My understanding is that the team at Mojang is seriously committed to their new mod-based vision; but that there are many technical hurdles they must overcome to achieve their goals.
Just looking at the patch notes for the 1.7, 1.7.1, and 1.7.2, it looks to me that they did some significant code refactoring and expanded the capabilities of the core systems.
Additionally, they seem to have added new features to really enhance the multiplayer experience.
Among the changes I see as significant (either from improving the social experience, or from technical difficulty) are:
+ Achievements are now world specific
+ Gaining achievements now announced to other players
+ Servers can now have a “server-icon.png” that is displayed in the multiplayer list
+ You can see who’s online before joining, just hover the player count number in the server list
+ Links in chat are now clickable
+ Click on somebody’s name to send a private message
+ Added Stained Glass
+ Added a bunch of new graphics options
+ Added some shader tests (click on the “Super Secret Settings” a couple of times…)
* You can now have multiple resource packs loaded at the same time
* Resource packs can now hold sound effects
* Servers can recommend resource packs
* Network code has been rewritten
* Sound manager has been rewritten
There may be interesting organizational hurdles, as subjectively the community, or at least the mod community, or the users of the most popular mods, appear to implement changes showing they believe the best way to enhance the multiplayer experience is new sets of blocks doing cool new things with new varieties of technology, whereas most of the listed "upgrades" boil down to making a nice chat system. Make the game more fun with more toys, vs lets make an app to socialize oh and there's also a game attached or something.
I think this frictional point is where most of the interesting action will happen in the near term evolution of MC and Mojang.
Actually, most of the changes revolve around "let's make it easier for modders to make mods" and "let's work on areas that we neglected". Private messaging systems are used a LOT on servers.
Just looking at the patch notes for the 1.7, 1.7.1, and 1.7.2, it looks to me that they did some significant code refactoring and expanded the capabilities of the core systems. Additionally, they seem to have added new features to really enhance the multiplayer experience.
Among the changes I see as significant (either from improving the social experience, or from technical difficulty) are: + Achievements are now world specific + Gaining achievements now announced to other players + Servers can now have a “server-icon.png” that is displayed in the multiplayer list + You can see who’s online before joining, just hover the player count number in the server list + Links in chat are now clickable + Click on somebody’s name to send a private message
+ Added Stained Glass
+ Added a bunch of new graphics options + Added some shader tests (click on the “Super Secret Settings” a couple of times…)
* You can now have multiple resource packs loaded at the same time * Resource packs can now hold sound effects * Servers can recommend resource packs
* Network code has been rewritten * Sound manager has been rewritten