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Comment by whatshisface | Hacker News Reader

If you like this, check out minetest too. (minetest.net)

Its got rendering improved over Mojang's Minecraft (with built-in shader support,) infinite world size in all directions (not just horizontally), and a very high-performance C++ implementation.

It also has a very well-supported and well documented mod API, and an active community. You should check it out.

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> infinite in all direction

Homepage says supports up to 62000blocks per dimension, which, conrary to their claim, is quite small.

62,000 blocks may not sound like a lot, but that would be 11.5 hours of walking continuously without any obstructions or stopping. I'm pretty sure not many people are going to run out of space.

11.5 hours != infinite

Improvement? Sure. 64k is more than anyone will ever need? er... 62k? Sure.

Infinite? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means.

> Homepage says supports up to 62000blocks per dimension, which, conrary to their claim, is quite small.

Indeed. Minecraft only gets ~256 in the Y-direction, but allows you to go ~30,000,000 in the X/Z-directions.

A second on minetest. It's quite impressive.

>very high-performance C++

C++ does not automatically mean "very high-performance". A lot of users get worse framerates than with Minecraft (not everyone, though!), and the entity/"mob" code used to be insanely slow, at least a year ago.

While I find your second sentence quite insightful, the first sentence seems to fight a straw man.

(GP stated that this software is high-performance, and that it is written in C++. They didn't claim it to be high-performance because of C++.)

My apologies. Way too often I hear people in the Minecraft community say everything would be magically fixed if the game had simply used C++ in place of Java. I guess I'm too quick to jump on people using "C++", "high performance" and "Minecraft-like thing" in one comment nowadays.

Well, tbh that is somewhat grounded in reality: lots of minecraft's early performance problems were caused by the GC, which wouldn't have been a problem if writing "idiomatic" C++.

Lots of those problems have since been fixed though. I believe a rewrite in C++ today would bring more problem than it solves (which, BTW, Mojang is kind-of doing with Minecraft PE).

I don't believe that this person means to imply that C++ is inherently performant -- only that the software is written in C++ and it is highly performant.

When I played with it 3 years ago, the entity/mob stuff was implemented in a Lua plugin instead of C++. If they did not change that it certainly explains the performance problems.

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