Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

gamingonlinux.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 177 posts

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#141

Post by wongarsu »

creatonez wrote: post #116
wongarsu wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase, with the aim of fully replacing the Java edition. A simple plan: bring Bedrock to feature parity with Java, add a modding API that satisfies 95% of use cases, then force everyone onto Bedrock. The feature parity is mostly there, but modding in Bedrock seems to have become a non-goal, and Bedrock has so many bugs that if your pla…

> As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase Is there a source for this? I don't remember any language to suggest Java Edition would eventually be replaced when they announced Windows 10 Edition. They've always indicated that they intend to keep maintaining the Java Edition, with parity in the core game. The messaging here has never changed, as far as I'm aware.

I'm not sure there are any direct quotes to that effect. But for four years the name of Bedrock Edition was simply "Minecraft" or "Minecraft for Windows", with the previous Minecraft becoming "Minecraft: Java Edition".

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/all-news-e3

https://minecraft.wiki/w/Bedrock_Edition#Nomenclature

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#142

Post by jakogut »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #98
PaulKeeble wrote: post #14

I hope this reduces the CPU overhead a bit on the main thread with some time. Quite a few games that ported from DX11 to 12 and openGL to Vulkan didn't just gain performance from the API swap it required taking advantage of the new higher parallel draw call capabilities. # The main thread is often the limiting factor in minecraft. Minecraft just can't go as fast as the GPU could render the scene and even with quite a…

I use Unigine Heaven to benchmark Linux systems. A colleague's friend has an epic spreadsheet of Heaven benchmarks across many configurations, and he submitted a few I've done. I ran it at home on my Linux desktop. For shits and giggles, I also downloaded the Windows version and ran it in Proton, and got a 30% performance boost! I suspect that a lot of that is due to the dxvk library that Proton uses, and the multith…

There's a "newer" (almost ten years old) Unigine benchmark available called Superposition you should check out.

https://benchmark.unigine.com/superposition

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#143

Post by permo-w »

NekkoDroid wrote: post #119
potwinkle wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems kind of odd to play Java edition without mods at all. Wouldn't you have a simpler time on Bedrock?

Well... people do call it Bugrock for a reason.

Also redstone is different, there's no F3 menu, generally far less vanilla customisability, far more micro-transaction prompting, far fewer commands and I'm sure 20 other things that someone who has actually played Bedrock recently could name

This thread is quite weird to me. People are massively overstating how important modding is and understating the strength of vanilla Java. Minecraft is not Skyrim

Speedrunning, anarchy servers, parkour, technical farming, server economy destruction videos and other primarily vanilla Java content forms are as popular as ever or more. Alongside the newer content creators, Hermitcraft is still growing somehow, as is Etho. Besides anarchy a little bit, none of this is reliant on modding

There are significant updates every year and many people, including me, install them every time they come out and play them in vanilla.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#144

Post by bombcar »

permo-w wrote: post #139
bombcar wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They wanted everything on bedrock but they can’t do it, and losing the Java modding ecosystem would literally kill the game, which remains popular because of all the YouTube content, 90% of which is Java (even unmodded). Much of the cashflow is from kids watching a YouTuber doing something in Java Minecraft and attempting it themselves in bedrock, which is why feature parity is the only thing they’re really working o…

(Not saying you are but) I think people here are overstating modding and understating Bedrock's inferiority for content creation. The bugs, the differing technical surface and redstone logic, the basic missing key technical features from Java, like the F3 menu. Yes modding is a huge factor, but even if they released an amazing Bedrock modding API 3 years ago, Java would still be dominant in the content creation commu…

That's the underlying reality - they wanted Bedrock to unify all the non-PC platforms (phones, consoles, etc) and they succeeded on that.

They have no need to supplant Java, nor any desire to (and all their marketing materials and screenshots are usually Java anyway).

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#145

Post by creatonez »

wongarsu wrote: post #141
creatonez wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As far as I remember the original plan was to only maintain both in a transitional phase Is there a source for this? I don't remember any language to suggest Java Edition would eventually be replaced when they announced Windows 10 Edition. They've always indicated that they intend to keep maintaining the Java Edition, with parity in the core game. The messaging here has never changed, as far as I'm aware.

I'm not sure there are any direct quotes to that effect. But for four years the name of Bedrock Edition was simply "Minecraft" or "Minecraft for Windows", with the previous Minecraft becoming "Minecraft: Java Edition". https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/all-news-e3 https://minecraft.wiki/w/Bedrock_Edition#Nomenclature

That's still the official name of bedrock, but it was never meant to establish a hierarchy or a plan for ending Java, they always seemed very careful in their words to avoid making it sound like it does.

If anything, they might have just done the rename simply for standardization over 9 different app stores with different requirements, branding requirements, and length limits before truncation occurs.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#146

Post by dzaima »

permo-w wrote: post #143
NekkoDroid wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well... people do call it Bugrock for a reason.

