Minecraft – MINECON 2016 Extensions for Minecraft: Our plans for Plugins and Add-Ons

Hi everyone uh welcome to this extremely brightly lit panel um on add-ons and plugins i’m joined here with through the developers who work on minecraft pocket edition and windows 10 edition so why don’t you guys go ahead and introduce yourselves so i’m jason major as one said one of

The devs on pocket i’ve done a lot of the porting features and stuff like that but for the last six months or so our focus has been on resource packs and add-ons my name is adrian orschulock i’ve been working on add-ons for the last six months

Yeah and i’m michael also known as sarge and i created the tools for the java version in 2010 that are used for modding and now i’m uh leading the efforts to bring modding to our c plus versions including the pocket version and the vinta version so

We have some some demos some live demos here that we can show off which should help explain how how these things work i think um first of all we’re gonna talk about the add-ons side of this and then go into the plugins for the second half of the of the presentation

So let’s yeah take it away yeah so as we said so adrian and i are going to show off the add-on stuff so what i want to kind of get in first is so the add-ons term kind of was first talked about last e3 but there wasn’t really a lot of

Information forthcoming about add-on so i wanted to kind of just set the stage for what they are so our grand vision for them is really anything that you can put in the game that will change appearance or behavior of things in the game so that could be

Entities model any of these items blocks stuff like that so my appearance the there’s kind of three categories there so it’s the textures of things so that’s kind of the the colors that you see all over the model then it’s and then it’s the model which is the shape silhouette

When you look at it and then the last one is the animations of the thing so how they actually move in the world and then for behavior it’s what do these things do in the world to make them kind of differentiate themselves so that’s kind of the set the stage for

This that’s where we want to go we’re obviously not there yet this is going to be our first preview release in the dot 16. and so if where we’re at today is we focused on entities and for the entities we haven’t hit the grand vision for any of these either so

Right now what you can do is you can change the textures and you can change the models on them so animations are still not there so you’re still restricted and if you want something to have arms and legs that move around you need to choose an existing mob in the

Game that has arms that move up around so if you looked at the alien invasion that was shown at e3 and on the show floor and stuff the villagers that were running around with arms and legs those are actually re-skinned skeletons so we we changed the model on them made

Them look like villagers but we wanted their arms to move around so we used the skeleton as the basis for that and that’s what people are going to be kind of constrained for this first release but it’s definitely on our roadmap to get animations all data-driven as well as

Soon as we can and then for behavior what we have with the add-ons right now so we have these json data files these just they’re text files and you can we have a library of over 70 different pre-built behaviors and these are all the things that we actually use for the current game

So when you get the 16 release download and we have the beta out there already and it’s already using this is all of the bobs that are in the game they’re already using these so they’re actually built on top of the exact same system and framework so when you see a

Spider jockey spawn it’s because it has an ad writer component on it that adds in there and it says i want to add a skeleton and it actually has some rules on it about what conditions will restrict when that ad rider component can get added and stuff like that and so

We’re going to show some sort of kind of just the tip of the iceberg of some of the things you can do with what we’ve got there we’re pretty excited about what we can do obviously there’s way more we’re going to get to eventually it’s it’s fun that even with

That limited set of features you can already do some kind of crazy stuff which we can we can show off now so we got demo let’s go to the game so we got the the base game there we’ve got a level that’s kind of pre-set up don’t jump in yet

And so one of the first things i’m always partial to uh the baby all the baby mobs in the game and so i worked on baby zombies and got some of those things into the pocket version and so what i wanted to do was just kind of give people like so we’re

Going to make a take one of the existing creatures in the game and make them be a baby so you guys want to do spiders skeletons or endermen I think it’s uh it’s pretty it’s pretty enderman focused i think so here’s can you guys see that okay do we need to zoom in some more no okay let’s let’s zoom in a little more getting better so here’s the enderman so what what i usually do when i’m building an add-on

Is i’ll kind of have an idea of what i want to do so i’ll i’ll be like oh i want to make a baby version so let’s open up something that already has a baby so in this case uh adrian’s opened up the pig and he’s going to basically grab a

Component group that’s called pig baby you’re going to want to grab maybe the whole modern group but and a component group is a collection of components and it’s a way that you can add and remove collections of behavior at a time and generally the

Way we use them is if for people who are more tech inclined we use them in kind of like what we call a state machine in game development and for the statement the state machine is like it’s the am i an adult or am i a baby and what’s different between those

