Nphyx

The most straightforward way to do it that I know of is to make a copy of minecraft.jar in .techniclauncher/tekkit/bin or .techniclauncher/technicssp/bin. Next install the (normal) GLSL shader mod for the correct minecraft version to the original minecraft.jar. Then extract both the modified and original .jars to separate folders and use a diff tool (I like Meld in Linux) to find all the modified files. Put the modified files aside and add them to the modpack.jar in the same folder. Next go find the Shader.class and shaders/ folder in Sonic Ether's shader pack and put those into modpack.jar. Caveats: this doesn't always work for me for mysterious reasons. Also, the game tends to crash more often with the shader pack installed on my custom minecraft build (not tekkit, but with a subset of its mods that I like plus some others for SSP play). I would love for the shader mod to be an included option in tekkit, but as I understand it Daxnitro is against releasing patched class files as opposed to using his patching tool. It follows that he would not appreciate others doing this either. Shame that.

Re: Next Go-Around, please configure the pack better for balance and gameplay One thing I don't understand. If the problems mentioned are "super easy fixes", why not just STFU and fix them instead of throwing a tantrum about how someone didn't do it for you? @.@ As far as server-side config issues, if you're so damn lazy you can't be bothered to configure a server before opening it up to the public you do *not* need to be running a server. There are a *ton* of things you need to do behind the scenes on a server as an admin with or without tekkit - setting up backups, updates, mapping tools, configuring privileges for your staff and players, potentially doing map editing, etc. There is no such thing as an "out of the box" server. Even a vanilla server doesn't roll itself. If you can't be buggered to change some numbers in a config file as a part of that eff off and give up on running a server right now.

Granted. But if you do that it's your own stupid fault <.< Also, due to hash collisions, there's not a 100% guarantee that the password you generate is actually the one the person used in plaintext form, although better quality algorithms will not produce collisions on a dictionary attack. I don't know how many times people have to be told not to use stupid passwords and not to reuse them in important places. If one thing doesn't steal one of your passwords another thing will - insecure website, virus (if you're using Windows or, occasionally, Mac), phishing attack, etc. I had to reset a half dozen throw-away passwords thanks to the stupid Gawker attack last year and I'm generally uber-paranoid and secure. At least I'm smart enough to not have used the same password on bank accounts, game accounts, etc. Anyway yeah points well taken. Maybe someone ought to demonstrate an attack to (hopefully) force Mojang into action.

Yeah I saw the notes re: not hashing later. Brute forcing a known hash is essentially the same thing as precomputation in terms of prevention - use salts and multiple hashing passes to solve that problem. I wouldn't put it beyond Notch to roll his own hashing algorithm, rofl, but I don't know why they're resistant to using hashes. That's just mind-boggling. You just call the relevant hashing method before writing to file (MD5 or SHA would be fine...). Saying "we don't have time to implement hashing" is like saying "I don't have time to not point this gun at my own foot and pull the trigger". Whuh? Creating a machine-dependent salt (say, by looking at the Java environment) would also be trivial and create a further barrier to entry to skiddies. Though honestly I doubt anybody would put the time and effort into creating a great Minecraft mod just so he could use it to steal account info. Maybe if a mod author turned malicious at a later date, but that's just an invitation for a SWAT raid since by the time the mod is popular enough to be a risk it's nearly impossible to hide the author's identity from authorities (even using TOR and other privacy guards he'll likely have slipped up enough just in discussion threads and correlative data to narrow him down; it's surprising how few data points you need to get a positive identity match). Also other than pure assholeitis not much incentive. You can ebay accounts for a few bucks maybe but they'll just get shut down. I doubt the biggest hoard of goodies on the biggest MC server out there is worth more than a few bucks at auction.

