Tracking the tweets of several Mojang staff members, I'm learning this morning that Minecraft name changing will finally be possible sometime after 1.8's release. Good for those stuck with a weird name or a misspelled one, bad for me as I'll have to rewrite some components to deal with this new option. The current target for 1.8 is sometime in May and name changing will be available a bit later, so it's not like this'll happen soon. Still, we finally have a target for this.

Of course, this happens as I was a few days away from starting work on reorganizing some of the whitelisting process, server-side. I guess I'll drop this for now, since it'll all change in the coming weeks!


Edit: Surprise surprise, MC 1.7.6 will also include the modifications required for username changes. I might need to start that whitelist rewrite earlier than I expected...

Edited by Dr. Cossack on March 6, 2014 at 10:42:54

PITA indeed. I wrote some custom plugins that use usernames because, hey, that's the way to do things. I'll have to rewrite part of them to account for the new UUID system. Furthermore, as you indicate, I'll have to wait for some other plugins to update. The update to 1.7 was a pain, and I was hoping that 1.8 would be better; it might actually be worse...

What I don't understand is why they're going the down UUID route instead of something much more simple: usernames and display names. The current usernames would stay in use for all internal Minecraft server/client duties, while display names are what would be displayed to everyone. They could enforce the same rules that will apply to the upcoming username changes so that people can't simply all reuse/steal common names. But then, maybe I shouldn't be so surprised: Mojang often develops everything to work properly for the vanilla game only, not even taking small steps that'd make things so much easier for modders.

That's a myth that won't die, which is a shame because it's not true.

What happened originally is that Mojang hired the four main Bukkit developers: EvilSeph, Dinnerbone, grum and tahg, with the intent of eventually relocating everyone to Sweden. tahg quickly resigned from both Bukkit and Mojang. EvilSeph resigned last autumn from Mojang and is still head of the Bukkit project; he never moved to Sweden. Dinnerbone and grum both actually relocated to Sweden and work in the Mojang offices, but they stopped working on Bukkit right after when they were hired. The end result is that no one in the current Bukkit team has any ongoing ties to Mojang, and both groups are fully separate entities.