it already is, the entire protocol is reverse engineered, there are tools to automatically deobfuscate the code and there is already a full reimplementation of minecraft that also supports servers
If that's the case, how come nobody seems to be writing improved Minecraft clients?
Ever since I started playing it in the beta days I've been frustrated with how poorly Minecraft performs relative to what it's showing on the screen. (Not that that stopped me from pouring hundreds of hours into the damn thing.)
Well, they do? Sodium, for instance. It's a mod, not a full rewrite, rewriting the client from scratch would mean a lot of boring work like speaking with Mojang's server, but I understand Sodium basically rips out and replaces the entire graphics pipeline of the client.
Yeah, it was always weird how 32x32x48 extreme reactors lagged the game whenever you looked at them, but the moment you looked away everything was fine.
the client has to authenticate with a central server and present a ticket to the server it wants to connect to. otherwise clients could impersonate each other easily.
sure, iirc it used to even just be a setting? online-mode=false
most servers leave it enabled because preventing player impersonation is pretty important so people can't just easily grief each other. some piracy servers implemented their own auth on top.