If it were me I'd salt the password before creating the hash with something procedurally generated by the client machine (and reasonably unique). Then an authentication request would consist of hash + salt. I don't know whether Notch thought that far ahead, but any crypto junkie or security professional would. (Granted you could steal the salt too if you knew the procedure) Brute force password cracking is trivial to prevent. You just limit the number of requests per time interval to something reasonably slow (say 1 per 10 seconds). Then the power of the client machine doesn't matter. Precomputation is a bigger problem with (relatively) unlimited computing power but there are plenty of hashing algorithms for which no rainbow tables exist, and again you can use a salt to prevent that. A one-way hash can't be decrypted no matter how much juice you have so that doesn't matter.

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 It actually matters a little, since a significant portion of what we're paying our ISPs for comes down to bandwidth and other operational overhead wasted by fundamental security flaws in certain operating systems and devices. In that sense it hurts me personally. There are other issues that are a bit harder to measure (societal stuff like privacy and identity theft) which are largely caused or enabled by incompetence in the developers and users of those systems, but I can mitigate the personal impact of those things except insofar as it drives up insurance rates and thus cost of living (which again is tough to measure). Still, I don't bother bitching anymore. I'm an unapologetic elitist. I just laugh when people insist upon the superiority of their little playskool operating systems and then bitch about problems that wouldn't exist if they didn't keep *paying* the people who create those problems. It's cute and hilarious at the same time.

That's pretty much it. But hey, don't worry. The upside is you'll get access to all the brilliant mods that in all likelihood are better than Bethesda's which 360 owners won't get. Or you could be the pragmatic gamer and buy the console, pirate the PC version. I'll be fucked if I *ever* pay twice for one game for the privilege of playing it on two different devices. I don't get to charge clients twice for writing a website that works on two browsers (ok, I do charge them extra for making it run on stupid browsers, but still, not double...). No PC game has DRM if the users don't want it to have DRM. It's just that sometimes PC developers waste time creating DRM that doesn't work &lt;.&lt; But that's Windows gimpware for you. 9 times out of 10 you have to apply an unofficial patch to fix the built-in bugs it ships with ^.^ As for linux support, hah. That'll be the day. The desktop environment will be a thing of the forgotten past before mainstream games work natively on linux. On the other hand OnLive works fine afaik. I don't have the bandwidth for it personally or I'd already be subscribed and have one less reason to have any Microsoft malware running on any of my machines.

Hah. If I owned every good idea I came up with before someone else took it to market I'd be rich. Of course if I paid to bring to market *every* idea I ever had, good or bad, I'd be very, very poor on the whole. &lt;.&lt; But not even the person who brings the product to market really &quot;owns&quot; the idea. Intellectual &quot;property&quot; is a fraud. Unfortunately factual reality and legal reality are very rarely related to each other.

I place all blame at the foot of the guy who originally came up with the sick notion that you can &quot;own&quot; ideas. I won't go into a history lesson (I could, but I won't) or an economics lesson (ditto) or an ethics lesson (that too). There are plenty of good articles, essays and theses on why copyright is wrong and stupid (I'm a big fan of Stephen Kinsella's work, along with Boldrine and Levine's &quot;Against Intellectual Monopoly&quot; and Cory Doctorow's various utilitarian and pragmatic musings and practical experiments). But let's look at the rhetoric involved here. &quot;Stealing&quot; &quot;mine&quot; &quot;permission&quot;. It's all about attempting to control others, to no particular ends, because one has been told one has the moral right to do so. Nobody has made any serious assertions that anybody has been physically or financially wronged. Nobody can come up with why this is hurting anything (beyond spurious bug reports that the technic guys have repeatedly offered to handle themselves). There aren't even any shakey &quot;but fors&quot; to be had here, since the modders do not stand to gain anything financially and the users do not stand to lose anything. The benefits to everybody - users, modpack creators, the community as a whole - are obvious. No, harm has not been done to anything but their egos, and only because they cling to perverse and barbaric notions of their &quot;rights&quot; and feel the need to assert them. This is just empty moral outrage, aka fucktardery.

