Bear with me, this may get a little technical.
Mojang has been busy incorporating both Optifine and MCPatcher features into Minecraft. Even now the video settings windows looks suspiciously similar. Shaders and vastly improved responsiveness is a more than welcome improvement. This new snapshot feels so smooth I don't want to play Minecraft 1.6 anymore.
I'm eager for the new release. I can honestly say we weren't thrilled with the last, but it turned out for the best. This time we are thrilled to be working on 1.7 - we're upping the ante too. 64x resolution may not cut it.
Thankfully the new rendering engine may enable players who couldn't play to join the foray. Let's face it guys, even Intel CPU based graphics are acceptable. When your graphics accelerator actually does more work than your CPU - which most do these days - it's a shame not to take advantage of it.For the first time, Minecraft will do so natively.
A consequence of this is MCPatcher and Optfine are effectively useless. I haven't heard whether a deal was reached, but I doubt it was necessary as Java (and thus Minecraft) uses OpenGL for rendering, so there are no secrets - only techniques. Color patches and mods across the board may be completely invalidated, depending on the planned adaptation path of the aforementioned mods.
What this means for us is the MCPatcher/Optifine features of the ACME and ACME Christmas Packs will not work. Frankly it's up in the air and only the guys at Mojang know what they plan to support. Are we getting random mobs? An easier system of modding textures, colormaps and connected stuff?
My impression of all this is that Mojang is laying the groundwork to support as many mods as are logical in the foundation of a plugin API. So far, so good.What's next? Until we know "advanced features" such as transparent glass are on hold.
It's not that Mojang hasn't made boneheaded choices, but the beauty of code is errors are usually correctable, features are buildable. We've been waiting a long time for the sort of performance and functionality that is being added, and I'm grateful for it.
Good work, guys!