Things so for something like a baby zombie um a baby zombie doesn’t burn up in the sun but an adult zombie does so you want to be able to control which behaviors are on which version of the guy so adrian went out what he’s what he grabbed is he grabbed the component

Group from the pig he’s bringing it over to the enderman right now and he put a is baby which for the enderman should scale his head relative to the guy and he scaled his size to 0.5 but we need something that actually selects when is he going to be a baby

Because we don’t we could we could make him just always be a baby but let’s make them actually only sometimes do it so we have um what we call in there is an event system so there’s a bunch of built-in events and then there’s also ways with these

Components that you can trigger your own events but for now we’re going to use a built-in event called entity spawned and he’s copying that across so it has inside of the entity spawned it has a randomized group inside of there and that’s because you want it you don’t

Want it to always be a baby or always be an adult so the default one for pigs is it’s 95 of the time is a adult and 5 percent of the time it’s a baby so what we can do in there is we add and remove component groups so let’s get that copied Let’s see what he’s doing okay so he’s updated the randomized so let’s make it be say 50 of the time um be a baby so the cool thing here is i mean this is affecting the behaviors for the for the whole of this kind of game world

It’s not just a one-off thing it’s going to be permanently there will be enderman babies spawning all over the place which is quite terrifying in its own way but you know okay so we’ve got there so the enderman already had some component groups in there for when he’s um calm

And when he’s angry at you so the the trigger that’ll make him do his creepy face and his head expands and stuff like that so we’re trying to preserve some of that um hopefully we didn’t miss any commas in here so the json formula that we use is like definitely likes its commas

I highly recommend if you start messing around with add-ons is to there’s a few tools out there they’re called linters that you can put the json files into and they’ll help you spot any syntax errors that you make in it they’re invaluable we use them every day as we’re working on this stuff

But once once you get used to some of the rules around json it actually becomes pretty easy to to edit these files is it good to go i think so okay so one of the things we kind of pre-set this up we built a world that on our

Worlds now is you can actually set uh resource packs and add-ons to be associated with your world so even if they’re not in your global list of things that world will always load with that specific resource pack or that specific add-on so we’ve so we’ve built this world up that already has this

Add-on that we’ve created associated with it so let’s jump in and see our enderman oh there he is so now we got a baby enderman and he looks like an angry baby he’s he’s so much less menacing than like most babies he’s not real happy most of the time so uh

But that’s so that’s our baby enderman so in the uh opening ceremonies one of the things that was shown that i definitely got a pretty good reaction from the crowd was the writable chickens so we’re going to do a quick demo kind of show how ridable chickens were made

So yet again we’re going to grab some stuff from pig because pig is one of the mobs that exists in the game that has some rideable behaviors on it So this time we don’t need to mess with any events or anything so we’ve got a there’s three components that kind of work together um and we generally try to take these components and have them be a very specific set of functionality because if we try to make them do too

Many things then it’s hard to mix and match and get that kind of remix behavior that we’re really going for so what we end up needing here is we have a rideable component and that’s what that does is it really gives you the interaction to you can walk up to the thing the

Little button will pop up that says ride automatically for you tells you how many seats it has like a boat has two seats most things that you can ride have one seat and then there is and it also has some does the right one have a filter

That was something else um and then there is a controllable and that was something that we added for pigs we didn’t want to build that into writable because controllable could be interesting for some other context and that’s the thing for the pigs where you have the carrot on a stick that you can

Steer it around and control where it goes and then there’s a controlled by player which specifically allows players to ride these things around because we also have things that are rideable like the cows and sheep the baby zombies will jump onto and ride them around so we wanted to keep these kind of

Intermingle slow so we’ve copied all of those into chicken now yep okay so let’s jump in i think we should go up on that house that super tall house there there’s our little chicken so we’re not riding it and we could do things like we could try

To do some like chocobo racing make that chicken twice the size or something like that we’ve been we’ve been doing a lot of races there this is one of the kind of the not predicted side effects of riding chickens was you can actually jump off ledges and cliffs and stuff and they’ll

Do their normal behavior of just kind of flutter to the ground so you don’t have to worry about fall damage and stuff like that and it was we’ve actually had a lot of fun in the office with this particular one it’s it’s really impressive how quickly you can tweak these things and