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 I have a hard time imagining keyboards going away for serious text input. In all likelihood voice recognition technology will never get that last little bit to &quot;good enough to be generally used&quot; until we have a serious breakthrough in artificial intelligence. We might get something more exotic like key gloves with haptic response that simulate real keyboards or just direct neural input before they solve the voice to text problem Maybe that's too pessimistic, but even then, you can't write code efficiently with voice. &quot;function foo open parenthesis capital int dollar sign bar close parenthesis open curly bracket return return capital system period out open parenthesis open doublequote capital hello capital world exclamation point close doublequote plus dollarsign bar dot camelcase tostring open parenthesis close parenthesis close parenthesis semicolon return return close curly bracket&quot; ... nah, I'll pass. I type faster than I talk even when I'm not describing code blocks. Wireless bluetooth keyboards are pretty handy though. I think we are talking about the same video. The lack of branding just meant &quot;this is all microsoft&quot; to me. Especially since it was pushing a bunch of their new technology or subtly hinting at evolutions to existing tech. Thing is Microsoft is playing catchup or completely blindsided in *every single category* in the video from cloud computing to mobile hardware and software to artificial intelligence. The only thing they still lead in is traditional office productivity and enterprise support, and that's the only place they're likely to hold on to (and then only if the hipster companies who are ditching their desktops in favor of iPads don't start a trend...). Notably I just saw some stats today that tablets *alone* almost equaled desktops in sales last year, let alone other mobile devices (although laptops are still a pretty big piece of the pie).

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 I think Microsoft is out of the running personally (if you're talking about that little fantasy tech demo they released a while ago with the microsoft-branded smart gadgets). I think they're way too crufty and entrenched in their culture and way of doing things to keep up with the changes in the market. I also think it's absurd to believe that we'll ever return to a paradigm where a single company is providing a majority (let alone the totality) of services. Edit: I should clarify, I mean out of the running for mobile devices and probably for consumer OS in general (we'll see how Windows 8 tablets do). They're not going anywhere any time soon even if it means pulling an Oracle and patent trolling for two decades. When the market shift is over the reason it will have happened is that people genuinely don't miss the old way of doing things, because the new way is so much better in so many ways. So I'm guessing you might not miss desktops as much as you think, much like I don't think people are going to miss physical media - books, movie &amp; music discs, etc as much as they think. But we'll see. Every individual is different. Some of us just like old-timey things for nostalgia or personal preference. I know a young writer who *still* uses a typewriter despite the obvious objective advantages of modern document editing, just because he likes the experience of it. That doesn't force anybody to support his typewriter though, nor will people keep making new typewriters for people like him (I don't know if anybody is making them anymore as a matter of fact, and parts are getting harder to find). Lots of people still use feature phones or run old versions of their operating systems too even though nobody supports them or provides new software for them anymore.

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 Trends can change, yes, but I'm not talking about &quot;fads&quot;, I'm talking about &quot;market momentum&quot;, the kind of thing that market analysts use in order to steer the direction of major companies. To some extent perception of market trends is reality because when gigantic companies forecast the future they invest in it to the exclusion of other things, and that shapes what choices consumers have. When major game publishers say &quot;stop making PC games, mobiles and consoles are the future&quot; you can bet 2 years down the road you're going to have more mobile and console games to choose from than PC games, and that's going to influence your hardware buying decisions, which just further reinforces their commitment to consoles and mobiles. That's what has been happening lately, anyway. Indie games like Minecraft are definitely important, but it may surprise you to know that it's generally easier to develop them for consoles and the web than it is for PCs for a variety of reasons. PCs are a pain in the ass to work with even in the modern age because they're not a homogenous environment. You've got 3 different versions of windows, Mac (if you care, same for Linux), 2 different instruction sets (x86 and x64, and really a couple others but nobody makes games for them anymore/yet) 2 different 3d rendering layers each with huge variations in specific feature support based on user-selected hardware, obscene numbers of different individual hardware configurations each with their own issues that have to be accounted for, etc. etc. Hardware abstraction layers make some of this easier, and languages like Java which run in virtual machines also make it easier at the cost of performance, but it's certainly not as straightforward as a guarantee that 100% of the people you're writing code for run the *exact same environment*. Mobile devices share some of the above issues but their APIs and the design patterns that have evolved over the years help to ease the pain a bit (now the really big issue is dealing with the huge range of performance and screen sizes, not so much the architecture). The biggest implication of these trends, however, is that a new generation of gamers is not being raised with PC gaming. For example, my kid spends more time on my android tablet and XBox than on the PC. For him the mobile computing environment is the default paradigm, and the computer is a funny old thing like a typewriter is to us. The only thing it's good for is Starcraft and Minecraft, heh. Anyway like I said, if you don't believe me, wait 5 years. In 2017 if the global economy hasn't collapsed or the United States or India or Israel hasn't triggered World War III we'll talk again. ;)

