To be honest, we've wasted quite a bit of hour valuable time at school playing Minecraft. Of course, we did... not play during the lesson!
Unfortunately most of my friends don't feel comfortable paying 20 € / $ for Minecraft. To be honest, that's really a lot of money. However, I did buy the full version of Minecraft back when buying beta games was considered cool and shared that account with all my friends so they could enjoy singleplayer mode too. But being a lonely guy in a world full of zombies, creepers, spiders (!) and other ugly looking creatures didn't make us happy any longer. So we decided to move to a new, better world. Sure, those ugly looking creatures still tried to kill us at night, but at least we were able to support each other and dry each other's eyes after a kamikaze attack of a crazy creeper, right? Unfortunately not quite, because multiplayer is meant for owners of the full version only. Lots of lonely, frightening nights searching the web for a solution passed, until we came up with an idea: a Minecraft proxy, which I call "McProxy" (there's a high chance you get fat if you consume a lot of Minecraft / McDonald's). I'm not going into much detail about what it exactly does, but simply put it is a translator between the official Minecraft server and the official Minecraft client, so none of them knows they're talking to someone who didn't buy the full version.
99% of the code come from Andreas Stefl, also known as andiwand, which also came up with this idea. I've onky contributed the possibility of static name mapping and am now trying to make this proxy public and accessible for everyone out there.
Before I'm going into detail about where to get it and how to set it up, there's one thing you should know: Minecraft is an awesome game, which cost Markus Persson, notch, and his colleagues from Mojang about three years of development. So I strongly suggest you to consider purchasing the full version of this game, or, at least some merchandise.
You can get the latest version of McProxy as of today here. Download it and do the following:
- Edit your server.properties
- Set "online-mode=false"
- and "server-port=12345"
- (Optional: create a static-players.properties in the directory you're executing McProxy from)
- Start your Minecraft server as usual
- More information available here
- Start McProxy java -jar proxy.jar 127.0.0.1:12345 # assuming your Minecraft server is running on the same computer as McProxy and listening at port 12345
That's it. Friends should be able to connect to your server even if they don't own a premium account. If your friends get an error like "couldn't download packages", "didn't download packages" or similar, log in using your premium account on their computer so they can download all necessary updates and log out again afterwards. Otherwise, I think there are places in the world wide web offering all necessary files...
We would love to hear from you if you're using McProxy! Also, feedback and suggestions for new features are welcome. :)
PS: If you don't know Minecraft (what the fuck?) I suggest you to watch the following video and get your pickaxe ready. It's worth a watch even if you do know Minecraft, though.
A simpler, but more limited option is to just use "online-mode=false". The limitation is that unauthorized players share the same character ("Player") and get disconnected when another unauthed player joins. I can see it being really useful when one person in a group wants to try it out before buying or can't afford to buy and nobody else wants to gift it. Cracks and proxies that eliminate that limit, bypassing designed restrictions, are too far in the area of piracy for me to condone. Give people access to the full version for free with little to no hassle and most of them would never think of buying it if they could. Of course, that can go the other way too with hassle for people who pay, which is one reason I avoid most software using DRM.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I may want to join you in MC some time.
Yep, that's what we used at first. However, three of my friends had no account, so we had to come up with another solution (read, McProxy).
DeleteI'm not playing currently, but plan to do so again some time. ;) I'll let you know then!