MINECRAFT UPDATE-BY NOTCH

The web server is struggling, we’re migrating

Once again, minecraft.net is more popular than the poor old server can keep up with, so we’re upgrading. I’m not quite sure how long it will take to get done as it’s mostly Tobias doing the work (thank you, sir!). We’ve got a huge amazon cloud server which we’re moving the main server to. We’ll be able to replicate this as demand grows, and we’ll have a load balancer set up in front of it all. Skin downloads will almost certainly be migrated to S3 downloads instead of going through resin as it does now, and we’ll have a separate server just to handle game logins and auth requests.

In other news, we spent the day today out of the office in various cafés, as the floor was getting fixed. And we got the Machinima.com IGA awards! They’re pretty!

If you want to see some pics from the office and Mojang in general, Carl has a photo album here. It gets updated every now and then.

For Minecraft development, we’re working on the new file format, and a new game launcher. The file format is still in early testing, but it’s looking somewhat promising, except for it taking up a bit too much space. It’s faster, though.
The new Launcher will be a bit prettier, will show release notes and other news, will send login requests over https (finally), and will ask if the user wants to update to the latest version or not. In the future, we’ll add support for playing the previous installed version (after warning the player that there might be unexpected bugs) and the ability to choose what work directly to save the level files, but that’s not coming in this version.

We’ve got a meeting planned for tomorrow with some community members to discuss how to best implement the modding.

posted 17 hours ago