
New Game: Minecraft Earth - eDameXxX
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/new-game--minecraft-earth#
======
fenomas
Since there's not much info on this, and since I missed the relevant thread
last week, I'll just note here for the record that Mojang's _other_ recent
release, a browser-based retro game called Minecraft Classic, was built on my
voxel game engine.

[game] [https://classic.minecraft.net/](https://classic.minecraft.net/)

[engine] [https://github.com/andyhall/noa/](https://github.com/andyhall/noa/)

if anyone's interested. It's pretty weird waking up one morning to find out
that Mojang built a game on your tiny solo project...

~~~
yohann305
what an achievement, good job! I hope you'll get handsomely paid for it,
cheers

~~~
malnourish
Unless the parent were to be hired in some capacity, why would they be paid
for it? The project has the MIT License.

~~~
behringer
and now the reason for the GNU GPL license becomes apparent. If some
unfathomably wealthy corporation founded by one of the richest person to have
ever lived isn't going to pay you for your work, at least you can get
something out of it by making them open source their work.

~~~
steve_taylor
If this library was GPL licensed, Mojang/Microsft wouldn’t have bothered
taking the time to even evaluate it.

~~~
ajnin
That's an interesting dilemma. If your goal is to get your source code to be
used by lots of people, then it seems logical to use an as permisive license
as possible to "compete" with other open source projects. But it might be
short-sighted, because then if your code gets incorporated in proprietary
projects it may become used a lot, but it won't propagate, it won't generate
new projects that might get even more use. If on the other hand you want to
get your source code into the hands of as many people as possible (that is not
only users but empowered ones), that's different, and a licence like the GPL
that is inherited (I don't like the term "viral" very much, it seems too
pejorative) seems better, but then they can't compete against more permissive
licences, so they can't "reproduce" that well either !

This is a "tragedy of the commons" of sorts. If all open source projects could
collaborate and choose a single license, what would it be ?

~~~
doesnt_know
> That's an interesting dilemma.

It's not a dilemma at all for those that explicitly choose the GPL over MIT
because they believe in Free Software (others might choose GPL for other
reasons....).

Being Free and having every user of the software retain their Freedom is the
literal point of the GPL. Saying "hey, your software would be used by lots
more people if we make a proprietary product out of it" is undermining the
entire point of the Free Software movement....

So it's more ethical if 10 people use your software and they retain their
Freedom, then it is for 10 million to use it bundled in a proprietary product.

------
skohan
This reminds me of when I first discovered Minecraft in university. I was just
going to play for a couple hours before bed, and I got sucked into the game-
loop and before I knew it the sun was coming up. A few days later, I was
walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to wait at between my house
and campus, and just for a moment looked at those tracks and I seriously
thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks to build a bridge and
avoid waiting for the train.

I decided to take a long break from Minecraft after that.

~~~
andrepd
>A few days later, I was walking toward the railroad crossing I often had to
wait at between my house and campus, and just for a moment looked at those
tracks and I seriously thought about where I should place the Minecraft blocks
to build a bridge and avoid waiting for the train.

This is called the tetris effect. I've had it with, you guessed it, tetris.
Whenever I get a bout of addiction and play tetris for an hour at a time I get
up from the computer and just start seeing the stuff around me start fitting
together in an interlocking fashion.

Happened with 2048 as well, I vividly remember being stopped at a red light
and feeling the car in front of me fusing the one ahead to make a bigger-
numbered car. Very weird.

Happens when coding as well, in fact it is happening right now as I type this!
I'm having this very strong urge to wrap all "key" words in this post [like
so], in ocaml documentation syntax.

(* Brains are weird! *)

~~~
Gene_Parmesan
Try spending ~20 hours in a week playing serious racing sims complete with
wheel and real-feeling pedals, then hopping into your car on the weekend to
drive cross-state to visit family.

