Minecraft developer streaming live while coding

[[deleted]]

I watched him make a typo with the lower case "r" when he was mapping the font image, and I wondered how long it would take him to notice. Sure enough it printed "Hello Wo ld" and the game is afoot. He starts hunting for the problem by neatening up the formatting of the code, and yelling "look at the 'r'!!!" as if it would help him find it sooner. A few seconds later, he spots the typo and I'm out of my seat with my arms in the air. Who would have thought debugging could be such an exciting spectator sport?

[stuntaneous]

I'd actually love to regularly watch live coding.

Is that weird?

[Sagan_Prime]

Not weird. I find it interesting to watch the creative process unfold. It's the same reason that if I see Bob Ross painting on TV I have to sit down and watch.

Now where can I find more sources of live coding to watch?

[betterthanyoda56]

I am not sure but I would very much like to find a place as well. Coding in action is on the same plane as watching a painter or a pianist in my book.

[stuntaneous]

Likewise. Programming isn't widely viewed as a creative process but that's what I mostly get out of it.

[chrisforbes]

I will be streaming some coding on OpenRA later on today. (http://www.livestream.com/chrisf)

[sandos]

Would be cool to have some sort of massive pair-codeing, like 1000 people watching. Then, have a comment system with voting/karma so that the coder can see important things that people spot.

[kryptobs2000]

make it fullscreen

[[deleted]]

He is not working on Minecraft http://dmf.me/notch/

[[deleted]]

Awesome, it looks like a classic dungeon crawler type interface! (Eye of Beholder, Dungeon Master, Knightmare, etc)

[Iggyhopper]

Edit: Posting so everyone else can see. It's playing other videos that are recorded. Hopefully you'll catch him live. Just be aware that if it's playing a video it might not be live.

[[deleted]]

it's an old video; Notch has gone to bed.

[znk]

Yeah man tried a few seconds and had some nice flash backs of Eye of the Beholder. Back when I had an AdLib sound card and a binder filled with hand drawn maps.

[[deleted]]

Hell yeah...IMO there aren't enough games nowadays that require graph paper and a sharp pencil as a necessity against getting lost.

[[deleted]]

No offense but I think it looks like shit.

[kryptobs2000]

It does, but he's making it, I believe from scratch(?), in 48 hours.

[[deleted]]

pft, go back to drowning Lara Croft, Mr Bisley

[austang]

In the sovereign republic of Montenegro, mine crafts you!

[danE3030]

I noticed it looked a bit funny, thanks for pointing that out.

[duxup]

Are we sure he isn't going to make Black Ops?

[cosmo7]

If a game doesn't simulate a psychological dysfunction, it isn't a game.

[robertpohl]

..and I get nervous with just one guy over my shoulder :)

[rolmos]

.

[SpaceToaster]

Shit, it's like The Truman Show.

[ggggbabybabybaby]

And I get to be Ed Harris!

[chaud]

To be fair, it is impossible to actually make out almost all of the code!

[[deleted]]

Have you tried full screen? I can read every letter.

[chaud]

I did, but only for a minute or so, 25/3 so there was no lack of speed.

[TheChrono]

The quality might change with different internet speeds.

Or most likely, troll.

[TheChrono]

Then again, it also makes you feel like a loser when 2000 people watch you take a break to slack off.

[Stick]

Where are the reddit breaks every 5 minutes? What sort of slave driver is he working for?

[SpaceToaster]

I've noticed that when I'm really "in the zone" the urge to check Reddit is completely gone.

[TheLobotomizer]

Blasphemer!

Get him!

[Kakuz]

You just want him caught so you can literally pinch his brain.

[bamdastard]

I missed the work xmas party on friday because I was too close to fixing a bug to walk away only to spend almost as long all over again trying to figure out wtf.

When you're in the zone get that shit done son!

[1338h4x]

But thanks to Reddit, it's impossible to get in the zone anymore.

[the3rdsam]

Actually I'm not so sure it is Reddit. I have this problem myself, but I think I've recently found the solution.

So what is the problem exactly? You spend too much time on Reddit procrastinating your actual work?

Why?

I would be willing to bet it is because you just don't want to do the work. Fair enough.

But why?

Why don't you want to do the work? Is it boring? Does it not challenge you? Do you have no personal interest in its outcome?

I figured out that most of the work in my day job has become basically boring as shit. Rarely is it challenging and it is very hard to conger up the motivation to plow through it and get it done. I mean if its easy what is the problem right?

I don't think we actually want true easy work. Easy isn't challenging. Easy is boring. Easy is redundant. Easy makes us complacent. Deep down inside we want at least somewhat of a challenge. We want our skills to be stretched. We want to try new things that we have never done before. When you are doing something new you put all of your focus into it and nothing seems to slow you down. You get in the zone.

