Custom Minecraft Classic client written from scratch in C

So, sure, Minecrat's not open source. But they don't mistreat their mod devs, released an abundantly hackable game, and have the largest player community on Earth.

I’d love a way to sidestep them. It’d make my life easier. We already own four or five copies of the game, so I’m not even talking about piracy.

Plus their fucking launcher phones home to any of a whole bunch of IP addresses, refusing to launch the game if those requests fail, which makes allowlist-based management of kids’ connected devices difficult if you want them to be able to play Minecraft and don’t want to have to manually intervene every time they start the game. God damn is that annoying.

(We tried the minecraft-clone plug-in bundle for that one open source engine, and the kids and I both found it off putting and definitely worse in ways that were hard to put my finger on, but were real. Instant rejection by the kids, and I couldn’t blame them)

[edit] though without survival mode or the ability to do multiplayer, this project is also no help to us.

It started as a fun curious idea to understand more about programming and mechanics in games, but became very quickly extremely addictive.

Paired with big personal problems at that time it provided me with an excellent opportunity to escape and basically not leave my home until I was done.

And I regret none of it. I learned much much much more about engineering than I would have ever done otherwise and with this knowledge I landed very good jobs with good and stable income which eventually brought me out of my personal problems.

People re-create classic games all the time, like tetris, for fun.

Uhm... why not? If I contributed a Survival mode, and submitted it as a PR, then it would be rejected? If the goal of this project isn't to recreate what we loved about old-school Minecraft, then I don't know if this project is for me or not, and then I don't know who it's for.

Its seemingly too big for a programming exercise. Minecraft Classic isnt really broken or super limited like the targets of many open source remakes. Its not commercial.

The big selling point seems to be support on really old desktop devices and iOS/Android? Assuming the mobile controls are good.

I am very out of the loop with Minecraft, not having played in quite a few years. Meanwhile, I have been getting into factorio... but the thought of going back to my Minecraft roots is appealing

I know the website owner has actually talked mojang’s legal team down from trying to take classicube down- the lack of modern Minecraft features essentially differentiates it from their product, assumedly it makes it much harder to sue for.

Nintendo is probably the most aggressive about this.

https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Chunk_format

The main unit of minecraft storage is the chunk, which is a 16x16xWorld height area of the map. Chunks are bundled into groups of 32x32 chunks for storage on disk. Minecraft keeps a map of chunks for an area of (configured render distance + 3) chunks in memory, and pages these in and out as you move around (including generating new chunks if you reach a chunk that's never been generated before).

Chunks themselves are subdivided into 16x16x16 sections of blocks by vertical height.

So the process is:

1. Find chunk containing co-ordinate (maths + dict lookup) 2. Find array containing data based on y co-ordinate (basically an array lookup) 3. Find block in array (another array lookup)

There's also various data of more variable size (e.g. lists of entities, structures, etc.) tacked onto the chunk format. These tend to be much smaller in number for any given chunk, so my understanding is these are basically just linearly searched or iterated on a per chunk basis when required.

> [...] To understand why octrees are slower for Minecraft games, it isn’t really necessary to invoke such exotic explanations. The underlying reason for the worse performance is purely algorithmic: each time an arbitrary voxel is touched, either when iterating or performing a random access, it is necessary to traverse to the entire height of the octree. Since octrees are not necessarily balanced, this can be as much as log(maximum size of game world)! Assuming the coordinate system is say 32 bit, this brings an added overhead of 32 additional non-coherent memory accesses per each operation that touches the map (as opposed to the flat array, where everything is simply constant time).

https://0fps.net/2012/01/14/an-analysis-of-minecraft-like-en...

You always know the location of the player in x,y,z. The world is extremely regular, first you figure out the co-ordinates of what you are hitting, then you do a direct lookup of that from the world, with like a single top-level hashtable that links to large fixed-size segments. This will be dramatically faster than any tree.

https://github.com/UnknownShadow200/ClassiCube#web

This was the most innocent comment ever.

Is there an anti-Rust sentiment?

Is it so bad to say something was a good idea, it makes me think of trying other things too.