Experiment with them i mean you guys obviously have experience with this but that took like a couple of minutes and you’ve already got something kind of fun unique out of it i think you guys also um started making a nice document where we have a list of all the components

That are in the game so that it’s yeah so there’s what is possible and what is um available to use emily please tell me if i get this wrong we have minecraft.net add-ons which is that up now okay so that site is up now so we’re going to keep adding information up

There um there will be definitely 116 comes out we’re going to have a alien invasion add-on is going to be up there along with the level that we’ve had down on the show floor to show that and it’s we built that as a starting point for

People to look at and see how we built our own add-ons and in addition to that our plan is to take all of the vanilla mobs in the game and put all that stuff up there as well so you can see exactly how the pig got put together you can see

Exactly how the creeper got built and that is going to be a great starting point for you guys and we want to put that document that sarge was talking about with all these components and the documentation on there and that’s going to be kind of a living thing that we’re

Going to be updating regularly so each release there’s going to be new things in there there may be some things we have to tweak because this is our this is our first time really doing this so there’s a definitely a chance that we’re gonna have to kind of go okay we thought

That was the way with this component should work but we need to tweak it a little bit and stuff like that um so we got one other one it was actually adrian and i were kind of rehearsing this earlier today and my six-year-old was like dad dad dad you have to make this

Thing um and we weren’t planning to do it we actually had a plan for a completely different thing and we both laughed so hard um we had to change it cool so let’s see so this is um we’re going to start with a sheep and in this case similar to what we did

With the rideable stuff earlier is sheep were already ridable because baby zombies can write on them so we’re just going to remove the filter that was only letting zombies ride it and we’re going to go into spider and he has an ad rider where he adds skeletons

But i don’t want to add skeletons let’s add creepers i don’t think this will end well oh it’s awesome and hey adrian so since uh this minecon 2016 seems to be kind of all about purple creepers can we make them uh be purple every once in a while purple that’s what i mean

Purple sheep you can make purple creepers but you need an art package for that one so just a quick addition there we go all right should be good to go this is one of the scariest things i’ve seen in a while he’s not too scary yet

But we have some uh this is a developer build so we have a way to quickly toggle between creative and survival so let’s see them now so that’s kind of that’s that’s basically where we’re at with add-ons today so we’ve got this huge list we’re

Gonna put get that list up there um that definitely we’re we’re interested in hearing all feedback that anyone has about add-ons and stuff like that we’re very excited about where we are but this is going to be this is going to be a long process to get fully

Towards that grand vision i talked about at the beginning and this is this is our first step and i hope everyone has a lot of fun with it very cool great well great thanks jason so now we’re going to switch over to sarge and he’s going to kind of talk

About the next evolution of add-ons that goes beyond kind of what we’re showing with these json files and if we have time at the end of this this part of the presentation we’ll take some questions from from you guys so maybe think some cool stuff up for the devs michael okay

Um yeah so as you saw in the demo that jason adrian just showed you it’s quite impressive already what you can do by just taking the features that are in the game recombining them in really cool ways to to to make things happen like uh the creeper was really

Really cool the creeper sheep but if you know from the modding on the java version is about programming in the java version of course it’s java programming and we want to have the same power on all the c plus versions such as the pocket edition the win 10 version so

We are not going with java we are using a programming language that is called c-sharp that is very similar to java but it has a few advantages that’s why we choose it here and one of the the main features will be that you can actually add completely new components and behaviors

That can be used in combination with the add-ons with the data-driven json files to create new interesting things that are not possible with just the behaviors that we have in the game in the vanilla version So that’s the main focus at the moment we are also going to have apis in the game that allow you to do Things that you might be used to if you already created mods on the java version that are very similar to that it’s a little bit more limiting than the java version because on the java version you basically have access to the whole game to everything and for several reasons especially to make sure

That we have a secure environment where plugins cannot do any malicious stuff on somebody’s computer if you want to install and play them we have to restrict a little bit what’s possible but we’re trying to make them as powerful as as possible of course so we are using the mono runtime that’s a

Technology made by xamarin it’s basically a way to get c-sharp to work on all the platforms where we need it and the the way it works is similar to how modding works on the java version but we are loading and compiling the plugins when you actually start again

And when you enter a world they said several advantages um one of the really big advantages is and that’s um really important for uh for me is that the plugins that you actually get and in store they contain the source code you can basically open them up and look inside