I also got this with programming at least once. I had been spending all night
trying to get something with my WPF view models working (and failing). When I
finally got into bed, I was having trouble falling asleep because I was just
"seeing" endless lines of code scrolling through my head. I very distinctly
remember thinking, "What order do I have to call these methods again to
successfully enter sleep mode?" Quite a bizarre experience.

~~~
SwiftyBug
I've had some similar experiences. When that happened I couldn't sleep very
well and pretty much dreamt of code.

~~~
samayylmao
My sleep code always compiles and always works as intended.

~~~
xena
It was really easy to tell dreams apart from reality until the compilers
started working.

------
gatherhunterer
This looks ambitious enough to be met with skepticism. What matters most for
gameplay is the UX implementation and AR has serious barriers to overcome in
that regard. Holding a device up at eye level for extended periods,
interacting with the game by touching the same device that is also serving as
the viewport and battery limitations are just a few practical hurdles that
have yet to be overcome.

What is really hard to believe is that one can recapture the experience or
something close to it and that this is not just the expansion of a brand into
a new product. Like Pokemon Go, this will likely be Minecraft's equivalent to
the Star Wars Christmas Special but without the "so bad it's good" quality.

~~~
criley2
The biggest issue I see is building, because builds take a long time and you
don't want to stand around using the worst input imaginable (touch screen) to
do nice builds.

Other than that, it seems like they're making a Pokemon GO clone with
Minecraft mobs (collect passive mobs and fight hostile ones).

W.r.t to your "Pokemon Go::SW Christmas Special" you're absolutely wrong,
while the initial popularity didn't stick around, the game is at a very strong
and profitable point and the ideas introduced in the GO app have moved into
actual Pokemon titles, notable the "no fight, just throw to catch pokemon"
mechanic was ported to Let's Go Pikachu/Eevee Switch remakes of Gen 1.
Basically the opposite of the SW Xmas Special!

As a (modded) Minecraft player there's a lot to be excited about in this
concept, but my suggestions would be

* Allow players to explore the virtual-real-world that they've visited with the phone app from a console or computer. So you can "tag" your local park, a cool bit of a forest, etc, then go home and explore a digital version.

* Allow players to build at home

The point here would be that you go out side, collect building materials,
catch some passive mobs you want, then go home to take advantage of these
collected goods to start a pretty build.

This would also fix UX issues because the goal of using the phone app would be
moving around, collecting, interacting, NOT standing still and building.

I'd play the heck out of that, it'd be another reason to get out of the house
and an interaction between phone game and console/pc game could be huge.

~~~
Crinus
> using the worst input imaginable (touch screen) to do nice builds.

Minecraft's controls for building stuff is very simple - you just point and
click to place or remove stuff depending on your active item. Here you can
point (via gyroscope, etc) and tap and you could even "scrub" to remove stuff.
This could be done with just a hand (the phone in portrait mode, you tap/scrub
with your thumb).

~~~
Cthulhu_
One scene in the trailer showed a smaller model on a table; what if they use
the Minecraft for mobile's UI to create a model in-game, which you can then
place (to scale) in a location?

~~~
ethbro
I was going to say the same thing. I'd be really surprised if they didn't have
some sort of blueprint link from full game -> mobile.

Seems a no-brainer.

------
jdavid
The ad for Minecraft Earth, reminds me of a cyberpunk novel, Spook Country, by
William Gibson.

In the novel, there are layers of augmented reality where people have put
their mark on the world with AR Dioramas scattered through-out the world. In
the book, AR scenes might depict historical events, art, or information.

If your planing on Playing Minecraft:Earth, you might want to check it out.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spook_Country)

[https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-
ebook/dp/...](https://www.amazon.com/Spook-Country-Blue-Ant-Book-
ebook/dp/B000UVBSYQ/ref=sr_1_1?crid=18ZCM1YV438V2&keywords=spook+country&qid=1558106487&s=digital-
text&sprefix=spook+country%2Caps%2C203&sr=1-1)

------
petercooper
Really neat idea and has the potential to be the next Pokemon Go in terms of
engagement, kids roaming around to build in certain real world areas, etc.

(Though I am a little sad it's not Minecraft but with a single 'world' server
where every player is present.. I would LOVE that :-))

