Custom Minecraft Classic client written from scratch in C

I wouldn't describe Minecraft as being unusually unfriendly to open source. Compared to most games, the company treats the mod devs pretty well (nobody's getting sued, they released decompilation symbols to make life easier, the whole thing's in Java), and there's a healthy collaboration scene among the mod developers, most of whom release their mods as open source projects these days (with a couple of notable exceptions, coughAzanorcough).

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.

Microsoft’s made account management annoying and shitty and unreliable—like, they make it weirdly hard just to buy the damn game—for MC Classic.

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.

I have done something similar for another game.

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.

Because they can, programming for many is not only a job but also a hobby and passion. Doing something like this you can learn a tons as well and it is a worthy challenge in itself to push your craft.

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

I enjoy writing toy versions of real-world applications. I'd say 90% of the code that makes up a program is there only to provide smooth edges, error checking, safety, etc. If you ignore all of this and focus on the remaining 10% - the core, bit-banging logic - you can learn a lot and have fun.

Yeah, I'm left wondering the same thing. The project page says that there isn't a survival mode, nor will there ever be.

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.

why should there be a reason to? if there are people that are interested in developing it (even if you solely is the only one interested), who cares?

Yeah.

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.

Do you have recommendations for modern "factorio meets Minecraft" modpacks? The more hardcore and complex the better.

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

Factorio was inspired by minecraft tech modpacks, so that tracks.

Because it is a recreation of classic 0.30 that used to be on the minecraft website, which did not have survival

1 because the target version didn’t have any survival features, 2 because mojang absolutely would not appreciate it.

Very cool! And I thought running it on my 600 MHz K6-3+ was impressive. :)

I don’t think the provided webclient uses webasm, it’s just transpiled to js. It can be transpiled to webasm but there’s no benefit right now (and worse performance iirc)

The author of the client just likes writing it. The owner of the website just likes running it too. Both have decent day jobs that cover the costs easily, so that’s nice.

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.

M$... That aside, no a replica is not a problem unless it uses any actual IP like Steve or the actual Minecraft art.

> I feel like I've seen similar happen to Nintendo replicas

Nintendo is probably the most aggressive about this.

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

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.

A bit of searching implies that they are not stored as Octrees due to "performance reasons":

> [...] 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...

Why would you need a tree?

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.

this is the kind of question a co-pilot programming assistant AI should be able to answer with direct quotations of the relevant code

It actually already almost fully works on all of those but the Xbox! Several players play on the Wii, GameCube, and 3ds. Most servers don’t work (due to ram and processing limitations) but they’re totally functional and mostly-stable.