And see okay how is something done so it’s a really really good way to learn if you see a cool mechanic in the game that you like in a mod you can just look at it how it’s done you you can try to to do something very similar um

I will just um show a short live demo of what we have so far and after that i have two two more slides where i can go a little bit more into the details i have to switch over to the other computer for this okay so as i said

Plugins is all about really programming things in in programming language and create completely new things we are very early in the development so it’s not something that we are going to release with like the next update but we are still interested in showing it and getting first feedback on the

Direction we’re heading to see if if you see especially if uh java models see something that’s obviously not ideal and also to to see hey you can also tell us if we do something right that’s okay um okay so first off i i have a small demo prepared and um

It’s just um it’s a little bit more technical i have to admit but um i wrote a really simple plugin and what we are going to do is just to show how we can create a custom plugin that hooks into our chat system in the game

And we can actually react to what people are saying in the chat so the the way that plugins are created is first you always have a small if this switches over to the other window yeah you have what we call a manifest file and that basically describes what is in my plugin

One very interesting um thing about the manifest files by the way is we are not going to use it just for the plugins so these manifest files can contain add-ons they contain resource packs so you have a way to have your new resources like textures like sounds

You can add have add-ons that just tweak the values combine things and you can have code all of this combined in one package that creates a new um exciting uh thing in the game so it’s it’s very technical i’m not going to do into go into the details but

If anyone is interested in seeing our current format you can just take a screenshot um feel free to ask me afterwards about details if you want to yeah i want to know more about it yeah one of the things i’ll say is the add-ons also use the same manifest so

If you want to make an add-on today you actually need to kind of go in and take the manifest of whatever samples we put up there if that’s where you’re going to start from and one of the key things to make sure is if you scroll to the top of

That sarge yes there’s the uu id field which is this it looks like a whole bunch of characters and numbers and stuff so that’s a unique good and that’s what tells the game that this plug-in or add-on is a different plug-in or add-on than another one so if you don’t change

Those things from the samples and you try to get multiple plug machine things all on the same machine the game is going to get confused and actually not know which one it’s supposed to load so make sure you change that please yeah and and another property of this uit that jason just

Mentioned is if you know the java modding um space a little bit you know that a lot of mods actually they have additional features if you’re installing along with other mods so it’s a dependency is either if you have a mod that completely just extends the functionality of an existing mode it’s

What we call hard dependency we say this doesn’t make sense without the other mods that i’m working with you can define this in in the manifest and there can also be what we call soft dependencies is just hey if you happen to find this other mod then we are going

To have a little bit of additional functionality where the mods work in more interesting ways together and if you don’t happen to find the other mod then we don’t don’t need these features in there so to show you a little bit of the code that we currently have it’s relatively simple and straightforward

We have an api created for it right now where you can specify things like a handling event handler jason mentioned that there are events that you can react to in the data files and we have even more complex more a longer list of events inside the game

That you can react to in program in a c-sharp code with your program so you can register in this case i say i want to register to the chat event because that’s what i’m interested in every time something happens in chat i want to do something about it and i tell

It okay i have this function that should actually just be called whenever somebody types something in chat so i made a very simple example it’s just making sure that whenever somebody types a message in the chat that starts with a dot i just send another message back to them

And i just say hey i pretend i’m the user with the name plugin and i send back hey you posted this message to me so let’s just go into the game really quick to see if this works um just starting my demo level here

I can just go into the chat and if i just type anything i have normal chat but as i said if i start with the dot just.test then the plugin will react to it and send back hey you posted dot test and we can try this real quick let’s say um

We want a user called minecon send back hey you said this it’s a very simple change So we just start up this the game again we go in there and when i go into the chat and i type something a little bit longer hey minecon you say test so it’s really easy right now you saw i had to restart the game that’s just due to a bug that

Unfortunately is in the version that i am demoing but it’s normally that when you just leave the level for a second and load it again it recompils all the mods so you can easily change stuff we were experimenting with what i call hot reloading it’s just

While you’re in the game you press a hotkey and it reloads everything but it turns out that especially if something goes wrong it could corrupt things in the world so it’s much safer to just allow changes outside of the level that can’t do damage because the last thing you want is to accidentally

Do any damage to your world so but one other interesting feature that i mentioned before is that a mod can interact with another mod and that’s something where i want to really quick show off how we do these interactions so every plugin that you create you have the option to expose