~~~
vanilla_nut
Just how high can a minecraft server scale in player number? I know the worlds
are effectively infinite (well, until you get so far out that the terrain
generation algorithms actually start to break in the Edgelands), so space
isn't an issue... I definitely used servers with hundreds or even thousands of
players in the 2000s, so they can scale relatively high in a single instance.
I wonder if a clustered minecraft instance could scale effectively infinitely,
as long as they synced time?

~~~
bo0tzz
Based on this paper from 2014 [0], you're probably gonna hit resource limits
in the late thousands unless you apply some special techniques. Apparently the
highest number of players that's been seen on a minecraft server
simultaneously is somewhere around 10 000, but I don't know the details of
this.

[0] [https://exaquark.com/blog/scaling-minecraft-to-millions-
of-u...](https://exaquark.com/blog/scaling-minecraft-to-millions-of-users/)

~~~
geophertz
Yeah but if you rewrite a Minecraft server to scale it would probably be
possible. The Vanilla minecraft server runs on 1 thread and is written in Java
so there is a lot of space for improvement.

~~~
unicornfinder
Indeed. Some years ago a friend of mine wrote a Minecraft server in Golang and
it ran on something ridiculous like 10MB of RAM with genuinely excellent
performance.

It could definitely be done.

------
logfromblammo
I am already disappointed by the vast gulf between how I imagine Minecraft
could work as an AR game and how I imagine it will initially be implemented as
an AR game.

The problem with Ingress and Pokemon Go, is that the player has to go places
in real life to have fun in the game, and one attraction of fantasy sandbox
worlds is that you have mobility capabilities that are impossible in your real
life.

In regular Minecraft, creative mode, you can fly and hover. This is extremely
alluring to a kid who may otherwise only be able to ride a bicycle around
their own boring subdivision neighborhood during daylight hours. Hey, it's
even nice for people who have cars. If the kids have to beg Mom or Dad to
drive them across town in the real world to mine virtual diamonds, that's not
going to end up being fun for anybody.

People play games where they live, and if the AR game does not include
people's homes as a legitimate place to play, then having fun includes some
amount of inconvenience that sours it. Some people can tap a Pokestop or
Portal from their bedroom or living room. Other people have to drive ten
minutes to reach the nearest one.

The best I can come up with is that players use their mobile devices in the
real world to mark their territory or drop warp points or exchange friend
tokens or do discovery, and they can still build or explore the whole world
from home. Geo-tagged photos might be able to update textures and geometry.

If someone builds a grand castle in the neighborhood park, that's not going to
work in AR if you have to climb stairs that don't exist or go below ground
when there is no real-world hole. But maybe you could see there is a castle
there, through the discovery glass at the park, tap the block that grants your
user read-only visitor access to it, and then go back home to climb the tower
or explore the dungeons.

If someone else builds a different castle overlapping over the same territory,
you can decide which user's construction appears in your personal sandbox.

------
4bpp
From the looks of the promotional video (glassy boxes displayed around every
object), it seems like the implementation of this is closer to "geotagged
Minecraft objects, which are NPCs or finite-sized voxel volumes" than
"Minecraft overlay on the real world". I'd consider that to be a safe-but-
boring option for them to go with - the implementation is easier and you can
probably control access to your creation to prevent it from being destroyed by
griefers, but on the other hand there will probably be no way two discrete
objects could be spontaneously linked up in a creative way, no irreverent and
_fun_ third-party modifications to objects of the sort that their creators
would have rejected if asked to allow upfront but would grudgingly admit to be
pretty clever afterwards, and (although the last point is quite subjective)
interacting with what are essentially more intricately customised Google Maps
pins will probably never feel as immersive as navigating a unified overlay to
the real world.