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 Ouch. You don't know anything about programming, do you (point: I do it for a living). If this is what you think, and what your view of things is shaped by, I'm sorry but you're really not qualified to speak on the subject. I suggest Googling yourself a short education on the subjects of programming environments, processor architecture, instruction sets, cross-platform development, and emulation before you say anything more. I'm also kind of sad that someone as well spoken as you (by internet standards) is so thoroughly ignorant about how this works What do they teach you kids in school these days! It's been 20 years since the internet, this shit should be as fundamental as geography and civics and all the stuff that sits a level above the basics.

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 Your ten cents are incorrect, sorry ^^ You can check the statistics and the trends yourself. Something could happen, something could change, yes, but some stats are already suggesting the 50% point is passed in regard to web browsing which is the primary non-work-related activity done on PCs. The same point passed many years ago regarding gaming. In regard to speed, rather than trends or statistics: It doesn't matter that PCs are faster. The speed doesn't matter to 99% of use cases anymore. Even chintzy little bargain smartphones have the power to render full screen HD video, simple 3d games, browse the (real) web, communicate via email, text, voice and video, and view (if not edit) most common document formats, and do most of the other things that people require from their computers. Many people don't grasp the implications of Moore's Law, so let me lay it out for you: in 10 years we will have gone through about 7 iterations of Moore's Law. Mobile devices (as well as workstations) will then have 128 times the computing power (actually price and energy performance) they do today. They are already sufficient for most computing tasks (which could not have been said 10 or 20 years ago, when even your standard PC was barely sufficient for the things most people wanted to do like document editing and rich media). (Edit: by comparison, your typical mobile device is about 2-3 iterations, or 4-8x, behind in price performance compared to a desktop) The most likely scenario, and the one tech companies are gearing up toward, is that mobile devices are going to be *the* thing within a few years (thus, for instance, Windows 8 being completely overhauled and retooled with touch interfaces in mind and ditching the mouse and keyboard centric environment it has been using for 20 years now, Apple throwing most of its weight behind iOS rather than Mac OS, and even desktop Linux developers like Canonical retooling for mobile). That which requires more computing power than a mobile device can handle will be done in compute clouds with mobile devices behaving like thin clients, because it's far more cost effective. Although it's hard to imagine needing 128x the compute power of a modern desktop for common tasks, it could be that &quot;common tasks&quot; expands far beyond what we can conceive of today. Having many multiples of that available on-demand (thanks to the scalability of cloud computing) with less time and trouble than it is to boot up a desktop is going to lure people quickly away from running machines in-house at the consumer or even small or mid enterprise level. There are a few smaller questions still in the air, like whether augmented reality and HUDs will take off, and whether HTML5 will become a universal application platform or whether developers and consumers will stick with native apps, and whether WebGL + javascript is going to be viable for gaming (especially before it gets eclipsed by cloud-based rendering, as seems possible). Anyway, I'm not trying to argue, I'm trying to educate. Like I said, many things can happen in 10 years (like global nuclear war) that would reverse the apparent trends. If you don't believe me (and the people I rely on who make a whole lot of money successfully predicting these things) wait 5 years and reevaluate. Edit edit: With services like OnLive growing, they don't need to worry about the only relevant issues with consoles (the 5+ year freeze on computing power). 5x as many console games are being sold as PC games at the *end* of the current console generation, and that doesn't even account for mobile games. Despite the fact that a typical gaming rig is now 8+ times as powerful as an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 game sales for PCs are on the same downward trend they've been for a decade now. How much longer do you think it will be before the numbers don't even justify a PC *port* of AAA games? The people calling the shots don't give a crap about sentimentality or loyalty to PC gamers, they care whether PC gamers will buy enough games to overcome the cost of development and turn a profit. When the numbers dwindle to the point where it costs more to port the games than it does to blow off the users, the games will start disappearing. The main saving grace for PC gamers right now is that it doesn't take much to port from XBox 360 to Windows PC thanks to a shared programming environment. If they're lucky it will stay that way for a while longer, since Microsoft is committed to it. Ironically, XBox 360 is saving PC gaming. True to some extent, but there is also the market forces factor. Once a use-case becomes so narrow that you can't turn a profit by serving it it simply doesn't happen anymore. There are some neat things happening that could shake it up, not in the least the resurgence of indie game development thanks to the &quot;long tail&quot; market and the explosion of the hacker/makerspace community, but it's hard to say what that means in terms of overall tech trends. Most of the people who have serious money and future success riding on successfully predicting the future of technology are in line with what I'm saying here. Hell, when *Microsoft* starts making serious changes to one of its core products you know the writing is on the wall.

