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Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

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141–150 of 285 posts

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#141
post #20

Is the rationale for switching away from GLFW documented anywhere? I'd love to read about it, I have some projects which use GLFW myself and I'm always wondering whether or not SDL would be better

You could make an entire 2D game using the SDL API without OpenGL/vulkan.

Minecraft essentially only uses GLFW (and now SDL3) to create the window and accept input. The game itself is essentially coded in raw OpenGL (and now vulkan).

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#142
post #20

Is the rationale for switching away from GLFW documented anywhere? I'd love to read about it, I have some projects which use GLFW myself and I'm always wondering whether or not SDL would be better

Not sure, but they were able to get Wayland support working out of the box in this update. Previously it required workarounds, and even with workarounds, new issues would pop up in a game of whack-a-mole, and nobody really cared because running MC in XWayland was good enough for most people. Whereas SDL3 has very solid Wayland support out of the box. Minecraft only really uses GLFW to create the window, set the taskbar icon, go into fullscreen mode, and accept input, with everything else being handled by raw OpenGL, so this was an easy switchover. Now that Minecraft supports Vulkan, it's able to use a fully modern stack on Linux desktops / Steam Decks.

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#143
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Delay a release? Sure. But delay a snapshot? Why? By releasing the snapshot in this state, they learn both 1) how big of a problem those known issues are (how often does entering exclusive fullscreen crash the game on Windows? They presumably have telemetry for this), and 2) if there are other, as of yet unknown issues they need to fix before release. The earlier you learn these things, the better. There hasn't ever…

Are snapshots explicitly a beta channel? Or do users get auto updates to them? Testing for bugs in prod shouldn’t be acceptable unless users expect bugs in exchange for getting latest features early in something like a beta channel

they're not useful to users looking for the latest features. They're useful to mod developers who'd like to see how internal changes might affect their work. For example.

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#144
post #18
post #3

osu (the rhythm game) also recently switched to SDL3, from SDL2, and it came with significant performance/latency improvements. SDL3 adoption is a bit slow it seems. Though, I'm surprised Minecraft used GLFW all this time. One notable thing is that switching to SDL3 eliminated lag from having Discord client open while playing osu. Pretty sure this was from their devlog on YouTube.

On Linux, often times you will be using SDL3 regardless, as sdl2-compat and sdl12-compat are the default implementations of SDL2 and 1.2 on some distros. This has a lot of benefits, from more apps working natively on Wayland (which gives lower latency than XWayland) to better controller support. Not sure what this meant for osu but I wouldn't be surprised if it made the actual switch less impactful for some users. I…

The compatibility layer mention is valid for many projects, and I personally greatly appreciate that it exists, even if it's a bit buggy

osu! however, is only officially distributed on Linux via AppImage (and semi-officially via Flatpak) and bundles its own SDL for the reasons that, to my knowledge, range from the general pinning to a known stable version approach to the team backporting functionality from SDL3 to SDL2 (last one I remember is non-text-based clipboard functionality, not entirely sure though)

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#146
post #103
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Soon enough it'll read email [_] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Zawinski#Zawinski%27s_La...

I'm sure it already can with the right mod/plugin.

I’m delighted to get to introduce you to ComputerCraft: Tweaked (modern fork).

https://tweaked.cc/

Email client and server in Lua

https://github.com/GabrielleAkers/cc-email

The whole project is a great way to get started with understanding computers, programming, and networking in an environment that appeals to the iPad generation- one that knows less about technology than its predecessors. It’s about making computers useful towards your economic and military interests with automation. You build equipment from scratch and connect it any way you please.

For this email approach:

> get 3 advanced computers and 3 ender modems then follow the instructions in the readme in the repo

> the first two computer/modems are for the auth server and email server then the third is to actually use the email client to send emails. i guess it's 2+X where X is the number of computers you want to send/receive emails on

https://www.reddit.com/r/ComputerCraft/comments/1lsl070/comm...

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#148
post #20

Is the rationale for switching away from GLFW documented anywhere? I'd love to read about it, I have some projects which use GLFW myself and I'm always wondering whether or not SDL would be better

Not sure, but they were able to get Wayland support working out of the box in this update. Previously it required workarounds, and even with workarounds, new issues would pop up in a game of whack-a-mole, and nobody really cared because running MC in XWayland was good enough for most people. Whereas SDL3 has very solid Wayland support out of the box. Minecraft only really uses GLFW to create the window, set the taskb…

GLFW 3.4 has always just worked under Wayland for me. What has been the issue for Minecraft?

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#149

The lwjgl bindings for this were written by a member of the GTNH modpack team, thereby completing the chain of vanilla->modded->vanilla once more https://github.com/LWJGL/lwjgl3/pull/1033

How many people working on Minecraft now were modders ? And how many current persons working on Minecraft are also Modders ?

> how many current persons working on Minecraft are also Modders?

Probably less than you'd think: lots of people recognise they need to leave their work behind at work and not get too emotionally invested in something they love, because at work they'll be exposed to the gut-wrenching business-decision sausage factory.

Re: Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

#150

Anyone got any advice for a techy dad with no (zero) Minecraft experience who wants to set up a Minecraft server for the family in 2026? Kids right now are playing on their iPads, and (sometimes) old macbooks/windows PCs.

Docker compose + systemd, automated backups (bonus points for coordinating with restic/borg + rsync cronjob), and ram disks. Ram disks in particular are a game changer for game feel. For the backups you'll need to leverage a feature that exports the world. This used to need to be a mod, but it's possible it's been folded into vanilla.
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