Not a bad choice... since Minecraft Java edition only supports desktops, they don't have to deal with the abysmal Vulkan drivers on mobile.

Though I thought a company large as Microsoft would have the resources to build a cross-platform RHI with the most stable API available for each platform (DX12 for Windows and Metal for macOS)...

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pdpi 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

A company as large as Microsoft has resources to do a lot of things, but you’re not borrowing resources from the Office team to help on this project.

The relevant measurement is the resources Mojang has as a studio. And I expect the decision here is that they don’t want to commit to the long term maintenance of three renderer implementations on the Java side.

Another concern is that modding is a major part of why Java Edition is so popular, and that includes shaders specifically. This is already going to cause chaos in the modding world as it is, no need to compound that by making shader mods that much more burdensome to maintain.

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norman784 2 hours ago | parent [-]

TBH Mojang should have the resources to do that on his own, Minecraft is the best selling game of all times btw.

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Pay08 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I imagine it's far from the best-earning, though. It's a one-time purchase.

	▲	bonesss 19 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Skins, media packs, servers, hosted realms, upsales through all consoles, multiple copies for multiplayer with/between your kids… also a mass revolving shit tumbler of account stuff on the backend that invalidated lots of old accounts… I bought during the beta for a lifetime of goodies, had to buy it again after the buyout, then again after an update to MS accounts wasn’t acted on, and then for the Switch. I’ve bought Minecraft 4 times, with another on the horizon if it keeps popular.
	▲	Jean-Papoulos 16 minutes ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		They do have a bunch of add-ons now with Realms notably, but I wonder if this revenue goes to Mojang or to another Microsoft branch for tax reasons. To say nothing of derived media, plushies, Legos etc.
	▲	galkk 25 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You need subscription for multiplayer

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ozarkerD 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They use bgfx for bedrock edition.

https://github.com/bkaradzic/bgfx

https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/attribution

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debugnik 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

An aside, but out of five links for Java edition one is 404 and the next one is an HTTP-only site seemingly not updated since 2009.

Funny to contrast with Bedrock edition, for which they paid for FMOD Studio to cover the audio features of those two (and more).

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Imustaskforhelp 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is such a gold mine project! thanks for sharing it.

I suppose, if someone in future might want to create their own godot-alternative. Why not just use bgfx with the language bindings instead.

I Love Godot from my time tinkering with it but one of the reasons why Godot is so hopeful in future compared to other engines is imo the fact that they support many many platforms.

I have seen some blogposts on HN where someone used godot to prototype an android GUI application (and not a game) and how the whole process actually makes sense when you think about where they talked about it in the blog post.

Actually there were discussions about even integrating bgfx into raylib (the goat) but looks like that its not getting integrated but it was interesting to read the discussion and maybe anyone more experienced than me could even contribute to the discussion below

https://github.com/raysan5/raylib/discussions/1699

	▲	nnevatie 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Why not just use bgfx with the language bindings instead. For me the biggest obstacle would be the weird build system the project insists on using.

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charcircuit 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On mobile 3rd party launchers use ANGLE to use EGL or Metal drivers.

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Svoka 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Honestly pick between Vulkan and DX12 is very superficial.

But you can easily make Vulkan run on macOS. Not sure what would be the reason to use DX12 in the new project today given free choice of technology, especially when team comes from OpenGL.

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Negitivefrags 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The reason you use DX12 in a new project is so that you can get good linux support.

I'm making a joke, but it's also true.

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maxloh 4 hours ago | parent [-]

How good does Wine support DX12?

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charcircuit 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

DXVK does not need wine.

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Negitivefrags 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Support for DX12 under Proton in linux is incredibly good. Some games actually run faster under DX12 in Proton than the native versions do.

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literallywho 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it's faster than a windows game running Vulkan, though, is it? Like, if you benchmarked a game that has native DX12 and Vulkan modes (such as Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, I believe), it will probably have higher FPS in Vulkan mode, right?

	▲	Negitivefrags 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well our game runs faster in DX12 under Proton than Vulkan under Proton. Of course since Proton uses Vulkan to implement DX12, it means that our Vulkan implementation is simply worse than the one that Valve created to emulate DX12. I'm sure it's possible to improve that, but it implies that there way to get the best performance out of Vulkan is less obvious than the way to get it out of DX12.

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xxs 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

it translates the calls to vulkan.

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socalgal2 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

but why would you pick the worst API?