Your own api that’s just the way that the plugin can expose its functionality to other plugins to use in this example i have a very simple example i created an interface that has one function that just says hey i can register a question and i get back an answer now

Let’s quickly implement this so what i’m doing is i’m just using this interface that is chatty i have to copy paste this so i’m just implementing this interface and it’s telling me that i need to add a using statement here so what i’m doing now is basically just

The interface that i defined that i want to expose to other plugins to be used has this function register and i have to implement it by creating this function register down here it says oh it’s not implemented right now so let’s real quick create what we call a dictionary

And we say we want to register Our questions and our answers here i just go for a dictionary okay i hope i i’m not making any typos here and then in our own functions we just say every time somebody registers a new thing we want to just store this in our dictionary here so we add the question

And the answer in it and that’s all that we need to do right now to Store all the questions answers that other plugins want to register with us of course we need to make use of this so what i’m going to do here is i’m just going back to the function that we had before we just saw if you type a message with a dot send something back

And i tell it if you happen to find the the question that is posted in chat in our dictionary then Please send back the answer that was registered with it so we are looking for our event message and then we need to define the answer the way that this works is a so-called out value so we need a string that holds our answer and then we can just say okay if we

Find the question that the user posts in the chat we want to send back the answer so i’m just going to use the same that we have here we send back our chat message to whoever user send us the message in the first place and we want to use let’s just say

Api is the username that we are using for now and then we send back the answer so okay and this should be all that is necessary for this short demo to add on to this chat demo now of course to show how it works it requires another mod now that

Is loaded alongside with this one and actually makes use of this interface and i want to show also that it’s it’s not really necessary to use visual studio for all this any editor is able to where you can type text is enough to get started i use another programming environment here for to

Create the other mod that’s very similar and what i did is i have this other mod that’s very similar in structure it also just registers in the system but what we are doing here instead of reacting to chat ourselves we are actually just um registering we are trying to get the interface from

The other plugin and then we are registering a few questions and answers that the game should react to so let’s see if i didn’t make any typos this should work if i made typos i can show off how we currently see errors in it so i i will just check real quick

There’s a log file where i get at the end okay two two plugins are compiled so everything went where now is the question did i make a logical error we can just go into the game again everything should be loaded we’re going into the text so let’s see if our old

Thing still works we had test okay minecon use it all is good if i type normal things in the chat i get a very normal answer and i happen to have an answer oh this didn’t work you’re missing a return true apparently i’m missing a return too okay where did you see this

In your in the code probably right there oh you’re right thank you if only all our programming was done like that so this is the game that you can play in a pen like this um spotter programmers in the audience this is ultimate ultimate paired programming yeah yes it works really well so

Let’s see if this actually was the problem i hope so otherwise i prepared a small cheat code here i can just i can just copy paste working code from from a text file that i prepared so i can show that we could just get that guy up here if you want michael to

To finish the rest of the demo i i should use my cheat code yeah that’s probably easy i am so anyway i have some code here and i will probably see on the recording later what i did wrong um i can just copy that in here am i in the right file

So i copy this in here oh yeah i see what my problem was i forgot this part i actually have to make this interface available to other mods which means that if another other mod asks this plugin hey do you have this interface i should say yes so that

Let’s see so i’m only copying half of my cheat code in here if this was my only error bot system you typed by accident oh yeah yeah yes there we and we we should also see that it’s compiled okay the slash was actually not breaking the code that’s correct

It’s the only symbol that didn’t break anything here so i was very lucky to hit it okay so okay here we go here we go [Applause] as one of my teacher always said the moment you start doing something right it will work um let’s see we have we have more questions um

I don’t know everything Yeah okay so as you see it’s it’s really easy it’s really easy but we should go back now to the um to the slides and i have a little more details okay so i showed briefly the the format for the for the plugins and the manifest files um

Features that we already have in there is the what i call discovery is just figuring out which plugins are available what can we use we can load them we have the soft and hard dependencies what you saw right now was what we call the heart dependency because the question and answering mod doesn’t

Really make sense without loading our chatty plugin first and then i showed how you can expose your own api that other plugins can use and we have the interfaces in there we have event handlers we say i want to react to chat events for example you can register what we call systems

That will be especially important later in combination with the Components and these are the plans for the future because we are in early development we made some good progress but um it will still require a little bit more effort before we have something that we can show that we want to release because we should at least make sure