~~~
wilg
I would imagine it would be really hard to make the voxel coordinate system
spatially coherent over the whole planet, so placing smallish regions of
buildable space at various geotagged points seems like a pragmatic approach.

You could still design it to get the types of interactions you're after.

Edit: To clarify I think it’s hard because of the earth not being flat but
also because of the difficulty of syncing AR tracking to GPS tracking in a
device independent way. You’d get a lot of error depending on how you attached
the two reference frames together. Having many smaller buildable spaces means
you can have lower accuracy from GPS but still make the world feel populated.
The cubes wouldn’t align between volumes but the volumes can be in close
proximity.

~~~
4bpp
Good point about the coordinate system; you'd run into one sort of trouble or
another if you want to go with anything that's approximately "cubes" (i.e. say
each voxel is a "cube" of fixed height × fixed #degrees of latitude × fixed
#degrees of longitude) unless you exclude two circles of the planet's surface
from the game (say, some radius around each of the poles), and even then, you
would have to contend with voxels having a different size depending on where
on earth you are.

Possible (if off-brand) solution: a Minecraft based on the extrusion of an
icosahedral tiling of the sphere [1], with voxels that are triangle prisms
rather than cubes. Maybe an idea for someone who wants to design an AR game
and does not have to sell it as a Minecraft variant.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_polyhedron)

~~~
mos_basik
Oh man - the thought of trying to build structures with "straight" walls using
triangular prisms is giving me the heebie-jeebies. Entirely aside from the
impossibility of creating smooth surfaces and right angles - I can imagine
coming up with a pattern that reasonably approximates a straightness (to a
viewer at a reasonable distance, just like Minecraft's current diagonal
patterns [0]) at least on a local scale but which would quickly require
somewhat ad-hoc and constant adjustment for structures past a certain size.

I assume the center of gravity of such a world would be the actual center of
mass of however the voxels are arranged, meaning players could affect it with
large enough structures or small enough worlds. Without adjusting "straight"
"horizontal" structures to conform the curvature of the world, gravity would
no longer be a force that was normal to the surface of the structure at some
points on it.

I can also imagine people digging to the center of a world to find the gravity
flip-flop point and playing with it. Or hollowing out the interior of the
world in order to get a zero-G chamber (assuming no atmosphere) [1]. Or
building gravity trains [2].

[0] [https://imgur.com/a/0J5RoE1](https://imgur.com/a/0J5RoE1)

[1] [http://hyperphysics.phy-
astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshel...](http://hyperphysics.phy-
astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Mechanics/sphshell2.html)

[2]
[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gravity_train](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Gravity_train)

------
antihero
Giant. Dongs. Everywhere.

~~~
mattigames
-

~~~
bryanlarsen
From the Verge review I get the impression you only see stuff your friends
have placed. They're playing around with ideas on how to let other content in
but are well aware of the dong & swastika problem.

~~~
mattigames
That solution leaves out kids without friends; I understand why they do it but
it may be a price too high to pay.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Why is it everything has to be padded and safe and inclusive for everyone all
the time now?

Do you people not remember your own childhoods?

~~~
jacobsenscott
Yeah - it was only padded, safe, and inclusive for people like me. Those where
the days.

------
jbattle
This doesn't look like a freeform building game. It's really hard to tell from
the trailer but it looks like you can pick some pre-fab constructions or
animals and plop them down into specific places in the world.

Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right 1) boring 2) that will at least keep
minecraft earth from being covered in swastikas and genitalia

~~~
VikingCoder
I suspect you will build a prefab yourself, in a petri dish, and then place it
in the real world.

I say this because, you won't want to climb 100 feet in the air, to place a
block on top of that castle.

~~~
NikkiA
As the protagonist skated past the cafe she saw what I would assume to be the
petri-dish construction occurring on the cafe table.