Re: so sick of youtube f-....arts. <3 Why rage about incompetent computer users? It's so much more fun to laugh quietly as you watch them struggle to do simple things, pay for things you get for free, and have their shit broken and stolen constantly. I don't know why my computer is so slow, it was fast when I bought it! I don't know why my THIRD World of Warcraft account got all its stuff stolen! I don't know why this website doesn't work! I don't know why I should have to pay 60 dollars a year for antivirus! I don't know where the send/receive button is in the new Outlook! I don't know where all these porn links came from! I don't know why there are so many toolbars in my browser! I don't know how my boss/parents/overbearing government can keep spying on my hot chat sex! I don't know why I have to reinstall Windows -again-! Har har har. You don't talk to these people until they finally get fed up with it, stow the bullshit and ask you for answers. Then you tell them things they don't want to hear and 90% of the time they bitch and whine and go back to whatever idiotic habits they already had because change is hard. Anyway the whole desktop operating system argument is over. Mobile devices are becoming the computing platform of choice and, like the entire rest of the computing/electronics world besides desktops (/laptops), the majority of them already run some variant of *nix. PC gaming is slowly dying too; it's getting harder and harder to find a game that even has native PC controls or takes advantage of the graphical capabilities of high-end gaming rigs because they're all designed first for consoles. I guarantee you none of this shit is going to matter in 10 years. The only people who will spend more time on a traditional desktop computer than on a mobile device or some other gadget/console/appliance are the people writing the code for those other devices. When that time comes you'll wonder why you bothered arguing about it. Arguing with computer illiterates about operating systems is like arguing with 3-year-olds about, well, anything. It doesn't matter that they're objectively wrong and you know it. You loose by participating.

Laff. Actually on further reflection the thing that really got to me is some pissant internet troll accusing a person of a (fairly serious) real-life crime just because he doesn't like the person or his work. You don't just spread false rumors of felonies because you want to discredit people. That's not even trolling, it's serious bottom-feeding, borderline sociopathic behavior. Especially as idiotic as law enforcement is in this day and age (they have a track record of arresting people and locking them up based on false accusations, without even bothering to do basic legwork, in some places).

