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Comment on Minecraft's 'Vibrant Visuals' Upgrade the Start of a New 'Graphical Journey'

dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

Minecraft has a long and storied history of cribbing features from modders and integrating them into the official base game. This includes hoppers, light senors, pistons, slime blocks, several of the types of trees, armor stands, displaying maps in frames, quite a few mobs, several of the current biome types, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I can’t remember offhand.

So yeah, stealing the idea (even if not the outright code) from shader mods would be completely on brand, and not at all unexpected. It’s up to the player base to decide how they feel about this, but honestly it seems nothing short of kidnapping babies and setting them on fire would get any significant portion of people to turn away from Microsoft’s stewardship of the game, given how hard they’ve tried to screw it up post-acquisition and yet it continues to print them money.

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CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Mojang’s “stealing” started from at least the pistons in 2011, 3 years before the acquisition. Credit was given to the original mod author under “Additional programming”, and they did reuse the actual code from the mod

I don’t think it’s fair to call that stealing, for multiple reason:

copyright of game mechanics should never be supported, if we serioussly consider this stealing then a lot of innovation will be completely hampered, and videogames will be subject to abuses worse than what exists in other creative industries. Copyright on game concepts would be akin to copyright on camera angles, special effects, etc…

mods are only available on PC. Taking ideas from the community and incorporating them into the base game makes the content available for everyone, even vanilla PC players

Mojang’s has been very decent with OG mod authors, often being assisted by said authors to incorporate their content into the game, see how they worked with the author of Mo’ Creatures, a mod for animals, to add the horse into the game
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Elevator7009sAlt@ani.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
I wonder how much of this is network effects? I cannot describe how many times I have fired up Minecraft all over again after not touching it for awhile because oh, a friend made a server and my other friends are playing too! At least in my experience, it seems to just be a thing that if a social circle contains mostly people who happen to enjoy video games, even if we formed around liking to sing or something and not our love of video games, it will try to make a Minecraft server.

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