c1K wrote:xyzzy57 wrote:Meanwhile I'm currently unhappily using the official client, and lobbying for improvements to it.
I'm sure many people would've gladly switched to vanilla if it offered MORE things.
After 3 days playing vanilla, I have a few observations.
Some of the differences are obviously matters of philosophy.
The devs rarely, perhaps never give names for anything. Instead, they give icons. They tell you how close it is to sunset via an icon that shows the sun moving through the sky, in a manner at least similar to the real world. They tell you how close it is to sunrise via an icon that shows the moon moving through the sky in a way that only mirrors the real world experience at full moon - it instead behaves like the sun, even while its phases change. They tell you the state of your crops - and their identity - via yet more icons.
I suspect they want people to learn by exploring, and not to be able to easily communicate with each other. I can't ask "are seals likely to aggro" if I don't know the name of something that looks to me like an unidentified large ocean mammal. Instead, I get to find out these things by being attacked. If I'm lucky, when I pick a something-or-the-other I see on my mini map, I get told what it's called once it's in my inventory. I believe this is by design; they have the idea that learning by doing is more fun than being told things; they also seem to believe everyone has such an excellent visual memory that they can recognize things they are seeing for the second time, and distinguish "this thing again" from "new thing that's somewhat similar".
Objects do appear to have names within the code, probably because they haven't figured out how to use an icon as a symbol in their source code ;-( This has allowed custom client writers to surface the names, making the game a lot more playable for me and probably quite a few other players.
It took me a day or two playing with the vanilla client to realize that there were subtle changes in some of these icons, and those changes carried encoded meaning. Thus when I saw an hourglass without the % done shown by the ender client, I presumed the only meaning conveyed was "this will take time", just like the similar icon in, e.g. MacOS. Eventually I noticed that there was an animation of the sand running through the hourglass, and the state of that animation represented a rough % completion. (Frankly, I suspect there's a table in the code, with % complete mapping to icon-version to show.)
I don't like this, but it's obviously something the developers put in intentionally. It may also be useful because of the game being international - no need to translate "seal" and "walrus" into a bazillion native languages, and less confusing for a non-english speaker to deal with an icon than an english word - at least they can figure out it's supposed to be some sort of large sea mammal.
On the other hand, some things just look like failure to finish a bit of implementation. An example there would be mine support radius not including the radius supported by the mine hole ladder. I doubt Jorbtar consider it a positive value that user need to count tiles - and worse, draw the appropriate radius on graph paper and apply that picture to identify which tiles are safe to mine. It just didn't occur to them to finish the job, when they added the mine support radius toggle to their client.
In many other cases, probably most, I have no clue why the vanilla client is unnecessarily difficult to use. But there does appear to be some rhyme and reason to at least some of what to me seem like obvious deficiencies.
