

Notch's Livestream for Ludum Dare 21 - fredoliveira
http://www.livestream.com/mojang
The stream has started, but notch hasn't begun coding yet at the time of this writing. Those of you who don't know what Ludum Dare is, can check their website at http://ludumdare.com/ - but TL;DR: rapid game dev competition, in 48 hours - Notch (maker of Minecraft) is streaming his participation this year.
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GVRV
He's trying again at <http://www.justin.tv/realnotch>

Edit: Seems like many people having problems with it, but Notch is sticking
with it. Would be awesome if the Justin.tv/Twitch.tv crew can jump in and
help!

~~~
runevault
Odd when I try to load it the url jumps back and forth between twitch.tv and
justin.tv and never sticks on either.

~~~
sek
Obviously a bug, i got there from twitch.tv now and have the same problem.

<http://www.twitch.tv/realnotch>

Edit: Delete your cookies/privatewindow and go there with the twitch domain
above now it works.

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lee
This is amazing. Currently there are 12000 people tuned to watch a man program
live. Who would have thought that would ever happen... live streaming
programming.

~~~
ANH
I'd pay money for a 24-hour channel of various programmers, known and unknown,
livestreaming. Does this exist already?

~~~
ParadisoShlee_
Would be interesting to have a recording of the linux kernel programmers,
could release a 'Best of Code 3.1'... offering football highlights of coding
:)

I wonder who would pay to watch Carmack and others code on a regular basis..

~~~
swah
Problem is if we only saw him diving into Rage source code and tweaking stuff,
that wouldn't teach us much.

~~~
dkersten
Plus Rage and other commercial stuff would be under NDA, so no chance of
watching any coding on such projects. Big and popular open source projects
would definitely work though, IMHO.

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Simucal
He just ended the stream when he checked his usage report on Livestream.com.

Apparently he had racked up 17,000 viewer hours so far and said the cost was
getting way out of hand. I'm trying to see how much that is going to cost him.

It would be cool if we could get Livestream to sponsor him perhaps as a way to
promote their service?

~~~
citricsquid
<http://www.livestream.com/estimator>

Enter "mojang" there to see the cost.

~~~
Madsn
Thats pretty crazy. over 15k USD

~~~
marcog1
He makes about €172,493 in sales a day (source:
<http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp>). $15,000 is relatively nothing to him.

~~~
bradtgmurray
He makes a lot of money, therefore he should throw money into a fire.

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fredoliveira
The stream has started, but notch hasn't begun coding yet at the time of this
writing (so don't be scared by the still screen).

Those of you who don't know what Ludum Dare is, can check their website at
<http://ludumdare.com/> \- but TL;DR: rapid game dev competition, in 48 hours
- Notch (maker of Minecraft) is streaming his participation this year.

------
ForrestN
Does anyone know what he's making? I just tuned in 30 minutes ago, and he's
been focused on getting his RenderWall function to work. Has he said what his
eventual plan is at all?

~~~
Simucal
He just said, "The funny with my Lundum Dare entries is I never have any idea
what game I'm making while I'm doing it."

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suninwinter
It looks like his changes appear in the game window without rebuilding the
program. Is that what everyone else is seeing? Is this a technique I should
know about?

~~~
barrkel
Hotswap bug fixing is the Java term for it. .NET calls it Edit and Continue.
Much the same thing has existed in Smalltalk and Lisp etc. for much longer.

It's particularly well suited for things like a game loop or a server, because
it works best (or rather usually, only) when the code you're editing is not on
the stack.

~~~
Periodic
Are you still limited to method bodies? It seems reasonable that the method
signatures and object layouts couldn't be modified because that would
invalidate a lot of code already in memory and that may already be optimized.

~~~
barrkel
See JRebel mentioned by the other poster for more dramatic modification.

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cschep
Notch just talked about how it was going to be super expensive to do this, and
changed the quality of the stream to low to hopefully counteract that somehow?