That it’s a little bit useful before we put it in one of our releases so the next big step will be to have interfaces that integrate with more of the core systems you saw chat in this example we have so many things in the game especially when it comes to the

Entities items um the world generation will be a really big part um um and then the the first milestone that we’re hitting for is basically making sure that everything that we have in the game should be accessible through our api the the second milestone and we separated this explicitly

That’s where we focus more on adding all the tools that are still missing to really create any kind of new original content it will already be possible with the first iteration but creating really new things that are not even in the game right now that will be the biggest step after that

And we want to have more examples and documentation to show and maybe some tools that help to create things like the manifest file which has a lot of uids that are not really very easy to work with my goal is also to take some of the features that we already have in the

Game smaller features probably convert them from the c plus plus code that we have right now into one of the plugins and just ship one of the game features as an example with the api yeah the first preview is planned for early 2017 that’s where we hope to have something ready for you

Guys to try yourself and until then um i’m really looking to yeah get some feedback on the things that we could show so far and yeah i think we can Go to the q a great thank you michael i think we can go to the questions [Applause] cool so we’ve got around uh 20 minutes left if you’ve got a question for the devs then um yeah i guess i can go out with the microphone that’s probably the best option

Oh it’s not wired uh this one’s okay we have microphones you have microphones yes no they have microphones okay great thank you what is participation okay so yeah we’re ready first question please do you expect plugins to work on the mobile platform specifically on ios yes that’s one of the

Main goals that we have is this system that we are creating will be available on all the platforms that we support with the c versions including systems like ios we are still trying to figure out the details how it’s technically going to work but we want to

Have it on all the platforms that the cpus versions support great hi i’m jig above and i as a map maker i’m always interested in how to package these sorts of things the add-ons plug-ins that sort of thing what are the plans for distribution uh for us people

That make maps yeah so one of the things that we’ve done in 16 is you can at least in the pc version i can’t remember if we’ve enabled it in the other platforms but on wind 10 definitely when you go into your world you can scroll to the bottom and there’s a

Button that says export world any add-ons or resource packs that you’ve set specifically for that world will actually get bundled into that and we create a mcworld file and that mcworld file can basically get sent out however you want to through email through website web portals all that sort of

Stuff and it’s as simple as basically uh on a pc you double click it it’ll launch the game import the world and launch you directly into it or on ios and each platform’s slightly different in exactly how it works but we’ve definitely been able to like open them through email download them

From web portals and things like that and it really kind of depends on your your platform exactly how it’ll work but we’re trying to get this easy import of everything in that sounds awesome thank you will will that work with rounds as well then if i put that on a realms world

Would that go yeah so the way realms is working for 16 is you can export your world with all your add-ons and then you can basically upload your exported world to your realm cool very nice okay next question please um i have a few technical questions so is the

Eventual plan to have just the core game engine in c plus but all the content using the plug-in system even in vanilla we want to have as much as possible of course in the future created on top of the plug-in system and keep like the core in c plus plus

The main question that we need to um solve out first is what are the performance um characteristics of the whole system on different platforms i wouldn’t really want to just say we definitely convert everything and then we end up with something that runs really slow on some platforms

But the goal is that we get as much as possible on the system and more importantly the system needs to be powerful enough that we create new content using it ourselves that’s the best way to make sure that the system supports all the features that are necessary and that we have

Interesting examples that we can ship with the game yeah i got a little bit to add there so one of the things that’s important is not so much about whether the core game is done in c plus plus versus c sharp but it’s making sure that all the

Interfaces that we use to build the core game are exposed to the plug-ins so as long as we expose all those interfaces it shouldn’t really matter to you guys which language the core stuff is actually implemented in that’s exactly to pull them down um and i had one other small thing

Will we be able to render with code and not just models because i i know some mods will need to do that or they’ll have terabytes of json yeah we’re we definitely have that in mind we don’t have a solution quite yet on how to do that but we are we’re

Looking at those sort of things we’ve talked about like how would you integrate a particle system into the runtime rendering stuff like that if you wanted a guide to just be a big swarm of uh fly particles or something like that um we wanna we try to think of ways to

Do that we don’t quite know exactly how we’re going to do it but we’re certainly thinking about it the rendering system on the c plus plus version is very different from how java works um we will we will see if it’s really necessary in the end or if the tools

