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[Navineous]

Now when ever I load up Minecraft it looks like this.

[Notch]

Whoa.. Is anyone else getting that?

I SHOULD go to sleep, but I managed to get a level with a massive lava lake:

(Perhaps I'm going to have to enable mipmapping.. that looks kinda bad.)

[vdgmprgrmr]

So... apparently having water and lava touching each other causes graphical glitches, and doesn't make sense. I had a cave with some water in the bottom, and lava above it, and you could see what looked like a second lava surface where the water was through the surface of the lava on the top, and the lava surface above the water was slightly lower (like normal liquid surfaces), which made it look really bad.

Perhaps lava should become some kind of stone when it touches water.

Also, the way the liquid surfaces work, the top of the water will stop if they reach a block that's just above the surface, and they'll be slightly lower than the top of a normal block that's on their level, so if you lo...



It's that. I r nto liekz ti.

(And yes, mipmapping please! Textures from afar make castles look ugly!)

EDIT: And liquid physics are being really slow in places where being slow is really bad, like down narrow tunnels. I was digging (upward, deliberately trying to find water), found water, and expected either to immediately be engulfed, or to have one of those classic awesome running-through-tunnel-from-water things, definitely not just looking at the bottom of the water for a minute or two, then walking away.

And I once saw an air bubble in water stay there for a very long time.

Also, regarding block-sized air bubbles, I think it'd be cool that when they get filled in, they spawn a bunch of small "bubble" particles that float up to the surface really quickly.



Note that I'm in block creation mode there, not deletion. Having building mechanics go screwy at weird angles makes it really hard to build my nefariously placed castles (and towers, no matter whether or not their parent castle is nefariously placed or not). Which makes me sad. I mean, this allows me to replace a block, but only being able to quickly replace a block at totally awkward angles doesn't seem intuitive.

[Notch]

Water next to lava SHOULD produce rock. Apparently, it doesn't always.. more debugging, I guess. =)

[Türbo Bröther]

Will custom level generation settings be present in any future versions? I'd like to be able to set the percentage of land to water to lava using sliding bars or numbers because I am kind of missing my dry-as-a-bone canyon levels.

EDIT: Sky colour setting too, so I can have a foreboding grey sky to suit my lava fortress.

[Syrion]

Oh, finally I know what that weird noise is I've been hearing at my desk since a few days. Whenever I get more than 1000FPS in Minecraft something in my computer starts to "whir". Sounds like an RC car driving around in the distance. I take it that's the graphics card?

Anyway, is there any problem with getting between 1000-2000FPS? Maybe the framerate should be limited or so.

[Navineous]

Notch please fix the grey glitch. I can't play the game now it's all grey blocks and grey water.

[Syrion]

I have photographic evidence of four bugs, two of which were already posted:
-http://s3b.directupload.net/images/090520/gqalcwvs.jpg
There is water on the ground, and above that is Lava, with no reaction. It seems both lakes were just generated like that
-http://s3b.directupload.net/images/090520/gqalcwvs.jpg
Those are two towers of blocks. To the left one that reaches the very top of the map, and the one I'm standing on is just one block lower. The upper side of the block that's touching the sky is invisible.
-http://s4b.directupload.net/file/d/1800/7adfvh56_jpg.htm
I have a normal stone block selected and am aiming at the side of the granite(?) block. Normally that side of the granite block would flash and I would see a transparent image of the stone block I can create there. Instead, the whole granite block is flashing and if I try to build the stone block, the granite block is replaced by the stone one.
I couldn't figure out when exactly that happens, as in other similar situations it didn't.

And as can be seen on all shots, none of the blocks is visible in the interface, only the plants.

[edit]
Another one of the third bug: http://s5b.directupload.net/images/090520/8fkl2ehy.jpg
In this case it always happens when I move too close to that wall. It happens with all blocks upwards and downards 3 "block sizes", so the furthest block up and down that I can create, the 4th one, is normal again (if that's understandable at all).

[edit²]
Oh boy, even if the liquids are rather unhandy at the moment, I already very much love the look of the new worlds:

I really hope you'll focus on the already great "creation" aspect (and going at it cooperatively with friends!) before you go over to implementing combat and such

[Navineous]

It so annoying to play the game with the glitch 
Please fix it as soon as possible.

[vdgmprgrmr]

(According to the blog, the wall-bug is crushed.)

Regarding water: if we're going to float that high off the water (it seems really high), we should be able to get up onto one-block-high blocks (relative to the water's surface).

And I think we jump slightly higher now. It's much easier to make towers of blocks by jumping and building under you, and going up narrow staircases is much more vomit-inducing.

EDIT: Buuuuuut... it's not.

[Syrion]

And I think we jump slightly higher now.

I think you actually jump a lot higher now. Seemingly just a little bit short of being able to jump on two-blocks-high walls. I think it's very fine like this, as stairs still work like before, but jumping around the hillier worlds is easier

[Inanimate]

Water fills up spaces really slowly, it kinda feels like molasses. just a minor complaint, not that important.

[vdgmprgrmr]

So, my tired brain and I were thinking about the water, and we think we came up with something interesting.

Maybe it shouldn't be block based? The system I thought of was like...