That seems crazy to me, we all want to watch this and it's costing him money
to do us that favor? Seemingly he's also driving traffic to livestream, is it
because he has no ads or something?

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swah
Would you (should he) ever commit to a VCS working at this speed?

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albertzeyer
This reminds me of the Hackontest (<http://hackontest.org>) (Disclaimer: I was
working there for/on OpenLieroX.)

We were filmed all the 24h via webcam and all our screens were recorded also
via VNC and inside the OpenExpo, one could watch us coding live.

I don't really find much records of it though but here are two videos (sadly
not the VNC records):

<http://www.etoy.com/blog/archive/2008/09/26/hackontest.html>

<http://technocrat.net/video/Hackontest/2.mpg>

I find it very instructive to actually watch other people coding.

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yatsyk
I'd be very interested to look at live editing of experienced vim hacker to
steal some tips.

~~~
pakitan
Check out peepcode.com - the "Play by Play" series with Zed Shaw and Gary
Bernhardt. The videos are not specifically dedicated to vim tips and tricks
but since the programming is done on vim you should be able to find something
interesting.

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shabda
If you like this kind of things, Peepcode's Play by Play screencasts are good
too.

~~~
BasDirks
I do like the PbP's from Peepcode, but Notch is something else.

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ugh
Well, it’s a bit too early, isn’t it? Here’s a time-lapse from a year ago:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV-AFnCkRLY>

------
exit
at 18:31 utc he closed the stream because the number of viewers would equal a
huge streaming bill for him :(

he mentions that he found streaming on justin.tv would also be too expensive.

i for one would pay to have famous coders streaming in the background while i
code myself.

~~~
emmett
Streaming on Justin.tv is free.

Also on TwitchTV. We reached out.

------
highace
It's actually really interesting to see the thought process and programming
technique of a respected dev from start to finish of a project. I'm sure I'll
learn a lot, more people should do this.

Going to keep it on the secondary monitor.

~~~
zaphodbeiberbrx
Please don't start taking programming tips from Mojang employees.

~~~
swah
Explain why?

~~~
zaphodbeiberbrx
Because Minecraft is a very buggy, poorly designed product. Notch is only
"respected" as a programmer by people who have never looked into his
programming.

~~~
MikeCampo
Well it's good enough to make him a very rich man. Oh and when did you get a
chance to look at his code and designs?

~~~
zaphodbeiberbrx
So because someone is rich that makes them a good programmer? I have done some
projects with the Minecraft SMP protocol (which is awful), and I write plugins
for it. So yeah, I know a bit about its design.

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Madsn
"Unfortunately, mojang has been permanently deleted. All of mojang's videos
will no longer be available."

Did they just kick him off? Cause I didn't hear him say anything about taking
the stream offline.

~~~
lgeek
"I deleted the channel myself to stop any further costs. It got WAAAY out of
hand, haha"

via twitter

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kayoone
Its amazing to watch him build this. I also find it inspiring that he is still
doing this because he simply loves building games despite the fact he has made
millions with minecraft already.

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AndyJPartridge
The host for the Ludum Dare website has taken them down for using too much
CPU.

<https://twitter.com/#!/ludumdare>

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bhassel
It seems Notch finished the game. He uploaded it here:
<http://s3.amazonaws.com/ld48/index.html>

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smhinsey
He just stopped the stream due to the cost. I'd be very curious to know what
the actual numbers were.

~~~
JoeH
He stopped and restarted at a lower quality

~~~
smhinsey
Ah, that makes sense. Too bad that I could really only see what was going on
in HD mode.

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swah
You can notice he is really in the flow right now.

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DLarsen
Anyone live-blogging this?

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lrm242
anyone know what music he's listening to on the live feed?

~~~
msim
<http://www.di.fm/electro/>

~~~
lrm242
Gracias!

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Madsn
"Flip the 'y'.. (Wh)y not, hehe" - Nice programming pun :)

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BasDirks
"Let's flip the y... y not!? ehehehe"