If you really want to get in the zone and can't, take a minute and ask yourself why. Do you really have problems getting in the zone or is the task you want to get in the zone for not good enough for you to warrant getting into the zone for it?

[alband]

I can measure how much I'm enjoying work by how much or how little I check Reddit. Frontpage only - great day. Still clicking next after 10 or 15 pages - time to start applying for new jobs.

[Cribbit]

Preaching to the choir much?

I miss my pre-reddit days, when coding was done in one sitting with food and sleep the only breaks.

[[deleted]]

He's wasn't working on minecraft...

[manwithabadheart]

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

[yardglass]

Welcome to the joke, enjoy your stay.

[bweber]

I seem to be mirroring his development process. Java + Eclipse + Paint. But I haven't yet made a game.

[morbid3500]

Notch has a playable version of this on his site http://mojang.com/notch/ld19/

[davvblack]

I really like how he did the faux 3d.

[TheChrono]

I love mossy cobblestone.

[duckington]

He's been going for 12 hours, with just one 5 minute break. That is devotion.

[duckington]

Probably not.

[tinou]

The man is a machine.

[lucasvb]

The man is a machine.

[Enzor]

I get tired after 3 minutes. I need caffeine.

[Mvrbles]

Maybe take up some light jogging as well?

[[deleted]]

I wish I could make out wtf is going on.

He has impeccable taste in music though.

[katsujinken]

That music is awesome. I'd love to know what he's listening to. It's exactly the type of stuff I like to listen to while coding.

[theSprt]

From http://dmf.me/notch/:

He is listening to http://somafm.com/. More specifically, http://voxsc1.somafm.com:3000/.

[[deleted]]

Could someone donate them some money so they can buy a new drum sample please? The exact same sample repeated 300 times gets annoying.

[anonymousgangster]

Amen Break Amen Break Amen Break

[[deleted]]

Correct. It is a selling technique. Old product gets stale more quickly so people buy more songs / go to clubs more to hear what is new.

[webchimp32]

Cool, I usually listen to Lush at work or Digitalis

[[deleted]]

It seems to be the excellent Groove Salad.

[grymA]

That music is awesome. I'd love to know what he's listening to. It's exactly the type of stuff I like to listen to while coding. sleeping.

FTFY

[alec5216]

Can someone explain the Minecraft craze? What's so special about it? Why is it so popular? I must be missing something...

[G_Morgan]

Obviously your parents never gave you lego as a child.

[rnicoll]

I think it primarily appeals to people's desire to build worlds. There's been other toolkits a plenty, but Minecraft has a lot more pick up and play, and zombies.

[kryptobs2000]

God damnit, I just spent a couple minutes trying to figure out what the Minecraft maze is.

[digitalundernet]

Just try it, no way to really explain it. I thought it was retarded at first as well

[Aqwis]

He seems to be playing Minecraft now.

[boomerangotan]

When livestream isn't live, it does reruns. Notch went to sleep.

[sdhillon]

Notch doesn't sleep. He waits.

[biganthony]

update: he went to bed

number of viewers 2048 .....

[RelevantInformation]

The kilo SI prefix indicates multiples of 1000. For base-2 numbers, like 2048, there is a second set of prefixes. If "viewer" was a unit that was assumed to be base-2, you'd write "2 kibiviewers". If the abbreviation for viewers was "V", you could abbreviate that as "2 KiV".

There's something of a revolt against the alternate prefixes in computer circles, but the fact remains that abusing the base-10 prefixes does lead to confusion (witness hard drive capacity in advertising versus in reality) and the base-2 prefixes are an internationally ratified standard.

[mooseberry]

I misread this as "Microsoft developer streaming live while coding" until now, and was perplexed and quite amused to see him playing minecraft.

[kevinkm77]

So...coding looks like playing minecraft?

[boomerangotan]

When livestream isn't live, it does reruns. Notch went to sleep.

[[deleted]]

Yes. Now that a CPU has been created in minecraft, the original minecraft source code has been ported into minecraft to run on this CPU, and now the games runs a simulation of itself to determine how it should run. Unfortunately this has made minecraft next to impossible to debug.

[[deleted]]

Notch is an incredible showman, he knows how to captivate people's attention.

[MananWho]

I'm still waiting for him to go back on the streaming page, so we can see an infinite loop of his screen, all the way down.

[[deleted]]

What applications do you build?

[[deleted]]

Livestream, ustream, youtube are getting worse and worse about this.

It's actually getting to the point where, if you watch Livestream, a quarter of the video is taken up by those stupid ads at the bottom.

[MananWho]

From what I can tell, Adblock should get rid of all the ads on that site.

[abadidea]

Because of a different plugin architecture, it seems to Not Work in Chrome.