Bawwing Tardmuff Weenis mod is the Best Thing W/eva!

The thing is that those retards aren't even sophisticated enough to dream up theories about proxies and mirrored copies, rofl. According to them, we're all too stupid to notice that the paypal account we're making a donation to is not the one we intend to, or that technic folks are sophisticated world-class hackers who can pull off paypal fraud and the best application they could come up with for that knowledge is to scam a slow trickle of donations to video game modders. Give me a fucking break. I don't know why I felt the need to post a big rant about it. I guess I just hate ignorant assholes shooting their mouths off and trying to pass themselves off as experts - particularly in a field I actually have enough expertise in to pick apart.

Personally I think EA fell into the trap that so many software companies do of letting the marketers and lawyers control the direction of the company rather than the creatives (and see also, Bill Hicks on marketing people). They probably also hired executives based on the amount of money their previous company made while they were in charge, rather than how much they knew about publishing, art, video games, or making software. I don't know either of these things for sure, but when a software company goes from good to shit (or shit to shittier) this is almost invariably the cause. It generally revolves around making an IPO and thus ending up with essentially anonymous shareholders getting the right to influence the company. Since most of those people are fucktards with a little money and zero understanding of *any* of the companies they hold shares in other than what the charts say about them, they tend toward demanding predictability, consistency, and constant measurable increases in performance - all of which are pure poison for creative work. Just as an example (disclaimer: not an apple fanboi) look what happened to Apple between the time they kicked out Steve Jobs and the time that they hired him back again. Running a company that relies on constant innovation takes passion, creativity, a strong personality and a clear vision, not metrics and focus groups and patent holdings and legalese. Anyway as far as BTW, I admit some of the stuff in there looks cool (windmills! waterwheels! elevators!) but I'd rather jump off a cliff than allow some jackass' code to run on my hardware. It'd be hilarious for someone to duplicate those features in another mod and then open-source them. Not that I'm volunteering - I loathe Java.

Re: Could this remove the need for a Technic pack? Internet rumor has it they did the same thing to ME3, explaining a lot of the inexplicable choices and general displeasure it caused. But rejoice, their stock prices are tanking, hopefully meaning that they're finally getting bitchslapped by investors and consumers for the long list of dick moves they've made in the past few years. In fact I think some financial analyst or magazine or something ranked them the most hated company in the country this year. It's pretty tough to rank hate as high as Goldman Sachs and Haliburton as a video game company, so that's saying something. Change or die is the apparent message.

I think the attitude on display from certain mod authors (not just forestry) is a much wilder insult than a few bits of profanity personally, but as you wish :)

The key part is practical distribution without requiring end-users to dick around with patching jar files (or even using the really slick patchers out there). I'll be frank, I'm a highly technical person and even *I* surf away from any server that says I have to go out and download mods X,Y, and Z to use it. That's a real shame, but I just don't have the time to mess around with that kind of stuff, let alone the logistics of doing it separately for a dozen different servers. Spout claims it will eventually make this possible and if it does, I agree, who needs Mojang; but if the newly added Bukkit guys get the job done first even better since we won't even have to ask people to install spout I hate Java (it's just so yucky), but if the Mod API manages to solve the distribution problem I'll definitely write some mini-mods. I don't do Swing, I do web applications, but I definitely do GUIs and might end up writing some web apps along these lines. We'll see what happens. I see Minecraft becoming a huge ecosystem like the old MUD bases used to be, and I won't be surprised if MC derivatives are still around 10 years from now (hell, some of the old MUDs are *still* online). Whether Mojang or someone else ultimately makes it happen is up in the air. The community, as well as the necessary attitude regarding legal stuff on Mojang's end (if not an explicit open source license :/) is all in place.