That we can give you um enough so that you don’t even have to need anymore to write your own rendering code which is like probably the most complex problem to serve in in morning yeah we do have it’s it wasn’t it didn’t get far enough for 16. we have started some work

On getting all the models and animations data driven um but it just to to get the rest of the stuff we had to kind of pull people off that and work and work specifically on the behavior side yep thanks okay over that side okay uh i you you pretty well

Halfway answered my question my question is uh as you move minecraft into the uh microsoft system are you going to fully support those who prefer like me to work in the open source field with open source tools and be able to fully use your apis the api is explicitly designed at the

Moment that all the plugins that you create with it um are distributed in source code form so um i i think it depends on how you define open source from your point of view if you look at can i see the source is it visible source or is it a license

That is really open source that that i will be able to uh write code that will compile with um with java and it will it will be compatible with your work right now we don’t have explicit plans to make a system that works on the java

Version in the same way as on the c plus version i see but you’re not going to continue to support uh the java version the java version will be fully supported in the future um yeah it’s just the the add-ons and the plug-ins are currently we’re looking at

The pocket version for that exactly i see it’s because java is definitely fully i really would uh be looking forward to working with your nuances what you’re doing with it now but uh i don’t care to get into new programming languages in order to use your system yeah ultimately

Our vision for this is that we want every version of minecraft to have the same set of functionality it’s just right now we’ve got a java version we’ve got the console code based on the pocket code base and stuff like that and it’s just it’s there’s there’s a lot of

Technical weight behind each of these versions and the list of features in each of them is different and we’ve been working on trying to get the same set of features in all the versions and if you actually look across the board now we’re getting pretty close from a feature

Perspective and then now it’s kind of like well now like could we make the pocket code run on a console but those are the sort of things those are the questions we ask ourselves all the time now and then by doing things like that if if we ever brought

The pocket code to a console we could actually run add-ons on console and stuff like that and our goal is to get add-ons on there we’re just figuring out what’s the right path to get there but i think to answer your question is we don’t have this exact system on the

Java version i see okay all right thank you c sharp’s pretty close still semi-colons and brackets they also in case you didn’t know when microsoft bought xamarin they open sourced xamarin like legit open source not oracle suing google uh open source microsoft’s definitely a lot more open about open source nowadays things things

Have changed no more cancer uh my question was about permissions if you guys have thought about it or could talk to you because i’m thinking about doing like plug-ins where you’re you know doing web requests or checking your current gps location and mapping real-world stuff to minecraft things

That do you have you thought about you know if your plug-in needs to request permission to make a certain api call um that you could prompt the user for this kind of like you know apps do on phones through the app store or that kind of thing yeah

So we will definitely discuss this in more detail in the future but right now the first the first goal is to get something done that is very safe and very encapsulated in said box so we will definitely in the first versions not have any access from within a plug-in to other system resources

We have to look into which kinds of access to resources like as i said web requests or gps make sense and which ones we can provide later as a feature of the api in a in a safe way that cannot be exploited on a platform to do bad things with it but the

It’s i’m looking to build skynet i want skynet in minecraft yes um that’s definitely something that we will discuss much later in the developments i don’t say that how much sky net we can we can actually give you your future robot overlords thank you Over that side please why do you choose c sharp over java for writing plugins there are multiple reasons One is not very technical reason is that i prefer c sharp over java personally um but that’s not that’s not the main reason we actually looked into many different options for um for weeks and looked at all the disadvantages and advantages of all the languages that could be used and

C sharp just turned out to have the most on the pro side the most checked marks it’s also very easy to integrate in games now that the mono platform xamarin made it open source when they were acquired by microsoft and it’s very easy to integrate it i personally also have

Almost 10 years of experience using mono in a similar way so yeah all these things contribute to the decision to go with mono and c sharp okay thank you okay we’ve got a few minutes left maybe another three questions do you think that work sure uh this side please

I have actually two questions okay i guess you can have a double question and then it’s okay it’s quick so do you have any plans to ig do you have any plans for plug-ins to be able to access guis um yeah actually so if you saw the pocket dev panel that we

Did yesterday michael lott was up there and one of the things we’ve done with if you’ve been following the pocket version over the last couple of releases you’ve seen a lot of ui getting changed and updated the goal with that was we’ve actually been building and rolling everything out

