Earlier quoted context omitted.
1.3, not beta 1.3. Chunk data was traditionally the biggest part of Minecraft's memory use until they added a bunch more garbage.
Interesting they switched after a couple years! > Chunk data was traditionally the biggest part of Minecraft's memory use until they added a bunch more garbage. But that's only really because it is extremely light on assets that are typically large in other games. I'm a bit indifferent about this. Obviously they made a lot of decisions that aren't good for performance but it's a tradeoff. Notch was most productive wo…
They even managed to pessimize the assets. They did this by, during startup, pre-converting every possible rendering state of every block in the game into a static 3D model made out of Java objects (Vertex, Face, etc). This wastes about a GB of RAM.
Before Minecraft 1.8, blocks were rendered by running block-specific code for each block to render it in the needed state. One function would append a ladder to a vertex buffer, another function would append a cube to a vertex buffer, another one for stairs, etc. Since the same code block would render any material variant and direction variant of stairs, this didn't use excessive memory.
I know that in 1.8, the biggest single waste of models was redstone dust, because it comes in 16 power levels and approximately 3^4 side connection states (connected, not connected, and connected up the side of a block, but not all combinations are possible) which is over 1000 unique models. Not sure if this is still the case.