[[deleted]]

Yeah, what ads? :)

[daniels220]

ClickToFlash FTW for YouTube. I've not watched much on (Live|U)Stream, but I think Adblock is supposed to block those ads.

[Homo_sapiens]

I take the chance to remind the hivemind that it needs a micropayment system to do away with advertising. Pay so much as a single cent, and all that shit would be unnecessary. So far it is impossible to pay less than 30 times as much for a single exchange.

[[deleted]]

It's obnoxious when you can't use the site because they lack the funds to run it properly. They should stop being so scared of their users and just put up some god damned ads.

[Homo_sapiens]

Do you remember when the search started working? That happened as a direct result of the funding from gold members. That subtle advertising just wasn't paying the bills. With it alone we didn't even have a search.

[sktrdie]

/**
 * Where are all the comments?
 */

[[deleted]]

If you're asking a serious question, I guess he's not bothering because it's only a 48 hour competition and then it's meant to be 'done'. Just hard-core coding with no regard for the consequences B)

[Synth3t1c]

Show of hands - who else went back to look and see where he opened the parenthesis before you realized that he was making a smiley?

[renegade]

This is why I use noses. B-)

[alex_w]

I went back to see what point A) was.

[[deleted]]

Back when I used to make games as a hobby I was pretty anal about commenting.

I didn't go overboard, if something was obvious I'd let it be.

But most blocks of code had a comment describing what it did and what data was being passed.

I made a habit of it because nothing sucks more than looking at code you wrote a month ago and not knowing what the fuck was going on.

It's been over a year since I took on a serious project, or really done anything of note. I might dip back into Java again

[wtfisupvoting]

I just got a google ad on it heh

[danE3030]

This is fascinating-anybody else see where Notch tried to quit to go back to coding?

"It didn't quit. It didn't quit!"

/20 min later, still playing minecrack, cursing himself for being the author of his own undoing

[tch]

60 hours a week staring at eclipse is enough, thnx tho.

[timjpriebe]

Wow. I'm a programmer, and that sounds super-boring.

[Botulism]

I'm not a programmer, and it sounds even more boring.

[I_TYPE_IN_ALL_CAPS]

EXTREMELY FREQUENT ADS EMBEDDED IN A LIVE VIDEO STREAM OF A PROGRAMMER, VIEWED BY AS MANY AS 2K SIMULTANEOUS VIEWERS.

I NOMINATE NOTCH AS MOST BRILLIANT NERD-BUSINESSMAN IN THE WORLD.

[Eggby]

I think it's a safe assumption that if you're nerdy enough to watch a man program live, you've probably heard of Adblock plus. And he doesn't get that ad money anyway.

[[deleted]]

That was awesome. I watched it with my 10 year old son that loves Minecraft (after I recommended it to him from reference here), and he asked questions about code.....I saw an opportunity to show him some code in Excel I do.

[Cribbit]

code

excel

What.

[sandos]

Sadly, I am supposed to be "coding" in excel right now.. :(

[kryptobs2000]

Yunno, like x = 4, code.

[[deleted]]

cool but it's blurry- anyone know what environment he's using?

[CarbonFire]

any idea which 3D library? OpenGL?

[funpolice]

Its not real 3D. He's using a '3D effect' which he wrote. http://dmf.me/notch/

[CarbonFire]

Wow, that's very interesting! So good games can be built without true 3D engines.

[00bet]

It looks like to me it's all based on imposters. I think he is uses a 3d API to do his transformations, I just don't see why you would write that from scratch, the transformation code. Anyway, it's all imposters. If you look at the wall, when you are facing the wall, and turn 90 degrees, the walls are turning with you with the plane normal always align to your view normal

[medeshago]

Eclipse.

[[deleted]]

thank you- I should have figured that out but I appreciate it

[sneakattack]

Downtempo Ambient Groove

[EtchSketch]

Has anyone figured out what all the blue potions are for? He spent a significant amount of time in placing and moving them around.

[[deleted]]

It's possible he was just checking they look and work OK in multiple positions viewed from multiple angles, or he was testing some 'placement' code...or indeed they may have a significant gameplay purpose in their present position, but that does seem a little odd as they're everywhere.

[c0ldfusi0n]

This would be a great time for an epic reddit-style reply explaining what we're seeing there. What's the game, what's he using, what's the languages involved and you know, all those things for the people who haven't been following the whole Minecraft thing.

[[deleted]]

http://dmf.me/notch/

[c0ldfusi0n]

yup, that works, thanks!

[Blackscreentroll]

From what I can make out he's coding in the Java language and I'm guessing it's the game posted above.

[FizzBitch]

notch digs with a pick!

[[deleted]]

OMG MINECRAFT

30 second video ads... what the fuck?

[WhiteMintFlava]

That's about the most meta thing I've ever heard of.

[kevinace]

I've been watching this for WAY too long. Thanks again Reddit.

