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> How long before they port it to C#? They won't. They'll just take the C++ ports that already exist (Xbox, mobile) and port that to desktops. Or rewrite th
by Mikeb85 12y ago
> How long before they port it to C#?
They won't. They'll just take the C++ ports that already exist (Xbox, mobile) and port that to desktops. Or rewrite the whole thing in C++. While C# is MS' baby, it makes no sense to write a 3D game in it (and for everyone who thinks Unity is C# - it isn't - Mono is just used for scripting).
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoMinecraft isn't heavy duty graphics, you just need a simple voxel engine. Your game code could be running in python and you wouldn't know any better. There is quite good reasons not to do everything in C++ if game designers are involved. Unity uses C# for scripting; only the inner graphics engine need be native.
- Mikeb85 12y agoReasons to do it in C++ - mobile and console is already in C++, so you can unify ports. Can make fancier graphics - it's Voxel graphics right now, but the next Minecraft could look like Destiny while retaining all the sand-box nature of Minecraft. You use scripting languages to save dev time - Microsoft can just throw more devs at it. They spent 2.5 billion on it - labour is cheap at that scale...
- blazespin 12y ago"Minecraft could look like Destiny"... ahahahah. Sorry. That shows an utter and complete misunderstanding as to the attraction of Minecraft. If MSFT did that, they'd kill it instantaneously. There is a reason why kids prefer lego batman and lego starwars to real batman and starwars.
- Mikeb85 12y agoI'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm saying it's well within MS' way of doing things. It could be fun...
- Filligree 12y agoThe mods, however, can be quite compute-heavy. Minecraft needs to be written in a reasonably performant language to work.
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoIt still has to be moddable at all; don't throw out the baby with the bath water.
- exDM69 12y ago> Minecraft isn't heavy duty graphics, you just need a simple voxel engine. Your game code could be running in python and you wouldn't know any better. On the contrary, Minecraft is very heavy on the CPU and would benefit from running on native code rather than a managed bytecode based virtual machine environment. It isn't heavy duty graphics, so you don't need a super strong GPU (it's still quite heavy), but Minecraft is very CPU and memory intensive. Graphics can be fast regardless of the programming language if you unload things to the GPU, but Minecraft requires a lot of CPU side work to prepare the voxel graphics (ie. building GPU vertex buffers, etc from the voxel octree in CPU/main memory). There are huge potential performance benefits of rewriting it in native code. I don't think that will happen, though. Here's a recent interesting article about optimizing visibility and minimizing overdraw, in particular for mobile "chunker" (aka. "tile deferred") GPUs. In the end it improves performance but at the cost of even more CPU work. http://tomcc.github.io/2014/08/31/visibility-1.html http://tomcc.github.io/2014/08/31/visibility-1.html
- seanmcdirmid 12y agoA lot of that is also just physics, but again the voxels are really quite easy to work with. Moving to C++ is always a PITA, I hope this isn't an optimization made so early, especially when there are other things to do.
- Rapzid 12y agoI think Microsoft wants all the 7 year-olds writing their first Minecraft mods on a platform that they sell tools for. Given Microsoft has been cozying up to mono, I wouldn't put it past them to port the game over to a platform they can leverage to get little kids using a free version of Visual Studio.