Eskil to help Notch with Minecraft graphics

[iamacyborg]

Interesting article over on Eurogamer about Eskil helping Notch on making some graphical improvements to Minecraft.

Markus "Notch" Persson has enlisted the help of an unlikely source to help improve the charmingly basic graphics of MineCraft.

He's asked fellow Swede and Love maker Eskil Steenberg for a hand.

Are their two brains even compatible?

"I don't think so, because he writes Java and I'm a C programmer," jokes Steenberg in an exclusive and candid interview with Eurogamer.

"Actually I'm probably gonna help him with some graphic stuff. He actually asked me to help him with some stuff."

"It's array buffer objects!"

He explains: "In order to do graphics fast you want to store your geometry on the graphics card instead of the main memory. But there are some tricks on how to do that fast because drivers are picky about how you do it. So you need to be smart about it."


Love - a lavish, ambitious, idealistic online world framed as a painting come to life - pre-dates MineCraft. But the two share similarities. In both games, players hold the power; theirs is the task of building a settlement and shaping the land. Love differs in that it has complex AI routines that also populate the world, adapting and reacting to your chosen style of play.

Steenberg, however, has never enjoyed success like Persson: Love watched as MineCraft took over. So is Steenberg jealous?

"No I'm not," he says. "I'm really not. I know the guys that did it."

"I haven't played it actually," he adds. "I haven't played much at all lately because I've been much too busy. But everyone tells me it's completely different.

"It shouldn't be about [money]. I'm really happy for his success. He's handled it really well: he's still making the game, and that proves what it should be about."

Steenberg, like Persson, says he's been approached by big, attractive companies with competitive job offers. But even the rosiest of them didn't appeal.

"I've had offers, yeah," he admits. "Well the last one was Apple.

"I'm not interested. Once you've been free for so long, having somebody tell you what to do...

"I actually think I'll probably never be employed again."

[Mattk50]

this is extremely intresting for me being mainly a minecraft player and not so much a love player. i always thought minecraft would look funky with love's graphics... we will see.

[iamacyborg]

From what I understand of it, he's not helping to change the graphical style, he's just helping to make the code run more smoothly.