Say you have a 3x3x3 cube, and it's hollowed out (like a cup). And you have, like, a bunch of these lined up together on a plane. So the middle one (hypothetically) slowly gets filled up, and the more water is in it, the higher the level gets (not block-based, but it gradually rises, like normal water) and when it gets above the edges of the cup, the program would check along the ground that makes up the cup-plane to see where either the next wall, or the next dip is. Then if it hits a wall, you can just continue filling it with the changed rate of surface-height-change for the new geometry of the cup, or you can divide the water that's filling the cup into each of the dips the new field of water has and fill those dips up accordingly. I think that's a good way to explain it.

So, like... if X=ground and a number is the amount of water in a place that's empty (and the empty spots are 3 units high.
XXXXXXX
X0X0X0X
XXXXXXX
X0X3X0X
XXXXXXX
X0X0X0X
XXXXXXX
--- add 1 unit of water to the filled spot
XXXXXXX
XaXaXaX
XXXXXXX
XaX3XaX
XXXXXXX
XaXaXaX
XXXXXXX (where a=1/8) (1/8 because there's 8 spaces for the water to fill up.)

And you'd have the water height in those areas go on a scale of 1 unit is equivalent to 1 block, so the middle one would have three full block-heights of water in it, and the others would have an eighth of a block-height filled up with water. And for added effect, have a bluish film cover the ground that the water is flowing over.

It'd be pretty easy (I think) to accommodate differently sized areas, like so):
XXXXXXX
X0X0X0X
XXXXX0X
X0X3X0X
XXXXX0X
X0X0X0X
XXXXXXX
--- add 1 unit of water to the filled spot
XXXXXXX
XaXaXbX
XXXXXbX
XaX3XbX
XXXXXbX
XaXaXbX
XXXXXXX (where a=1/10 and b=(1/10)/5)

This seems pretty easy to implement right now, but as I said, I'm a bit tired, and I'm not sure if it's reasonable in regards to efficiency or not, so, you know, take what you will from it.

It seems like it would be possible to make it somewhat efficient, but I could be completely wrong. I mean, you'd only have to calculate the outer edges of any large bodies of water (to check if there's some extra space around them to fill with the new depth).

[Diggum]

This is some serious good fun. I see you're making a game of it but I just spent the last three hours simply building. I had one wall with ramparts and two guard towers that forked into a basement, appearing out at a lower elevation several meters from the main structure. I made a road that then went to a thin tower that I built as high as the map would let me. In short: I got to feel like a kid, immersed in creativity with a program simple enough to pick up and go but complex enough to keep me interested.

I am very glad to have read that you plan to make a way to have people join you on your maps. That was something I was dying for even while goofing around. The idea of making buildings above ground that connect to a progressively deeper set of gloomy caverns below really appeals to me. Another thing I hope for is more tiles to choose from with more textures. Wood and gold, maybe tree textures? Half sized blocks that you could choose the color of would be great! You could make simple tables for your structures or thrones for your castle. :D Just a thought.

To offer some tiny bit of technical feedback: The only problem I had was when I decided I wanted to make a river through my map. I opened up the ground where the water was placed with the intention of connecting it to the "ocean" surrounding the map. What happened was, when the river met the ocean, my graphic card drivers went nuts and basically crashed. I have only a simple entry level card, nothing to brag about at all.

Considering water a little more, I thought maybe it would be good to offer a way to remove tiles of water. I was thinking about how opening up the ground to create rivers and lakes could potentially flood some of the very deep holes. In hindsight, I wonder if that's what made my drivers crash as I had started the game going as deep into the ground as I could. Maybe I ended up flooding some of those spaces? With the ability to delete water tiles, you could plug up the holes and potentially remove water from an enclosed space which would be useful in the free build mode if no where else.

I hope some of this feedback has been useful to you and thanks for sharing the alpha! I'll be looking forward to the save feature coming soon!

[Edit: I was messing around when I came across some odd structure...]



[What in the world is this? ...wait a sec...]



[It's Super Mario!]





Alright, I'm done now. Sorry everyone, I couldn't resist.

[Xion]

Irrigation would be cool.

This is epic. I have to play with vis distance on the third setting but it's still way way awesome.

[Notch]

[much technical stuff]

Awesome. I'm going to look that over more closely when I feel more rested. Thank you!
I've been looking for an alternate solution for doing water.

[Renton]

Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink.

It's awesome. Will be even more awesomerer when it's finished.

Irrigation would be cool.

This.

[Navineous]

Yay my color is back thanks so much Notch! 

[William Broom]

I love this game! Can't wait for the level saving to be implemented. I like the idea of building all my creations in one level, which is conceivably possible because the maps are so large. I hope to see them end up less like custom levels in, say, Spelunky, and more like your home town in Animal Crossing.

[Zolyx]

Aha! I see there are boundaries to the game world now. I'm almost disappointed about this, but then again I suppose bottomless pits can only be so much fun before they get irritating

Right, time to find some lava and create a Mob Pit o' Doom mk2...

EDIT: Oh, and I meant to say that the currently selected brick no longer appears for me in the top-right corner. The only thing that shows up there is the Shrub. Also, the surface of fluids seem to disappear if there is a block directly above them, like so: