Minecraft: Java Edition 26.2, the first version with Vulkan 1.2 | Hacker News Reader

Minecraft: Java Edition 26.2, the first version with Vulkan 1.2

minecraft.net

I find this choice interesting. Vulkan is a sensible choice given the game is multiplatform (and of course they mention MoltenVK right in the announcement.) Despite that, I still find it interesting that a Microsoft subsidiary would make this choice given that Vulkan is a direct competitor to Direct3D and that Microsoft seemed to only begrudgingly continue to support OpenGL and wgl. (Am I hallucinating, or was there not a period of time where the graphics drivers shipped from Windows Update simply omitted OpenGL support, leaving you with only the terrible OpenGL 1.4 software renderer?)

The bedrock lineage is microsoft's attempt at microsoftifying minecraft. The team behind bedrock are responsible for showing the world the supremacy of DirectX.

Bedrock is far behind on features and is far buggier compared to java edition. A ground up C++ rewrite is noble beginnings. Unfortunately time has shown that they only planned to get it to an MVP necessary for some gross monetization tactics targeting children and not really a genuine interest in improving the tech, growing fandom goodwill, or creating new art.

Because most mods take advantage of Java capabilities, so JavaScript extension points are not as interesting.

However the C++ version has a reason to exist, sadly Java never established itself for gaming outside desktops and J2ME/Android.

One could argue about AOT, but those are not widely adopted, CodenameONE, RobotVM.

You should check out Codename Ones recent gaming related features...

Which was my last sentence.

The issue isn't that it isn't there, it is mindshare among game developers, especially when it isn't part of the official SDK.

This isn't unique to Java, and that is why outside indie games, it is always the same languages that get used among all major studios.

Sure and I don't argue that. But it also wasn't fully there. This past couple of weeks Codename One introduced some big missing pieces:

* Level builder/game designer * Proper 3d that works natively everywhere (direct 3d on windows, metal on iOS/Mac) * Support for native win32, Linux and mac - real native with no JVM, 5mb binary * Native performance for some edge cases (low level SIMD API etc.)

You're right that mindshare is a huge part, but there were also many important missing pieces especially on the deployment front. I think that with good tooling and a royalty free pitch this might open some doors that were previously closed to Java.

Getting to major studios would be an uphill battle but since they acquire indie studios the path goes through there.

You could run java literally anywhere it matters with not too much effort, but ios store terms would never allow for mods anyway (neither would ps/xbox/ninty store probably), so you could just as well redirect effort to optimize for platform specific audiences, AKA in this case kids wielding their parents' credit card.

Neither do game consoles.

I was under the impression it was because Java wouldn’t work on mobile devices. Is that not the case?

Probably just iOS since Apple bans JIT compilers other than their own.

And then note the curiosity of how microsoft blocks bedrock from running on macos, for some reason.

Consoles ban JITs too.

Almost is if an iphone is a little console.

I don't think there's much chance Sony or Nintendo would have blocked the publishing of a Java version of Minecraft, if that had been on offer in place of Bedrock.

The rules are always flexible for huge games, especially when they'd otherwise be an exclusive for a competitor.

Ignoring that, https://pojavlauncher.app/ supports iOS too.

FYI, PojavLauncher has been succeeded by https://github.com/AngelAuraMC.

IIRC The Android version came out pre-MS acquisition

It started with that, yes, with Pocket Edition, but then that codebase got used for the console editions. I guess the temptation to monetise was too strong, and monetising Java was probably a lot harder and would spark a lot more outrage.

The Modded Minecraft community is basically all Java, and yeah, I think the Microsoft team on this have done a good job, but given how much awesome stuff modders give away a monetisation gambit is going to bring loads of ire for relatively small gain. "Better Than Wolves" is an entire mod which exists because one solo was angry about Wolves being added to Minecraft and they were like "I can do better than that" and of course the only way to show that you're serious was to uh, make a mod which is better than the wolves. IIRC it's a mechanical power system, water wheels, wind mills, gears and then simple machines to connect.

When I was 15 I ported Minecraft Java beta 1.2 to android.

There is an unofficial mobile port of Java edition, so no

https://github.com/AngelAuraMC/Amethyst-Android

Unfortunately being technically possible is only half the story. If it won't pass iOS App Store review it isn't a viable strategy.

> Bedrock is far behind on features and is far buggier compared to java edition.

But does allow you render distances and frame rates that are impossible with the stock Java game (and can still be tricky even with mods.)

... at the cost of reducing the world update range, simplifying some of the mechanics and disallowing the kind of modding you can do on java.

This is actually one of the weirder things. The Java edition is objectively better from a technical player's perspective.

It's simple. Microsoft the new owner has no idea what Minecraft is about.

Or at least the subset of Minecraft that I play: complex builds and automated farms done in survival not creative. At that level the combat they keep adding to is ... just getting in the way of my building.

> Microsoft the new owner has no idea what Minecraft is about.

They've had 12 years to figure it out[0]. Now sadly they've spent those 12 years working out how best to milk every last microtransaction and merchandising cent out of the property rather than actually listening to anyone and improving the game(s) but whomst among us could have predicted that outcome?!

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/sep/15/microsoft...

Do they have MTX in Java yet? I haven't played in like 2 years.

Java edition has, mercifully, shown nothing of that sort whatsoever.

I think the problem is that Minecraft caters to a huge range of tastes. I fully agree with you, I’d much rather have more options for automation and building fun machinery but my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing, and lead to new ways of playing the game. That’s barely scratching the surface, you’ve also got the speed runners, the boat racers, the people using it as a place to shoot weird films, the drop map obsessives, and the speed bridgers competing to bridge from one point to another as fast as possible. It’s almost impossible to accommodate everyone all the time.

> my son is deeply into the PvP side of things where the new combat options are hugely appealing

But is he not using mods because he doesn't want to, or just because he hasn't got into it yet? Perhaps soon he'll run into a must-have java mod and drop bedrock.

Personally I learned about MC and even that there are mods by helping my then 12 year old daughter install them...

Oh he's hard into the world of Java edition mods, my point was more that they're adding combat options to the core game because there's a huge audience demanding more combat options.

My experience has been that unless you are using the basic graphics options of Bedrock it performs worse at the same render distance, and even with basic graphics the perf is not much better. With Java version getting Vulkan rendering I suspect it'll out perform bedrock even without mods.

Not to mention bedrocks "improved" graphics look like trash compared to the shaders available for modded Java.

The defining aspect of Bedrock is C++, not DirectX. Bedrock runs on numerous platforms where DirectX isn't available.

Minecraft isn't exactly be the type of game to showcase a 3D API's supremacy.

>Minecraft isn't exactly be the type of game to showcase a 3D API's supremacy.

Nvidia did exactly this...

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/campaigns/minecraft-wit...

Another thing to note is that Mojang had already commissioned a C++ port of Minecraft for the console versions, which they then abandoned in favor of Bedrock. The original console port ran better, was less buggy, and had a nicer UI for controllers than Bedrock. Bedrock is basically an extension of Minecraft Pocket Edition (the smartphone port of Minecraft) so I imagine that they shifted to Bedrock so they didn't have to pay to implement the same features on Java, console, and Pocket Edition whenever they updated the game. The console version was developed by an external contractor, which is probably why they chose to give that up instead of Pocket Edition.

"Bedrock is basically an extension of Minecraft Pocket Edition "

This seems crazy. When MS bought Mojang, why didn't they start with the console port for Bedrock? Even if some other contractor, it would be a starting point better than the phone version?

because the legacy console ports where very tied to the platforms they ran on

This isn't really true, the code works like most cross platform codebases where most of the code is common and then there's a bunch of platform-specific backends that handle graphics, sound, input, etc. They used the same gameplay code for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Playstation Vita, Xbox One, Playstation 4, Wii U, and Switch, so clearly there's not really much keeping it stuck to a single platform. A recent leak of the legacy console source code revealed that they also had an internal Windows port to make development easier, although you still need a controller to play.

Ah, okay. I didn't know that

As for the internal windows port, that's how most console development is done nowadays. Gamefreak (the pokemon people) does build of their games for PC which is neat considering how different the switch is compared to the differences between playstation/xbox and pc (those are just amd cpus and gpus on the inside, whereas the switch uses some nvidia soc)

Bedrock has a larger player base, the monetization seems to have worked. Existing Java players have not been put out (except the MS account thing).

MS didn't make the best decision, but their decisions have been good enough.

Microsoft the publisher also cares about other OSes, and each studio does whatever they feel like including publishing on mobiles and all game consoles.

Microsoft the Windows/XBox division has other priorities.

Is Direct3D not dead? I’m seeing no major releases in years, no notable features pushed (much less teased), and no team to speak of at MS. Is there a team still? Does MS plan to do anything with it? Seems like it’s Bush-era Internet Explorer at this point.

It's still alive.

https://www.techpowerup.com/346810/microsoft-intros-directx-...

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/

Direct3D 12 is Vulkan under the hood. GL is the real competitor, and it provides legitimate accessibility to small developers, which is why the industry is extinguishing it.

"Direct3D 12 is Vulkan under the hood" please don't speak on topics you have no knowledge of

you're right; I'm sorry. Trying to do better.

Ooh nice! Would've expected a bigger blog post announcement about it though? Like couple months back: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/another-step-towards... (discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47068948)

Is it safe to say that this positively affected me? For the very first time I installed Linux Mint on my old gaming with a 1080 TI and installed Minecraft/Steam. Minecraft ran beautifully and it is Java Edition 26.2. I've had a harder hit and miss time with games on Steam.

Unless you changed the setting it still uses the OpenGL backend by default

Minecraft (and Java) just runs great on Linux. I've personally experienced a 30% performance improvement from Windows.

I once tested the MS-Windows version on Wine on Linux vs MS-Windows on the same box. Both wine and native were faster on Linux, with the native Java version being the fastest (but not by much).

Am I crazy? Even a 1080 TI should have zero problems running Minecraft Java Edition...

Raw performance wise yes. Driver wise… I think we can expect instability now game ready drivers are past EoL.

Why? "Game ready drivers" are just a marketing thing to add game-specific performance hacks to new games, you don't expect "instability" just because nvidia doesn't do that anymore

Linux doesn't have "Game Ready" NVidia drivers, it just has NVidia drivers.

No need for the marketing sauce when you can already see the sizzle.

I even (quite a few years ago) successfully ran an older version of Minecraft on a laptop released in 2003. That had a Radeon 9000 graphics with a whole 32MB of VRAM.

And yes, it was playable with IIRC around 20fps, with minimum settings and a performance-tweaking mod (Optifine?). I played it a lot, since that laptop was all I had.

Even 0ad (the open source RTS game) was playable on that.

That was maybe in 2013 or something like that, so the machine was "only" 10 years old.

I run modded minecraft at 1080p30 on CPU: 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-1215U (8) @ 4.40 GHz GPU: Intel UHD Graphics @ 1.10 GHz [Integrated]

The Radeon 9xxx series were a beast, I envied the 9700 one from my Geforce 2MX.

You mean even a 1060 Ti...

A 1080 TI is a relatively good card these days still. With the insane GPU drought and price hikes that there have been for literally years.

Also MC is usually more CPU bound than GPU bound

Im so annoyed i did not pick up a few of those cards last year when we where decommissioning a old video editing system at work. Could have picked up 4x1080ti for about $100 + shipping!

Can confirm that a GT1030 can run Minecraft on Linux extremely well, but maybe you want to hang back from the really high-end shaders.

Minecraft Java is notorious for running like absolute dogpoop regardless of the hardware. Most people play with optifine or whatever the current optimisation mod is

Sodium is the current fps increase mod at the moment.

Did you have a bad experience with Minecraft on Linux before 26.2..?

No, this is my first time attempting to game on Linux full stop. Minecraft ran beautifully and this post may explain why - I should mention that I did enable the Vulkan setting in game (without knowing too much about it)

> Under Vulkan, we will prefer your dedicated graphics card over any integrated graphics, which is a change from OpenGL

Did OpenGL not do this?

I don't remember being able to pick which card OpenGL uses, while with Vulkan it's a required question the App has to answer...

I remember this being a nice API in wgpu, being forced to specify settings through a builder, otherwise it would not compile. Forces you to think how you want this application to operate

OpenGL doesn't have any way to do this except sometimes via vendor specific extensions. Basically how OpenGL works is it creates the graphics context on whichever device the system hands it. So you can configure the GPU used by OpenGL on the system level but not at the application level.

It does so via the respective OS way on how to create OpenGL context.

FYI, setting `NvOptimusEnablement` and `AmdPowerXpressRequestHighPerformance` have been the canonical way on Windows, `__NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD` + `__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME` on Linux. Though not an OpenGL feature per se, as you mentioned.

That would be the vendor extensions they mentioned.

AFAIR there was a way to "list" existing output devices, so your app could select the proper one?

I believe if you plug your monitor into your motherboard then OpenGL will use your integrated graphics rather than your card. I think with Vulkan it doesn't matter what port you plug it in, it can coordinate it?

So that is where all that money is going, rewriting a perfectly functional implementation (that you can never retire because OpenGL hardware will remain in use for longer than Microsoft will last) with another more flawed one. Same as all other companies in other words?

I'm still waiting for a Vulkan feature that is worth anything. Multicore rendering is not interesting, specially not for voxel games (that need to use another CPU core for voxel duty and once that calculation is done the GPU part is super fast) and because (in general) you need the other CPU cores for gameplay (physics, networking, 3D audio) and OS.

This eternal "growth" of APIs and features leads to eternal waste of energy. I'm more interested in the non-obfuscation of the byte code, is that in? What about vibrant visuals?

I'm going to have to attempt installing Minecraft on my ARM Mac now! Edit: that was super fast and smooth, 120Hz!, no VV but I guess they need Vulkan for that? Edit2: The source names are now default! No obfuscation!

GG Mojang after all! Edit3 (last one): the new music is great!

OpenGL as an API no longer maps well to actual hardware. The important feature Vulkan brings is simple parity with hardware, thereby, efficiency. Further, utilizing new (read: not actually new, but not reasonable in OpenGL), GPU capabilties are what make new features possible. Vibrant Visuals had a hard requirement of the renderer being updated. From what I've seen, it will be coming alongside the renderer update.

The deobfuscation of the byte code is done as of an update or two ago. I'm not a modder for minecraft so I don't know concrete details but I know its available.

I know, and X11 uses TCP between server and client too. But still OpenGL has more longevity with emulation than Vulkan has, because hardware is not getting better. DDR3 feels like the peak of RAM. SSDs are terrible now.

After all Java is the ultimate emulator (all jars will run for eternity unless Java removes features like they did with Applets = biggest mistake in history), so will graphics APIs evolve that way too? OpenGL -> Vulkan with something like Zink?

I will still prefer X11 in a 100 years. And also OpenGL (ES) 3 because that is the first really cross compatible API (ARM and X86) and it has the last feature = VAO.

So will VV only work with Vulkan enabled?

Meanwhile. Famous people are being banned from multiplayer for "hate speech" due to an "exploit." This includes both these people's private and public servers. Imagine being banned from visiting your own website. The modern version of the game is a disgrace to what once existed.

They really ought to fix that exploit, at the very least disable the functionality for the time being until they find a fix.

The solution is to play only on private java servers that have modded out the censorship functionality.

Of course most of those are closed or semi closed so useless for commercial purposes...

Mojang won't authenticate your account to the server. They can't remove the censorship without turning into a server that allows prirated accounts to connect.

Last time I played I'm pretty sure they had a plugin that disabled sending chats to Mojang but left all other checks intact. It just broke the griefing-by-reporting functionality.

Of course that won't save you if you go to servers that don't have reporting disabled so careful where you play.

That is irrelevant. It doesn't require chat messages to be banned for hate speech.

https://modrinth.com/mod/no-chat-reports

Basically with each chat message there's a cryptographic payload proving that you are the sender, so reports can't be fabricated.

If you remove it on the server before sending it to other players (or remove it on your client before sending it to the server) you can't report the messages.

Also look into this and this for exploits:

https://github.com/nodusclient/gaslight

https://github.com/nodusclient/guardian

That is irrelevant. It doesn't require chat messages to be banned for hate speech.

Someone found the right way to phrase a report or are just relying on support to mess up on one of the many reports being sent to get them banned. It's not like the player being banned was on the same server as the people reporting them.

Well, then it's time to download a crack.

Do you have a source ?

I didn't find any info about this exploit, and I thought it was related to chat reporting (being hate "speech" after all)

Possibly they have Copilot handling bans, then all bets are off.

The solution is to ban so many accounts, including high-profile accounts, they can't ignore the fact they fucked up.

I hope Luanti (formerly Minetext) catches up

Minetest :)

I don't think Minetest has much of a chance, it always felt like a loose group of programmers making a game engine rather than game designers creating a game. At least when I last tried it, it was completely devoid of any features to improve the game feel, everything (movement, camera movement, animations, mining, etc) just felt like a soulless "technically correct" implementation that a programmer without artistic vision would come up with.

It's the typical open source model. They are probably hoping someone else comes in to add the gameplay via modding.

they have, there are full minecraft clones you can download for it that work well

A full clone is not a very interesting game.

It seems like Minetest has more or less evolved from trying to be a Minecraft clone to trying to be Roblox, that's ... weird

Minetest has tons of games downloadable from a single click ingame.

So yes literally, hoping that someone else adds the gameplay via modding lol

Not mods but full games themselves.

Luanti more seems like an attempt to build a FOSS Roblox with Minecraft gameplay base

considering the amount of money they are making on Minecraft there is almost no forward momentum with the game. the tech is so dated that you have to go to mods to get basic performance improvements. Stuff like shaders and improving the render distance. more intelligent mobs.

The content updates are the laziest I've ever seen in a game, usually just re-skinned versions of other mobs.

really, it's illegal in Sweden to even think about lighting a fire under someone's ass. everyone's too comfortable to innovate. it's sad for a game with such potential. I'm waiting for someone to come and knock it off the voxel throne...

They were doing great game updates until Caves and Cliffs, where they promised too much and had to split it over like 5 next updates. After that they decided to mostly just do useless "feature" drops.

My view: The nether update was fabulous with so much new stuff. After that they seemed overconfident and promised way too much. They delivered but it took three new versions rather than one. Each of those versions was awesome in my opinion. But the community got sour because they were promised this stuff faster. I think part of the reason was that certain features, especially the Warden, Deep Dark and Ancient Cities was extended in scope, with awesome results. But then Mojang started promising less and moved to smaller feature drops. The autocrafter seems fun, but all in all, the updates from 1.20 onwards have been so boring that my interest have just dwindled out.

> everyone's too comfortable to innovate.

Bit ridiculous when it's the country that produced the original.

I thought Minecraft has been using bgfx for a while now.

Minecraft has two versions, Java and Bedrock (C++), the Bedrock edition uses bgfx: https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/attribution

Great, now someone can backport it to one of the good versions. Maybe Mojang's implementation is better than the Nvidium mod. (For those OOTL, Mojang prohibits mods which backport preview/experimental features to stable versions. Also for those OOTL, Minecraft JE's development has changed from stagnation to regression since 2024, though you could argue it goes back to 2021 or earlier.)

Last I heard about Minecraft was that MS was pushing AI written code updates, and the game is utterly fucked with insane bugs atm.

Source?

> ...the game is utterly fucked with insane bugs atm

As someone who's been playing since alpha 1.2.0 starting back in october 2010, there has never been a moment in minecraft's entire history where the game hasn't been utterly fucked with insane bugs. This is status quo.

Considering the creeper was originally supposed to be a pig in alpha, checks out.

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