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Comment by rexpop | Hacker News Reader

What an absurdly facile perspective. While it's true that developers like Valve develop games only to take advantage of or exhibit new engine developments and Minecraft's revolutionary voxel engine likewise enabled a game that could not be built otherwise, you seem to be suggesting that eg all UE games throughout the last thirty years are undifferentiated "in spirit" because they share an engine.

What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"

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Minecraft's engine wasn't remotely revolutionary, it was basically a 1:1 riff on an XNA game called Infiniminer that predated it. And its engine wasn't especially good. Minecraft's success is almost entirely due to its accessibility and the fundamental strength of its design - both things that are possible in any game engine. These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.

I am not sure I would even call Minecraft as having a "game engine". An engine is usually generalized so it can be extracted and used for many games.

> And its engine wasn't especially good.

It was good enough. It's non trivial to do, despite appearances.

> These days a large % of Minecraft installs are a C++ version of the game and not the original Java version, because it's really not about the engine.

But is the Bedrock version even the majority? It's been out for years and adoption is very slow. If it was not for game consoles it might not have taken off at all. And the main reason is mods. Which are not part of the "engine" as you put it, and were enabled by the technology choice.

We would need to know how many Minecraft installs are on mobile and console, where Java isn't an option. I would expect it's a large % of the overall userbase, but I don't have access to the numbers. Switch and Android both open Minecraft up to a huge number of people who either don't have a PC or can't install Minecraft on it.

Agreed that mods are a big part of the experience and would only really have flourished using technologies like Java (what Notch chose), C# or JavaScript, not C++.

Fine, "Infiniminer's revolutionary voxel engine."

"What an insult to writers, artists, and game designers! None of them have managed to imbue their works with "unique spirit?"

As someone said, to the extent they have managed to do it -- and many have -- it was not because of engines like unity but despite them. I imagine all those people would have been happier if the engineers had made a custom engine for them (and quick).

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