Minecon - Mojang Developers Panel Summary - #3 Livestream over IGN
This is the 3rd livestream casting by IGN.
Another developer panel but especially for Mojang team to present their brief detail about the development process both the games and back-end system along with tools used to create the game including answering questions from the audience.
Ohh god, this session is really geek stuff. I mean both topic and almost all of them, hah !
As usual, I will post the captured screen out directly from the IGN Channel in which I’m watching via youtube. It’s ordered in timely manner.
It’s all about Mojang now, not their friend like the 2nd developers panel session.
Jens starts to talk about some brief technical stuff making Minecraft.
Wow for this kind of talk, I never heard anything like this before in my game industry experience. The developers themselves come out and talk about their own solution, their own approach on how to do thing, to program although it’s a ground basic but it’s an idea for Mod Community for Minecraft !
He’s talking about how to generate village.
This slide says it all. Just read it :]
World chunks are created based on the observed from the nearby chunks.
In this case, Jens (indicated as a human face in the grid), ? is where we’re going to generate something, X is already there structure.
To be honest, I don’t play Minecraft online before just play a little bit portion of time by myself. I amazed to know that actually the level seen in the game is procedural creating via complex algorithm. It can turn out to be very different in only a day. This way of creativity makes the Mod Community goes wild as more stuff to be created and experience from them. More things can be created with that piece of complex code, more things Mod Community can do things and appreciate. <- Totally my opinion ;)
Yes, pretty much the similar concept but with different in starting up.
To create mine shaft, they start with dirt floor, then generate something up with 8 children in depth.
More technical stuff here.
Top view of village after procedural generated.
Leonard (left) and Tobias are next to talk about the web development of Mojang for their Minecraft game.
Tobias is the main web designer, and developer. Leonard is more in support role.
Both guys talked about the numbers.
- 5,600 logins per minutes users logged in into Minecraft to play the game.
or 241,920,000 logins per month - 4 servers are used for logging in process
- 2 billion files downloaded by launcher (it’s needed to check the version of Minecraft game before play)
- 11,000 skin download per second (See http://freeminecraftskins.com/)
They talked that users might experience hard time in logging in, it’s due to that time less than 4 servers are used for logging in process and it’s like one-point fail as if the logging in server crashes then users cannot play the game. Currently Mojang team makes it flexible and scales out a bit not rely too much on one system. It’s kind of stable.
They also talked about the deployment.
- They would like it to be fairly easy by using Cowbots just to upload the file to server and let users see it in a seconds or two.
- They keep the team to small size (as for 2 persons), and make use of software to do automatic works for them. They don’t want to scale the team size too large.
One statement from Tobias is similar to the following (to show how they use the benefit of automation).
“Software doesn’t do a mistake, but we do. So we just create it first and make it runs automatically for us.”
Follow them up.
One of audience asked about the long code / number at the bottom of the http://minecraft.net/ website, he asked what’s it ?
They answered that that long code / number is the internal number used in web development process as they need to know whether the current version is what they built from the previous day or not, to see the immediate effect in updating of server or to track down which server doesn’t update yet.
This is an answer.
Daniel Frisk comes and talk about the online counterparts and architecture in Scrolls.
He starts with these 3 questions.
- Opponent does nothing
Well, the game applies the time limit to make an action if player can’t make it then that round ends and switch back to another player. If this kind of thing happens for 3 times then it means that player surrenders. - Client crash
Player whose system crashes needs to get back as soon as possible before the time runs out to re-join the match. - Server crash
He touched the topic of backing up and kinda stuff. But he insists that it should not happen.
He revealed the tools used in the game.
- Graphics
Mostly use Photoshop. - Application
C# + Visual Studio, for back-end system and online stuff.
Unity3d, damn this is a reason why they can go in multiple platforms easily.
He’s animating splash effect used in Scrolls.
Wow, nice old day keyboard man !!! :D
He also revealed that the server uses MySql, and MongoDB with Java (NetBeans to create thing) on Linux.
MongoDB is a bit off topic towards Database stuff. He noted that as the team is small and MongoDB is efficient to rapid prototyping, and works with MySql. So it comes as a choice.
Server architecture for Scrolls.
Go deeper for Scrolls and Platform interfacing the application.
This is how it looks like in Daniel’s working desk.
They’re closing the session with Q&A for 15 minutes.
Most of the time, Jens is named to answer the questions.
One of the question getting answer by him is about the concept idea becoming Creeper.
He added that Creeper in Minecraft comes by mistake. At first, they start with Pig and finally it turned out to be Creeper by turning up-side down the pig and scale reversely for the size of 2 big parts of the pig. Ha ha ha !!!
Another livestream from IGN coming over, it’s yogcast.
Check at IGN Channel over youtube.
{Updated}
20 Nov 2011
- See the full video with length about 1 hour here.
