Mojang/ Microsoft no longer understands semantic versioning??

They released a new update for Minecraft, 1.21.5 - but it:

- Adds new features
- Breaks backwards compatibility

Look at this. The left side of the screen was generated in 1.21.5, the right side was in 1.21.4 You can literally see the split down the middle where the trees generate differently because of the update.

This doesn't *matter* but it's just bothersome to me! Fuck you! I'll rant about whatever, no matter how small!

Didn't read the news that fine that they were going to be doing this from now on?

Minecraft doesn''t use SemVer and it never did. It uses era/update/patch, wherein "update" is something worth trying, "patch"" is nice to have but not that important, and "era" changes maybe twice or thrice over the entire lifetime of the project.

Minecraft has no cross-version compatibility policy, so there's nothing to break. It's not a dependency that's part of hundreds of unique fully automated stacks collectively underpinning billions of euros of commerce, it's user-facing recreational software with no officially documented APIs of any kind. That means they have no obligation towards modders either.

The only thing I hate more than breaking compat is assuming compat where none was ever promised. No I will not fucking move my functions out of the class because Daniel from engineering unilaterally decided that the order and number of functions in my interface can be manually mapped to COM member function indices.

That story was an anecdote from before my time, but shit like this is constant. Semver is a curse enough on library development. Don't force it on projects that aren''t libraries.

@BordedDev nah didn't catch the news I guess

@lorentz I don't give a shit if it's guaranteed or not! A PATCH version of the game shouldn't modify terrain generation! That's fucked, and rant I shall do.

@AlgoRythm I guess not, but if it was a major update, would you have stayed on the older version just to avoid this?

@lorentz yeah, that's been a part of Minecraft culture for a while. That's why it's one of the only major games to have a version selector in it's vanilla launcher.

@AlgoRythm Odd, the only reason I ever stayed on an older version was for modding and servers (which stayed on an older version for plugins). It never occurred to me to stay on an older version of the game for itself.

But I guess I see your point.

@lorentz it implicitly tells you what it's going to do

I time my gaming times with how serious an update is going to be for a game for example

I won't necessary stay on an older version, but I'm more likely to start playing a game when they release a major breaking change. then I create a new world and I'm good to go for a few months until I get bored again
but if then they decide to do changes in a minor patch I'd be pissed... cuz then the world I committed to is outdated so I'd just quit playing and probably not come back when major releases happen because of the bad taste and their unpredictability

(I do similar things when choosing when to build projects)

@lorentz I usually play 1.8.9 because it’s really snappy.

When world generation changes, a lot of players simply create a new world.

My world is relatively new already so ungenerated chunks are near my base.

Which means I get this shitty meshing of new and old terrain within view distance of my base :(

@jestdotty worlds can always be migrated forward, at least in Minecraft. Is it really whether a change is "breaking" that matters for you, or is it how substantially the change affects the intended gameplay sequences?

@lorentz that's very complicated and not the same

I'm not here to deal with someone's compatibility fuckup anyway. I paid money to have a specific experience, not do more work and be pissed. I can do that at my work job already. don't make recreation into a job. you pay them money to do the job and if they're not doing it then they're not worth the money

@jestdotty Yeah. SemVer doesn't really indicate the significance of changes, that's part of why it's not popular for user-facing software. New features, even if they introduce shortcuts that replace most of everything you were doing before, don't force a major change, as long as the old methods work. Ideally, SemVer majors actually don't include any features, because it's enough trouble dealing with the fallout. They only remove deprecated APIs, and add tiny tweaks that subtly change the correctness or meaning of old calls. This is the complete opposite of what most people perceive as 'significance'.

@lorentz semver might be a bad choice for a game like MC, but the game is a platform in and of itself. People rely on the mechanics of the game like devs rely on the API of a library.

Major features like terrain gen, redstone logic, entity logic, etc. are pretty important to a minor but still vocal and important part of the community.

MC Java edition is like an intro to game dev. People have made fully featured games entirely within the game itself.

That's why I rant about compatibility. It should always be safe to upgrade a patch version. It should only really be used to fix issues within the game.

This is, to my knowledge, the first time they've so boldly screwed with game fundamentals in a patch version.

Well, at least on the Java version it isn't a forced update. I guess this would fuck all the xbox players.

Fuckijg 🤓