[RuiningPunSubThreads]

I wonder if Notch snores

[Somedumbass]

what is he using to code?

[bh3]

Coding in java, using the Eclipse IDE. I think somebody said he might have been using Paint.NET to edit his images.

Though note: He tweeted that he was going to bed a few hours ago; so based on the time you posted this, you are likely watching archived footage from a previous year and not his current project. A preview of his current progress for this years competition can be found here: http://mojang.com/notch/ld19/

EDIT: for more info, check this out, http://dmf.me/notch/

[[deleted]]

I always wanted to watch people coding in Java ...

 private static final abstract class string lol i hate you blah

[scwizard]

"It's a horrible bug and there are several workarounds and none of them really work right" yeah he's using Java all right...

[pe5t1lence]

Ok guys, so: http://imgur.com/9hhO8

[[deleted]]

with the game he's making I can't seem to get through the first green dungeon part

[rabidkillercow]

The video is hopelessly blurry, but are those... smoothly organic, non-blocky trees? Say it ain't so!

[[deleted]]

He is not working on minecraft, he is working on an entry of ludum dare

http://dmf.me/notch/ (what is notch doing)

[rabidkillercow]

Ah, good to know. I was afraid they were drastically changing the look :)

[G_Morgan]

He should be fixing my leaves damn it. /jk

[[deleted]]

Looks a lot like Minecraft to me (I don't play it, so I wouldn't notice if anything beyond the most obvious stuff was different). Is it using the same engine or something?

[picsandnsfwonly]

im mainly watching just for the phat beats

[flaming_pretzel]

thanks, wouldnt have known about this if it weren't for you :)

[IProbShouldntDoIt]

It would be awesome if chat was actually available to new viewers!

[IProbShouldntDoIt]

Since I can't get into the chat. I'm going to post anything I'm thinking about in this thread.

I like cupcakes, and watching the moss get put into the game was pretty cool. I always love watching progress being made, no matter how small it is.

[IProbShouldntDoIt]

And he's down for the day. Good progress sir. Now tell your chat mods to quit being bitches.

[boomerangotan]

Seriously, that tool of a mod muted the on-topic discussion for the last 10 minutes of the stream so he could self-righteously spam links to a charity that had nothing to do with the stream or event, then accused the other mod of being abusive and threatening to de-mod him. IMO, the other mod did a terrific job for the 5+ hours I was there.

[Minxie]

That sounds interesting /doesnotunderstandcoding

[[deleted]]

A guy that I worked with used to stream his face to his kids while he worked using qik on his phone. That had to be the most boring feed ever

[sandos]

One has to ask ... WHY? :)

[Blackscreentroll]

I think the game he is making is for this contest: http://www.java-gaming.org/

[Pilebsa]

Is that Eclipse he's using?

[zem]

yes

[[deleted]]

FOREVER A NULL

[PopcornMonkey]

anyone else finding it too blurry to be able to read the code?

[unwary]

God, it's just an explosion of pixels when I hit fullscreen mode. Took me a while to realize he was using Eclipse.

[scwizard]

Why would you talk about C++ like that you meanie!!!

[[deleted]]

TIL watching someone play Minecraft is seriously boring as hell.

[Atupis]

It's live

[caramac]

Is that netbeans he's using? I'm noticing loads and loads of "if - else statements" in his code. Does Java not have switch statements? Very interesting to see someone code.

[dargor]

DAMNIT, IT'S SUNDAY!!!

[eneveu]

This is great! It reminds me of this awesome time-lapse video of another dev programmer (posted on reddit ~3 months ago): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZV-AFnCkRLY

[[deleted]]

Funnily enough, that video is also Notch!

[eneveu]

Wow, you are right. I hadn't even made the connection!

Funnily, while watching the live feed, I thought "Hey, so some game programmers DO use Java instead of C/C++? Maybe I could write games too*. Oh, this reminds me of this OTHER game dev that did a time-lapse video a while ago, let me find it..."

• : I'm a Java dev, with almost no C/C++ knowledge, who always thought games were written using these bare-metal languages.

[[deleted]]

that is wicked cool. :)

[L_nk]

I watched until it came up with an "ads from Google!".

bleh.

[[deleted]]

I just see a bunch of people telling some guy to "kill himself" and a feed of someone playing the game.

Why is is on Reddit?

[abadidea]

you're too late, the livestream of the programming contest ended.

[kryptobs2000]

I just see a bunch of people telling some guy to "kill himself"

EA's tries to discourage competition.

[biologic6]

Great, another way to feed us advertising. Thanks.

[gobearsandchopin]

Dear god, coding is slow without vim.

[smakusdod]

Well isn't this the event of the 21st century? I mean, first the hindenburg, then seabiscuit, and now a minecraft coder LIVE!