------
vessenes
This looks like an expansion of Microsoft’s hololens tech demo from a few
years ago, which did a lot of work around identifying in-room surfaces and
allowing building on them.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this will be very very popular.
This is pitched as virtual collaborative lego, but you get to use your phone
at the same time.

Hopefully we will see artists play around with it as well; William Gibson
wrote a little about AR-based art in the blue ant trilogy; I always thought it
was an idea worth thinking a little more about.

------
anderspitman
It would be really cool if this enables "Minecraft artists" to build and place
impressive models. I'm an avid hiker and would love knowing I can pull out my
phone at the top of a mountain to see a digital model that doesn't exist
anywhere else in the world. Sort of like an imaginary geocache.

------
azhenley
The YouTube trailer doesn’t show any real footage of the gameplay, sadly.

~~~
aequitas
It's probably the same as with Pokemon Go[0]. The game is fun on its own, and
the geo aspect makes it different and get's you out of the house. But the
reality of the VR is grossly overrated and more often a nuisance than
something adding to the experience.

[0]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sj2iQyBTQs)

~~~
jandrese
Pokemon Go gets better when you turn off the AR mode.

Being able to virtually build something in AR mode in Minecraft seems pretty
sweet, especially if your friends can see it. Getting the AR to work right
won't be easy though, phone positioning is imprecise and it will be really
hard for the phone to line something up exactly the same if your friend is
viewing it from a different angle.

This is one of those game concepts that looks like it would be fun an easy but
turns out to be a real nightmare to implement I think.

~~~
blotter_paper
Yup, we just don't have mass-deployed sensors with high enough precision and
accuracy yet. We'll get there.

------
allenu
To me, this feels like the perfect app for AR. It's creative (you make stuff)
and your creations live in the real world, encouraging people to get out
there.

If this turns out to be a really great app and it isn't successful, I wonder
if we can take that as a signal from the market that people aren't that
interested in AR, at least not in its current phone-based state.

------
bunderbunder
How sad is it that my very first thought was, "How are they planning to manage
griefing?"

~~~
blattimwind
They don't need to, Rockstar and some others have shown that you can make a
mint with largely broken games, and even encourage griefing.

------
wtdata
This is brilliant... and PKDickian (is this a term? it should be).

We can imagine a distopic future with a thin boundary between the physical
world and VR where you would travel through totally destitute neighbourhoods
in real life, while seeing great works of art in VR that were built by the
users of a virtual world game akin to this.

~~~
pawelmurias
That would be super cliche.

------
gibolt
This will probably be huge. Minecraft is still super popular, and being able
to show off cool real-world footage on YouTube will fuel the fire, engaging
others.

------
_mitch
In the official reveal trailer, they seriously have the actor take out their
phone and walk backward into the road while looking at their phone. Who
cleared that?

[1] [https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI](https://youtu.be/dYKxBKj29dI)

------
sneak
This existed in 2012, and was called “minecraft reality”:

[https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-
augmen...](https://www.theverge.com/2012/11/25/3688674/minecraft-augmented-
reality-iphone-app)

------
baalimago
Just give kids some legos...

~~~
mattigames
Ok but you pay them

------
hyperpallium

      Sorry!
      This version of Minecraft
      requires a keyboard.
      Please try again on another device.
    

But I _have_ a bluetooth keyboard connected to my phone...

------
stesch
Reminds me of "Rainbows End". Remember the scene when the kids go to school
and overlay the building on the way? (And all the other overlays/skins.)

------
Fricken
This is my favorite augmented reality game:

[https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg](https://youtu.be/8t4pmlHRokg)

------
wyldfire
Notes from the FAQ:

> Minecraft Earth will be free to play.

