MCContent, my employer and the website I helped build, is formally being shut down this month. Euclid Editor will leave the orbit of MCContent as a result.

This announcement, conveyed directly to me, follows inactivity (including from me) on the website and Discord server starting around 2020.

“With everything going on in my life, I’m going to discontinue working on MCContent,” alvin8t, the CEO wrote in a direct message to me. “It’s been a major, MAJOR, and extremely hard decision for me, but I just don’t have the motivation or drive to continue to work on it.”

alvin8t also cited disappointment with Minecraft’s creative direction as a reason for losing motivation.

MCContent was under the HeliumArgon LLC umbrella, owned and operated by alvin8t. (I owned no part in the company or the website.)

The website started in 2016 as “MC Map Hub” with the hope that it would become a player in the Minecraft map-sharing world. The next year it would be renamed to MCContent.

I was connected with alvin8t through the Minecraft technical Discord server testfor[dev] in 2018. (tesfor[dev]’s name is a nod to the syntax of the /testfor command).

I was initially tasked with the front-end of the website, manually writing and partially automating the HTML and CSS that the PHP backend would deliver.

We both independently had similar—if not identical at times—visions and ideas. Those ideas remain novel and unimplemented, but we weren’t able to pull anything off with our resources and time.

During 2018, I began imagining a far more powerful MCEdit. I saw MCEdit being slow, janky, and having issues. I wanted to make my own world editor to replace it. I called it Project Euclid:

Project Euclid is a dream project of mine, and has been for like a year or something idk. It’s an all-in-one bundle of programs, which is similar to MCEdit, NBTExplorer, jmc2obj, worldpainter, autodesk maya, etc. For example, something that I want to include is an advanced terrain editor/generator. This portion will involve you starting with one of the following: a seed, customized terrain, or importing data. The next ‘stage’ would be adding in paths, trees, and houses, with lines, code, and shapes (ask me to elaborate and I will). Then, the final ‘stage’ would be block-by-block editing, where you can have filters, fill tools, and more. Then, you will be able to export this file into a minecraft world, a .obj file, a bedrock world, and more. To go even further, the program might even be able to load every version and export it to every other version.

Me to alvin8t in a Discord DM on March 25, 2019

Sometime after, somebody else took up the frontend work, and I was allowed to begin experimentation. I called it Euclid Editor, and it was originally written in JavaScript using the ThreeJS and Electron libraries. Concerned with performance of a non-native desktop application running an interpreted and annoying language, I switched to the more familiar land of Java with JavaFX.

JavaFX’s 3D was alright, but I didn’t like the API and once again I was concerned about the app’s performance. So, I followed Minecraft’s lead and went with LWJGL, which I have been using since, and combined it with Java’s Swing and AWT UI libraries, which provide a native-ish yet first-class desktop support.

Despite the time I’ve spent on MCContent, five years later, that original vision is still looking into the future.

I have been proud of the work I did at MCContent, and I will continue to work in my spare time on Euclid Editor.

The site would’ve been hella sick.