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Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

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Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Java garbage collection gets out of control when cramming 100+ poorly optimized mods together. The bedrock edition is great in theory but the proper mod API never appeared. Regardless, people have accomplished some really impressive stuff with commands, but it is an exercise in pain. The other issue with bedrock is it is far from feature parity with java. If these two things were hit then java could be reasonably ret…

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?

Of course. Because they would fail loudly and would have to be fixed in order to run. Garbage collection is a crutch which lets broken things appear not broken.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#152
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a colossal waste..

I still don’t understand what problem Bedrock Edition solves. I guess it was for consoles that don’t support Java?

Yes, and performance. Java edition is slow as hell in comparison, it just doesn't matter on PCs too much unless you really mod it.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#155
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

Minor tweaks are still a mod. Gameplay overhaul modpacks that turn the game into Factorio are definitely the a small minority of the playerbase, but anyone who knows better plays with at least some sort of client-side performance mod (Optifine, Lithium, etc), and that's been true since before 1.0.

Etho's dedication to keeping a purely vanilla singleplayer world is a unique feat. If you want to use Hermitcraft as an example of the median SMP, their modlist is actually quite large: https://github.com/henkelmax/hermitcraft-server

Minecraft simply has a lot of areas for improvement that haven't been touched by Mojang for one reason or another, and a big reason why people stick with Java is because the community has built an ecosystem to tweak the game to their liking.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#156
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a colossal waste..

I still don’t understand what problem Bedrock Edition solves. I guess it was for consoles that don’t support Java?

Ironically, it was originally built to support Android phones.

Pocket Edition was a stripped down version of the game to support the xperia play, so it was built for optimization from the start. Later it got support for broader Android devices and iOS, while Mojang outsourced console development to 4J studios. Eventually, they decided to beef up Pocket Edition to be mostly feature complete with Java, renamed it Bedrock, and made it the de facto standard for all devices, sunsetting 4J's port.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#157
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be clear I do kinda agree with the general idea that modding isn't that important to Minecraft Java; but it's still very important at least indirectly - were there not as large of a modding scene, I'd imagine many more content creators would've long ran out of content to make on it (or at least unique ways to do things), and the technical research/farms/whatever would be hampered by less available tooling.

(for what it's worth, last I played minecraft, like 1-2 years ago, I did so lightly-modded - Do A Barrel Roll for much more fun elytra; lithium; Distant Horizons; Hydrophobic Elytra to fix a stupid extremely-annoying elytra bug (might be fixed now?), BetterF3 (kinda superceded by the more recent F3 overhaul now I suppose?))

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#158

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? Of course. Because they would fail loudly and would have to be fixed in order to run. Garbage collection is a crutch which lets broken things appear not broken.

Memory leaks very often don't fail loudly. Especially if they are slower leaks which don't immediately break the application.

A lot of the memory problems that you can see without a GC are hard to find and diagnose. Use after free, for example, is very often safe. It only crashes or causes problems sometimes. Same for double free. And they are hard to diagnose because the problems they do create are often observed at a distance. Use after free will silently corrupt some bit of memory somewhere else, what trips up on it might be completely unrelated.

It's the opposite of failing loudly.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#159

Damn, this will break Minecraft on my original machine, an Acer C720 Chromebook modded to run Linux. The Intel HD4400 iGPU doesn’t support Vulcan! I always appreciated that MC would run on virtually any hardware, especially as a kid without access to anything nice.

At least Java lets you run older versions so you can just play 1.7.10 forever as Notch intended.

Notch already sold Minecraft to Microsoft before 1.7.10 was released.

Re: Minecraft Java is switching from OpenGL to Vulkan

#160

I hope Vibrant Visuals comes to Minecraft Java Edition quickly, it's a shame you need mods to have shaders on Java.

> it's a shame you need mods to have shaders on Java You don't. Ever since 1.17 you have been able to build GL shaders directly into resource packs. Resource packs don't require any complex loaders and don't pose a malware risk. To install them you can either drag-and-drop them as .zips directly into the resource pack menu, or a server/world can be configured to prompt the installation of a resource pack. These resou…

> Ever since 1.17 you have been able to build GL shaders directly into resource packs

This sounds very cool, I never knew this. Could you give me an example of such pack?

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