It blows my mind that more than two decades after GPL, and more than a decade since linux became the default platform for everything from web servers to embedded systems in appliances and gadgets (if you look at the entirety of the computing ecosystem, other operating systems are miniscule in comparison to linux), and almost a decade since open culture began to sweep the art and fiction world, there are still people out there who bitch about &quot;unauthorized redistribution&quot; of their -fucking freeware- -fucking video game mods-. Complaining about misattribution and plagiarism (i.e. taking credit for someone else's work) is one thing, but actually bitching that someone else is making it easier for more people to enjoy your creative works? Let alone actually trying to stop this? Are you kidding me? What do you do this shit for except to share it with others, to bring an idea to life and take pleasure in seeing other people enjoy it? How incredibly insane and self-defeating is it to actually make it *harder* on other people to do that? What kind of fucktard hipster thinks that people don't &quot;deserve&quot; to enjoy crappy amateur artwork if they can't figure out how to use it? We don't &quot;deserve it&quot;? We need &quot;permission&quot; to use and share something you created and gave away for free? Fuck you, pal! Your shit doesn't deserve my very limited time and attention! You're competing for *my* time, not vice versa. Crawl down out of your own asshole for five minutes and realize how tiny your contribution to the gaming world, let alone the art world at large is. And how brief a human life is. And how unlikely it is that anybody will remember your name or your work five years from now, and how introducing unnecessary barriers to entry only decreases the likelihood that anybody will ever give a fuck who you were or what you did by the time you're old enough to brag to your grandchildren. If reaching other people with a little piece of your imagination, your mind, your soul, is not the purpose of creating art, what *is* the point? (yes I did join the forums *just* to post that rant, and props to the Technic team for all the work they do to make sure the works of non-asshats get as much attention, appreciation and pleasure of sharing their dreams with others as is possible)

I think you'll actually see a net increase in performance (or at least perceived performance) for singleplayer gameplay on any modern machine because world-generation, NPC AI, physics, etc. will all end up being handled on a separate process (or thread, depending on how they do it) from the client concerns of actually displaying the game world and providing the user interface, meaning that it will naturally take advantage of additional cores. Imagine no more LSOD, no more framerates being cut in half during chunk generation, etc. without the use of Optifine. If you're on a multicore machine your experience may be similar to the performance gain you experience playing multiplayer vs. single player, but without the latency issues. I seriously doubt you'll notice the fractions of milliseconds of latency introduced by inter-process/inter-thread communication Not to mention the fact that, even if the mod API ends up being insufficient for some of the more complicated mods, unification of the client+server code is going to mean all mods are automatically multiplayer (even if users and servers still have to manually patch them in). Even the additional complications / learning curve that may be involved in writing for the server are going to be much less than the general pain in the ass of porting code that prevents many awesome mods from seeing SMP releases. At least from my perspective (speaking as a programmer but not a mod author), there are few things I loathe more than writing code once, then having to make a ton of little pissant changes to run on a different version/platform, and then doing that over and over again every time my code or any of those versions/platforms changes. Also, I think critics of the potential of a mod API are overlooking the vast untapped potential for itty bitty mods that an API will make possible. Right now making a mod that just adds a couple decorative blocks or a single mob (or handful of mobs) or a single ore or new piece of equipment is a big waste of time, because it's way too much trouble to install mods on the user side to bother doing so for a million little tiny ones. With an API it will be come totally possible (and even probable) for third party build tools to allow artists, animators and other non-programmers to add new things to the game without learning Java, let alone the complexities of dicking around with decompiled obfuscated bytecode. Imagine an editor GUI that allows you to plug in a texture image and tweak some properties in drop-down menus to create a single new block and then export that to a minecraft plugin, or a similar GUI for adding a mob or a weapon or a piece of armor. You can then stick that plugin on your server and automatically all your players get to use it. This could turn Minecraft into not just a game but a platform for making virtual worlds, in a way that is currently restrictively difficult to do. Those of you old enough to remember MUDs and MUSHes may have an idea of what I'm envisioning here. It's something an entire generation of gamers has largely missed out on, and I'm really excited to see it finally coming back.