In a new ui system and we’ve pretty well got everything in that system now and all of those ui are actually inside of a resource pack so you can use the resource packs to actually update it and then the goal is to be able to use plug-ins to write the c-sharp code that

That is the back-end behind the uis and also is there going to be like is it going to be are plug-ins going to be as easy to install to your world as resource packs yes okay over this side so so i’m a java person but i i okay okay

So i think t sharp is objectively a better language than java for several reasons the only thing that i don’t like is the stupid capitalization but i can live past that what i’m really curious is why are you compiling it at run time you can instead just have people

Distribute clr assemblies and then run those because what if i really hate the fact that c sharp is one of those curly bracket languages and i want to write an f sharp i know that sarge likes f sharp for fun i i’m a big fan of f sharp

So i wouldn’t object to add a f sharp compiler as well but we we should probably go into detail after this panel because it’s a very long list of reasons i can give you why i really want to compile at runtime at load time and you will see that there are really good

Reasons especially on the sandboxing security side we get a lot of advantages all of it and i personally care about the fact that the source code of every plugin will be easily viewable by other players to to learn from that yeah i think you have a point there like

I like the idea that you can just look at the code and you know you know you know how it works and you can use a decompiler for that but yeah you have a point the but the thing uh I’ll talk to y’all account yes uh okay let’s do two more so this is the second to the last okay this side okay so i have very a very limited amount of coding knowledge so what would be the main difference between plug-in slash add-ons and mods you mean between the

C-sharp plugins and the driven add-ons and mods on the java platform right now i think the main platform the main difference is that on the java version There’s this big problem that mods always break every time we update the game it’s it’s not true for 1.9 to 110 but there’s no stable api that is consistent over multiple versions and the system we create has the the goal to be as stable as possible it’s not a hundred percent sure

Never in api that it will forever be the same and never break but at least you can do proper deprecation cycles and most of the time add-ons especially um but also the plug-ins they will just work even when the new versions of the game are released

Yeah one of the things also like by us componentizing everything is the odds of us needing to change how these things work actually gets reduced because we don’t have these crazy inheritance hierarchies and things like that where like with a traditional way to build stuff is you would say okay well a pig

Is an animal and an animal is a pathfinder mob and a pathfinder mob is a mob and etc etc and actually makes it really hard to mix and match and do these things so it actually caused it it increases the chances if we wanted to if

There was some feature we wanted to add to vanilla for pigs that we would have to go change something drastically either in the inheritance hierarchy or things like that and those cause ripple effects through the code base but with the components now we can just write a

Single component add it to the game and say okay well now here’s a new thing that’s in the sandbox and the toy box for you guys to play with and mix and match but another thing that’s kind of different with the add-ons and plug-ins is add-ons we kind of have multiple

Tiers now so we’ve got the stuff that adrian and i showed initially which is just editing data files you don’t need to know any programming to do that so it’s literally just here’s some text you go in and edit it you can and drop it in there copy stuff that’s there play

Around with it and that’s a i kind of consider it kind of like an entry-level way to create cool experiences and then if you really want to dive deep into it you can go into the plug-in side and start building your own plugins and start creating brand new behaviors and

Those plugins might end up you can release them out to other people other people might use those plugins and their add-ons and they never so they didn’t know how to program either but they can start using plug-ins that say sarge created or people in the crowd out here

Start grabbing those plugins and they can start using them as well and i think we’ll get a pretty cool ecosystem of all the sharing among all this stuff thank you i like that you used to pick as an example okay so this is the last question but um

After this panel if you want to talk to the devs i think you’ve you might have some time before the opening ceremony to discuss stuff um so yeah last question please will you be able to edit global burials variables such as gravity and the length of days using json

Uh the goal is to eventually get there our current priority is entities wrap up those kind of missing things that we don’t have on entities like right now you can’t you can’t change their movement behaviors you can’t add animations and things like that so like you can’t make

A zombie fly but you could take a bat and make it look like a zombie but he wouldn’t animate like a bat so there’s some restrictions like that we want to focus on first then we want to get items and blocks eventually running through the system as well

And then we’re going to start looking at other things like there’s there’s things like world gen and global settings and stuff like that that we’ll we’ll eventually get to i just don’t know when okay thank you um thanks thanks everyone thanks for the great questions uh enjoy the closing ceremony and yeah

Thanks for coming to minecon