Also redstone is different, there's no F3 menu, generally far less vanilla customisability, far more micro-transaction prompting, far fewer commands and I'm sure 20 other things that someone who has actually played Bedrock recently could name This thread is quite weird to me. People are massively overstating how important modding is and understating the strength of vanilla Java. Minecraft is not Skyrim Speedrunning,…

Speedrunning is very much modded - ranked (the big content) is just flat out modded (not just the match setup, there are game tweaks too (guaranteed blaze drops after 20 or so iirc, guaranteed dragon perch in ≤3 mins)), and even RSG/SSG/AA/etc have a long list of allowed mods (much quicker seed rerolling, timer, perf improvement mods, etc). Many(/most/all? idk) Many (/most/all? idk) hermits use mods (esp. freecam, replaymod for creating timelapses / pretty camera perspectives). Never mind shaders sprinkled in a portion of everything.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#147

Post by chrisdfrey »

theandrewbailey wrote: post #98
PaulKeeble wrote: post #14

I hope this reduces the CPU overhead a bit on the main thread with some time. Quite a few games that ported from DX11 to 12 and openGL to Vulkan didn't just gain performance from the API swap it required taking advantage of the new higher parallel draw call capabilities. # The main thread is often the limiting factor in minecraft. Minecraft just can't go as fast as the GPU could render the scene and even with quite a…

I use Unigine Heaven to benchmark Linux systems. A colleague's friend has an epic spreadsheet of Heaven benchmarks across many configurations, and he submitted a few I've done. I ran it at home on my Linux desktop. For shits and giggles, I also downloaded the Windows version and ran it in Proton, and got a 30% performance boost! I suspect that a lot of that is due to the dxvk library that Proton uses, and the multith…

With a lot of games you can put DXVK DLLs in its folder and get better performance: https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk/releases

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#148

Post by cogman10 »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #136
cogman10 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java garbage collection is what's allowing those 100+ poorly optimize mods to be functional at the same time in the first place. Games with robust modding will almost always feature a garbage collected language which is what's primarily used for the modding. Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory?

> Consider this, if the mod interface was C/C++, do you think those poorly optimized mods could be trusted to also not leak memory? Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems. For example - keeping a reference too long, - much more subtle: having a reference to some object inside some closure will also cause memory leaks in a garbage-collected language. The proper solution is to consider what you name "po…

> Garbage collection does not solve memory leak problems

It solves a class of memory leak problems which are much harder to address without the GC. Memory lifetimes.

It's true that you can still create an object that legitimately lives for the duration of the application, nothing solves that.

But what you can't do is allocate something on the heap and forget to free it. Or double free it. Or free it before the actual lifetime has finished.

Those are much trickier problems to solve which experienced C/C++ programmers trip over all the time. It's hard enough to have been the genesis of languages like Java and Rust.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#149

Post by permo-w »

dzaima wrote: post #146
permo-w wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also redstone is different, there's no F3 menu, generally far less vanilla customisability, far more micro-transaction prompting, far fewer commands and I'm sure 20 other things that someone who has actually played Bedrock recently could name This thread is quite weird to me. People are massively overstating how important modding is and understating the strength of vanilla Java. Minecraft is not Skyrim Speedrunning,…

Speedrunning is very much modded - ranked (the big content) is just flat out modded (not just the match setup, there are game tweaks too (guaranteed blaze drops after 20 or so iirc, guaranteed dragon perch in ≤3 mins)), and even RSG/SSG/AA/etc have a long list of allowed mods ( much quicker seed rerolling, timer, perf improvement mods, etc). Many(/most/all? idk) Many (/most/all? idk) hermits use mods (esp. freecam, r…

These are minor tweaks. You could remove these and the speedrunning community/HC would lose little. A second account in spectator mode is a slightly less convenient version of freecam and the speedrunning community is kidding themselves in the first place allowing any tweaks to RNG whatsoever. They could ban that tomorrow and there'd be some grumbling but nothing would change viewership-wise

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#150

Post by dzaima »

permo-w wrote: post #149
dzaima wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speedrunning is very much modded - ranked (the big content) is just flat out modded (not just the match setup, there are game tweaks too (guaranteed blaze drops after 20 or so iirc, guaranteed dragon perch in ≤3 mins)), and even RSG/SSG/AA/etc have a long list of allowed mods ( much quicker seed rerolling, timer, perf improvement mods, etc). Many(/most/all? idk) Many (/most/all? idk) hermits use mods (esp. freecam, r…

These are minor tweaks. You could remove these and the speedrunning community/HC would lose little. A second account in spectator mode is a slightly less convenient version of freecam and the speedrunning community is kidding themselves in the first place allowing any tweaks to RNG whatsoever. They could ban that tomorrow and there'd be some grumbling but nothing would change viewership-wise

The main actual speedrunning categories don't allow any RNG changes; but I doubt anyone doing RSG would have any interest whatsoever going back to the 20x-or-whatever slower seed rolling, that's just a completely utterly dumb waste of time doing literally nothing except clicking a button every 5 seconds (effectively changing the category from "who can play the game the best" to much more like "who has the most beast of a machine to run as many minecraft instances in parallel to more quickly roll a good seed"). Viewership would definitely go down from there being less actual gameplay.

Ranked is intended to be a fun competitive thing; waiting 10 minutes for a dragon perch doing nothing is Not Fun; waiting forever at a spawner is Not Fun; simple as that, people wouldn't play it if it wasn't fun. (oh, also, I believe Ranked also just generally includes making mob drops consistent for the same seed (and consistent portal locations, and probably other things), without which the whole entire concept of competitively playing the same seed would not work whatsoever, devolving to just who got the better RNG, distinctly Not Fun; also the ability to review a replay of your game afterwards for learning). Viewership and player counts would go down because you'd just be looking at very slow gambling instead of something actually meaningfully-skill-based.

A second account might work for freecam (though it adds more editing work, aka makes you not want to actually use it much), but making pretty timelapses is not feasible that way. Granted, you could still live without it, but the quality of content would undoubtedly go down. The little things go a long, long, long way.

Post reply on HN