My experience playing the Java Minecraft tells me that it's going to be a challenge to render smooth and consistent animations on top of the JVM. The garbage collector tends to create huge frame drops. And 144Hz and more is definitely possible in Chrome/Edge.
Minecraft is (used to be?) a badly optimized game, you can hardly take away any conclusion from that.
And the JVM has multiple of the best GCs out of any runtime, with a specific low latency one which promises <1 ms stops, at which point the OS’s scheduler will have more latency. Also, it’s not like JS is not a GCd language..
I didn't intend to bring up the JVM. Minecraft Bedrock edition is written in C++ and renders the entire window contents and even has its own UI framework that it uses.
Minecraft Java Edition is 100% Java, but it's also notoriously slow, and experiences lag spikes, which are often attributed to garbage collection. I think an OS written in a GC language can certainly have adequate latency and throughput, but I don't think Minecraft is a good example of that.
It's probably worth noting that Minecraft has an incredibly lackadaisical approach to Java and Java upgrades in general. They're still on Java 8 and thinking maybe about upgrading to Java 11 at some point, although the performance benefits of going to the latest versions are really quite enormous in almost any benchmark.
There's an additional problem: when Notch first wrote it, he had some experience of doing games on the JVM and wrote the code in a performance sensitive style. But it wasn't a fully OOP style that people associate with clean, well designed codebases, so when Notch moved on, they immediately went and introduced tons of tiny classes for things like points or vectors where the prior code simply passed the components as parameters. That trashed performance. Again, newer JVMs are better at gobbling this stuff up, but it didn't help. Valhalla will eventually remove this tradeoff.
At any rate, Minecraft is a very good example of why more people should target the JVM for video games: modding is real, it can create communities that propel your game further than ever. It's not a great example of how to get the best possible game performance from the JVM. At all.
It really depends. Java isn't bad as server-side software, and there are benefits to using it's runtime. For client-side software though (particularly in 2012-2020), not many commercial PCs could play Minecraft at a decent framerate. Even now, feeding the Java version huge amounts of high-bandwidth memory is the only way to mitigate slowdown, and that still doesn't account for the micro-stuttering that you get when world generation occurs. In the context of Minecraft, it was a pretty obvious mistake. YMMV, but I'd still highly recommend against writing Java software for client-side stuff.
There are plenty of indie games written in Java, there are low-lat GCs available for the JVM (ZGC) that promises sub millisecond pauses, and you don’t have to use a ton of memory, there are ways to manage it.
Minecraft was written in a very suboptimal way, its creator was a very novice developer — there are mods that easily increase performance many-many times.
Umm.. Minecraft, while awesome, is certainly not one of the graphically intensive games out there, and yet the Java promise of hogging all resources available is always kept.
Also 10 years ago Java was nowhere near as fast as it is now. If you are saying that Javascript might be an option 10 years from now, I am not disagreeing with you.
Minecraft's java version has (or had, back when I played it) noticeable stutter issues (not necessarily caused by the gc). The Bedrock version (written in C++) is much smoother in comparison. The Java version is only for pc/linux/mac. Bedrock is used for modern consoles and mobile. I believe they also had a separate C++ code base for older consoles.
It looks like you're just rendering plain cubes, I'd be curious to see how much performance could be had by doing things the same as Minecraft (batching only the visible surfaces into larger 'chunk' meshes). I've been interested in WebGL for a while, and it'd be interesting to see how practical Javascript is for a fairly CPU-intensive game like Minecraft.
I've always thought Minecraft was an interesting programming challenge (I made a little clone of my own a while back (with portals, for whatever reason): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk_KjtbHUIs).
I bought Minecraft very early, and the more "features" that they added the worse the performance got. Adding shaders and better lighting as they are doing now, will make my gaming computer go to a crawl completely. Though it's quite known that opengl performance on java is lacking and it does not seem to have any easy fixing.
Java still seems to be the main sticking point - Bedrock (C++) seems to have much higher performance these days.
(Although, intriguingly, Apple Silicon runs Minecraft under Rosetta 2 much more efficiently than the i9 I was using a month ago - no fan noise, no burnt legs, lasts hours on battery, stable 60fps - despite using higher settings and without quitting everything else first. Roll on an Apple Silicon JVM.)
Minecraft uses a Java-wrapper for OpenGL. On all platforms. I say this primarily using OS X day to day. I've been running it on a Mid-2010 Mac Mini without issue. Most of the slowdown for the FAR render distance is I/O related.
The performance issues (and any graphics shortcomings) are due to the engine design, and probably a minimum of effort being expended on optimizing the game for performance, especially when the feature set is still amorphous.
Impressive. And now I'm wondering if a Minecraft inside Minecraft would actually be realizable. As 8bit CPUs have already been made (altough with unknown architecture), it is a bit less crazy to imagine running linux with a java stack on it. It will be hellish slow and you probably need some sort of "hardware" graphic acceleration. And a lot more memory than the current versions. But hey, running Minecraft in Minecraft would be pure brainmelting awesomeness!
Maybe some sort of Hardware Description Language to Minecraft compiler would be useful.
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