> Minecraft Earth is coming to iOS and Android this summer on AR-capable
> devices. We’ll have more to share soon.

~~~
saddestcatever
Interesting. I can't imagine they're doing all this out of the goodness of
their hearts. Wonder if they'll follow the cosmetic upgrade store, or
something more akin to PokemonGO's monetization mechanics

~~~
EvilGrin
The Verge article mentions an in-game currency (rupees) so I expect they are
going down the 'in-game shop' route. With the option that you grind for the
in-game currency or you can just swap real money for game money. Hopefully
they wont make this pay to win and stick to just cosmetics. They have stated
in the FAQ that they are not doing loot boxes so there is hope.

------
asah
wait, something that teenagers can see, but parents can't? who would want
that?

($B in 15 minutes)

------
settsu
_> Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a
patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day.
It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder
to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful Minecraft
build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new Minecraft
creation on the real-life grass._

So now we're gamifying gentrification and incentivizing the idea of covering
the earth with human constructions? (It's certainly arguable, but at least
Pokemon Go encourages physical activity and social interaction.)

Yes, I know I'm being reactionary but this just feels wrong, not to mention a
misguided application of the Minecraft concept. Is this is the best they could
do? Is this really all we can expect of AR at this stage?

------
billconan
I want to see a gameplay video. the occlusion effect in AR doesn't seem to be
easy to implement. I previously saw a startup doing it using a detailed 3d
scan of a city.

~~~
pducks32
The occlusion would need scans form the phone which I can think of one company
that can do it fast, then you need to figure out where in the world the user
is if you want to occlude using buildings, etc. I know of one company doing
that. Neither are working with Microsoft as far as I know.

(I work for the latter company and we do VPS: the thing you'd need to build
the game I assume people will glean from the video but they are totally not
releasing.)

------
orblivion
The first thing I got while watching this was a flash of the apocalypse when
Gab (the social network) inevitably comes out with their own version.

------
yohann305
i foresee kids dying after falling from cliffs or buildings, trying to build
things "in the sky".

Mark my words, i said it first

~~~
gubbrora
Wordmarked i could see this happen

------
jhoh
I was going to sign up for the beta but then was asked to log in with a
Microsoft account. Thanks but nope.

------
OrgNet
I wonder if you can choose the block size to make your creations look more
realistic?

------
Causality1
Dicks, dicks everywhere.

------
stuartbman
Is this just minecraft pokemon go?

~~~
demosthenes14
Is any AR game now “[insert name] Pokémon Go”?

~~~
imtringued
Every FPS is a doom clone.

~~~
baud147258
every FPS is a wolfenstein clone

~~~
wolfgke
Every FPS is a MIDI Maze clone.

~~~
rekshaw
Every FPS is a Pong clone

~~~
wolfgke
Pong has no first-person perspective.

------
blacktonystark
Part of me is like "this is dope!" and another part of me is like "are we so
lazy/poor due to income inequality that actually learning how to build things
is out of the picture now?"

~~~
codycraven
The desire to build stuff as a kid without the funds to buy wood/metal is what
got me into programming.

I could have either bought materials for 1-3 projects and then not been able
to build anything else, or build a computer (back then it was cheaper to build
than buy) and then have limitless ability to build things digitally.

------
lloydde
You “see a patch of grass” could read awfully dystopian. That opening
paragraph might come back to haunt them. With climate change possibly
accelerating unless global coordinated activity, I giggled at first to this
opener that basically says cover that “patch” of “real-life” nature.

> _Picture the scene: you’re walking through your neighbourhood and see a
> patch of grass. Grass is lovely and all, but you see this patch every day.
> It’s getting a little dull and is practically begging for a talented builder
> to brighten it up. So you take out your phone and craft a beautiful
> Minecraft build on a nearby picnic table. Then you place your colourful new
> Minecraft creation on the real-life grass._

~~~
anchpop
Are you proposing that due to climate change, there is a serious possibility
of the extinction of grass?

~~~
ethbro
Agreed on the skepticism. Grass is the plant equivalent of cockroaches. There
will always be grass. (And specifically, the C4 species are pretty robust)

