Minecraft 1.4.7 is Published (And Future Texture Info) news

The 1.4.7 patch for Minecraft has now been posted to the launcher. This was pre-released two weeks ago, and the fixes were:

• Fixed crash related to arrows fired from dispensers
• Fixed a multiplayer crash when using fireworks without a fireworks star
• Fixed long timeout when checking SRV records

// The Minecraft Team

(Mojang blog link)

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Jeb posted information about texture pack updates over Twitter. I will post the relevant information below, which is pulled from the wiki. --Warner

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Future

During MineCon 2012 they announced that Minecraft will support HD texture packs and animated texture packs in the Redstone Update.

Video that shows the plans for new texture packs:

Textures for Blocks and Items in Minecraft 1.5

Starting from Minecraft 1.5, or snapshot 13w02a specifically, the "terrain.png" and "gui/items.png" files will be replaced by individual block and item images (sheet images). These individual images will be "stitched" together again at runtime, and will make sure that the default artwork is used if images are missing in the selected texture pack.

The game will also no longer create procedural textures for fire, lava, water, portals, clocks or compasses. Instead, the sheet image for these blocks and items need to contain a pre-drawn animation. The upside is that the animations will not be limited to these blocks, but can be used for any sheet image. Also, the game will allow texture packs to mix and match sheet image resolution. For example, if a HD texture pack is missing a certain sheet image, the game will be able to use the default one even though it has a different format (16x16 pixels).

Folders in Minecraft 1.5
(Content removed, please view this section on the wiki instead.)

Texture Animations in Minecraft 1.5
Any sheet image can be animated by placing additional frames of animation in the same image in y-axis slots. The default behavior will be that, at 10 updates per second (100 ms per frame), the game will copy the next slot into the active texture. Once the bottom of the sheet image is reached, the game will start over from the topmost slot again. For example, to create a block texture that quickly flips between two 16x16 images, place them above each other in a 16x32 sheet image.

It will be possible to customize the duration and selection of which frames to use. For example you may want to "ping-pong" the animation (using frames 1-2-3-2-1) instead of looping it (1-2-3-1-2-3). This will be done by creating a text file with the same name as the sheet image (such as "dirt.txt" for "dirt.png") and specifying which frame indices the game should pick when it's ticked.

The format of the animation file is simply numbers specifying which frames to pick (indices start from 0), separated by either commas or new lines. For example, if you would want to ping-pong an animation that has 4 frames, the contents of text file would look like this:

0,1,2,3,2,1 

... or like this:

0 
1 
2 
3 
2 
1 

To make the animation slower than 10 updates per second, the animation file can be specified to keep the frame for any number of ticks using an asterisk and the number of ticks to keep it. For example, to make the animation above four times slower, the file would look like this:

0*4,1*4,2*4,3*4,2*4,1*4 

Special Sheet Images in Minecraft 1.5

• blocks/lava_flow.png, blocks/water_flow.png
  The flowing parts of lava and water use 4 slots of the terrain texture. To simplify the construction of the artwork, these two sheet images need to be double the size of the other blocks in the texture pack (32x32 pixels for the default resolution).
• items/compass.png
  The compass can not be animated, instead it will use its animation slots to render the direction of the needle. The compass can have any number of directions, but the first one (frame 0) should point south and the others should gradually turn clock-wise. Naturally, the last frame should almost point south again (and slightly to the east).
• items/clock.png
  Likewise, the clock can not be animated either. Its animation frames are used to render the time of day. The first frame is noon, then counting clock-wise a whole day. Midnight is at half of the animation's length (so if you have 32 frames for the clock, midnight should be at 16).

Resources

• Dinnerbone has released an "unstitcher" tool which converts texture packs into 1.5 format. The format separates each individual block texture into its own file. The "unstitcher" tool can be downloaded at Assets.minecraft.net.
• The sheet images used in the in-development version of 13w02a can be found here: Assets.minecraft.net Check here to see examples of the special images (such as lava and the compass).