Ha. This is an amusing claim given that redstone, the whole complicated circuitry used in advanced Minecraft machines, was arguably added for the purpose of powering doors. Years of work have gone into all of the community-made piston doors of various sizes and features. And all interactive components like buttons and pressure plates have to have their signal duration balanced against how long it takes to walk through a door.

Even ignoring redstone, though, doors are complicated to design in the exact same ways. Which way do they swing open? Depends how you’re facing when you place them… unless the game detects double doors, and reverses the second one to match. And each door has to have a corresponding vertical trap door, which can either be flush with a floor or with a ceiling. Which way do trap doors open? Well, whichever way works best with the ladder below them. Oh, which means trap doors must also act like ladders. In fact, you can climb a wall of nothing but trap doors in the game.

What about water? Trap doors can be waterlogged, and that’s a common way to hide irrigation. But normal doors intentionally aren’t. Why? Because doors are the most common early-game tool for scuba diving - a placed door becomes a free pocket of air. Does it seem realistic? No, and maybe they could fix it, but then that would affect anyone who uses doors as entrances to underwater houses, as well as make scuba diving more difficult.

Players argue about the use of doors for diving; they argue about whether they should be able to shoot arrows through the windows in doors; they argue about whether every new tree should bring a new type of wood, and thus a new type of door.

Doors are hard, no matter how simple the game.

Context for those who don’t know: zebras are crosswalks.

Who are current writers like him?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24330076

Points: 93

# Comments: 142

https://twitter.com/JStein_WaPo/status/1267253355530858496

I’m very surprised how little discussion I’ve seen on HN about what this means for everyone here building public, community-building websites.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22292049

Points: 2

# Comments: 0