Straight From The World of Notch - Our office is cold during the winter

Seriously. The radiators are tiny, and the rooms are huge. I think the landlord turns down the heat during the weekends as well.. I stopped by yesterday to get some bonus work done in between the two trips (I was in Mexico one week ago, and we’re going to GDC in one week followed by a short stop in Vegas).
Most of the work I got done last week was with the new launcher, and it’s almost done now! Here’s a mostly complete summary of the changes:

* Newly designed window looks slightly prettier, and also has a nice big space to load an HTML page showing the updates in the latest patch
* If there’s a new update, the launcher asks if you wish to update. You can choose between “Not yet” and “Yes”.
* The launcher only downloads modified files
* Logging in is done over https, preventing sniffing (we even double check the certificate)
* Downloaded files are checksummed, making sure the correct file was received
* You can force a full re-download of all game files in case you suspect your local files are corrupt
* There’s a handy link to go directly to the game install folder

We have a couple of bugs left to fix, and we’re going to try adding the ability to choose what dir to save/load levels from. Playing against your dropbox dir might be fun. Once all that is done, it’ll get released!

While I was away, Jens’s been working on 1.3, which we’re aiming at releasing sometime early/mid-week next week. I’ve forgotten all the new stuff in there (it’s sunday, ok?), but my favorite two are the redstone delay/repeater blocks and the beds. We’re hoping to be able to make the beds feature complete before GDC, but it’s more important to get the 1.3 update out, so some of the functionality might be missing for a week or two.

In other news, all the lights are on here. I tried playing Amnesia, but it turns out I’m a coward. If you’re reading this, Frictional; AMAZING JOB! I’ve never been this scared in a game, ever.

Welcome home, Notch. I look forward to seeing the new content.