Minecraft’s convoluted version numbering system is getting a shakeup soon, with Mojang introducing a year-based naming scheme for easier use.

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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    10 months ago

    “This change in our version numbering won’t have a huge impact on our players,” says Mojang. “We are, however, hoping it’ll make it easier for our creator partners and modders to understand which of our version numbers represent a game drop, and which of them represent patches or bug fixes to our drops.”

    I know that Mojang is not being honest, that there’s something going on, but I can’t exactly pinpoint what.

    The old numbering system is not hard to understand. It’s simply 1.A.B, where A = major version (“game drop”) and B = patch/bugfix. And the newer one is not easier, it’s A₁.A₂.B where A₁ = year and A₂ = major version within that year.

    Perhaps this is meddling from the above? It’s possible Microsoft is trying to kill the Java version, but before that it’s trying to leave explicit that all Java versions became “deprecated” - and having the release year in it is a good way to show it. But that’s just me guessing.

    • Nelots@piefed.zip
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      10 months ago

      I don’t think they would try to kill java edition. It’s not like the past decade of mods are going anywhere, and java players aren’t exactly known for being afraid to play on older versions. The most popular modpack is for 1.12.2. Hell, I recently found out most modern features have been back-ported via mods to at least 1.7.10 with older version inspired retextures and all. I don’t see why that wouldn’t continue to happen, even if Microsoft stopped officially updating this version of the game.

      And I doubt most of the people still playing on Java have any interest whatsoever in the bedrock marketplace. So they’d lose all of their goodwill with a massive chunk of the community, and for what?

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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        10 months ago

        Fair points. Well, it makes sense, my guess is probably off.

        Back to the original question - why is Mojang doing this?

    • wraithcoop@programming.dev
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      10 months ago

      So jetbrains versions their software like this, I think it’s because with semantic versioning the actual numbers are arbitrary. Making the numbers include some time information helps to identify how current it is, especially when it’s actively developed by a private company (oss generally isn’t guaranteed that)