for setting up a Minecraft server [1]. The instructions actually seem substantially shorter than I remember them being from back in the day, most of the bullet points are just explanations for various settings you could configure. (EDIT: Just to be sure I decided to try it myself and got a server running in just under 5 minutes. Obviously your average kid isn't going to be able to move that quickly in the terminal, but there was no authentication step.)
> It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.
Microsoft bought Minecraft in 2014, 3 years after it was officially released and 10 years before now. What you're offering is a very pessimistic view given that history, especially so given that it seems to be entirely based on a single account migration from bespoke Minecraft accounts to Microsoft accounts. You can be cynical about that all you want, but speaking is a developer in a company that currently has 3 account systems I'm going to venture that that move was exactly what they claimed it was: an effort to simplify things and increase security.
[0] https://docs.minecraftforge.net/en/latest/gettingstarted/
[1] https://help.minecraft.net/hc/en-us/articles/360058525452-Ho...
Maybe a clearer way to say it is, I'm not saying modding itself is harder, but I think that back when this article was written, if a teenager bragged that they run their own server with mods they usually meant they have a shell open on their home computer with "java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M something.jar" in it and a mod directory with downloaded-and-hand-edited-textfiles, and nowadays they mean they pay for a cloud server and selected mods from a list. But again I'm mostly repeating what I hear from my kids' friends, tell me if I'm off base here.
I'm still following some of the same Java Edition YouTubers that I've been following for more than 10 years now (and they're still producing content weekly!). I still occasionally break out an old version of Java Edition and play some of the old mods that I liked back in the day. Many of those aren't maintained any more because the creators have moved on, but many have stuck around (Biomes O' Plenty and Iron Chests have a 1.21 release, and Applied Energistics has one for 1.20 that was last updated today). Plus we still get amazing new mods like Create.
I don't think it's that the old Minecraft has really gone anywhere, it's that, like the internet as a whole, it got so popular that geeks and nerds stopped being the majority. The existence of Minecraft Bedrock brought Minecraft to a bunch of kids who would have never grokked the wild west of Minecraft Java. But its existence hasn't taken away from everything that Minecraft Java still is.
Contrary to the point of view that somehow Microsoft changed everything, what surprising is how much they didn't change or might not be different at all... Jens Bergensten is today's Chief Create Officer at Mojang... but he's not a Microsoft plant, he's been there since 2010 and, moreover... " After the full release of Minecraft (1.0.0), Persson transferred creative authority of the game's development to Jens Bergensten, afterwards continuing to help out with Minecraft while also working on new projects." (https://minecraft.wiki/w/Markus_Persson) That happened in 2011 a few years before the Microsoft acquisition. As far as I can tell, there is a significant representation of pre-Microsoft Mojang staff that still exists within the company; sure there are many more people that have only been there since the Microsoft acquisition, but that seems to be a function of growth and resource availability more than some imposed change of direction.
So actually, I'm not sure what we've lost here. Pocket Edition, later to become Bedrock and upon which Minecraft Education is based, was well underway prior to the Microsoft acquisition. That ship sailed while Notch still owned the company. Outside of the Microsoft account and chat reporting requirements, which clearly were Microsoft driven, it's difficult to really see how different things would be. Arguable Jens might have been reeled in more by Notch, but my bet is that Notch was paying more attention to his 0x10c by 2012 and Jens would have had pretty substantial creative discretion by that time.
I enjoyed Minecraft with less RPG mechanics overall
If enough people are pushed onto a new system, then yes we do lose the ease of the old system.
I spent the rest of my comment detailing the ways in which everything I ever liked about Minecraft is still available—do you have anything to add in support of the idea that something has been lost, or just this abstract observation?
As I noted in my comment, I'm still subscribed to YouTube channels of people who are still playing on the same server with the same group (with some changes over the years, of course). I don't play Minecraft as often as I did in 2012, but that's because I have a career and a family, not because I can't. I'm now introducing my son to Minecraft Java and he's loved it every time we've played it.
I'm just not seeing the loss, and those who are bemoaning it here haven't actually pinned down what's now missing from Minecraft as a result of Bedrock (or even Microsoft in general).
And before they merged ownership, the gap between casual play and a custom java server went from "some setup time" in the earlier days to to "more setup time, also more than a hundred dollars purchasing copies of java version even though everyone in the group already owns minecraft". Surely you can see the lost opportunities there.
That was such a long time ago... I remember people proclaiming the death of Minecraft.
To be fair, it's on a long slow Yahoo!-style death path - Microsoft have not been good stewards of the game. They've owned it for 10 years and we're still having to rely on 3rd party mods monkey-patching the game for basic optimisations and QOL improvements. The bug tracker is awash with things that should be fixed but are ignored in favour of "mob vote of the year" and forcing in things they can tie to merch / media and IAPs.
Microsoft bought Minecraft to milk it dry for money - and they are doing that amazingly effectively - but they did not buy it to make the game better or their users happier.
I've gotten my kids into Minetest after they kept hearing about Minecraft and asking to play, and they absolutely love it. Runs great on lower end hardware too.
Our first server box was a late gen P4 running headless Ubuntu. The CPU had strong single thread performance and handled dozens of players.
Not condoning it per se, but the game could be way more draconian in its implementation of auth.
It's nice that they've added a bunch of functionality, but the pessimistic view is that MS spent $1.6B to force the world's schoolchildren to make office.com logins.