Mojang Porting Minecraft to Raspberry Pi
Minecraft is coming to Raspberry Pi.
Over the weekend, Raspberry Pi community manager Liz Upton announced on the Raspberry Pi website that Mojang is currently working on a version of Minecraft for the popular Linux-powered computing platform. This will actually be a port of Minecraft: Pocket Edition for Android, and will reportedly cost absolutely nothing to download, install and play.
"The possibilities are massive," Mojang said. "You could organize the cheapest LAN party of all time, or use the Pi to learn the fundamentals of programming on a minuscule budget. It’s like hacking your way into Minecraft and modifying the game world with code, a bit like being Notch, Jeb, or Nathan, but arguably more fun and less stressful."
Called Minecraft: Pi Edition, the sandbox block-building game was officially revealed at Minecon in Paris. Upton said that Daniel Bates from the Foundation has been shipped off to Minecon for taking pictures and to chat with the Mojang guys... additional information and screenshots will be available soon.
"It’ll carry a revised feature set and support for several programming languages, so you can code direct into Minecraft before you start playing (or you can just – you know – play.)," Upton said.
The current version of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, v0.5.0, adds zombie pigmen, the Nether Reactor, mushroom farming and paintings to hang on the wall. Version 0.4.0 was probably the game's biggest release to date, adding chests to store items, beds for creating a spawn point, creepers, TNT, a new Peaceful mode option for Survival mode and lots more.
The first build of Minecraft: Pocket Edition arrived on August 16, 2011, after making its debut on the Xperia PLAY smartphone during E3 2011 last June. Since then, the app has become more like its PC counterpart although there are still limitations due to the hardware constraints of smartphones and tablets. The same constraints may apply to the Raspberry Pi version thanks to the platform's limited on-board memory, storage and SoC clock speed.
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yorgos zybchMeh, just do a DirectX or OpenGL one so we don't have to have Java on our PCs.it already uses OpenGLReply -
razor512 He yorgosit already uses OpenGLReply
Yep, minecraft uses opengl but the thing that makes it run poorly is that is requires java which adds a major performance hit.
Make a native version for windows (the largest userbase of minecraft, then also release a compatibility version (crap java for users on non windows OS) Whiel it would be great to have native support for all OS, that will take too much work to implement and maintain. -
apocalypsing Razor512He Yep, minecraft uses opengl but the thing that makes it run poorly is that is requires java which adds a major performance hit.Make a native version for windows (the largest userbase of minecraft, then also release a compatibility version (crap java for users on non windows OS) Whiel it would be great to have native support for all OS, that will take too much work to implement and maintain.Reply
That's a common myth I'm hearing. Java isn't the reason for poor performance, poor programming practices are. There is still messy code that needs cleaning up, some of which would date back to Minecraft's alpha days I'd imagine, since there are thousands/millions of lines of code in games like this. Notch didn't have the best programming habits while the game was in alpha/beta, presumably because back then the game was in a testing phase, thus optimisation of code would come later. I remember hearing that a lot of code was redone for the full game's release, but there is another scheduled re-coding of the game engine for version 1.5, which is planned for release in January 2013. This engine optimisation will fix the annoying lighting rendering glitches, and increases in performance. -
eiskrystal I'm more worried that they are spreading themselves too thin. We already have multiple versions all at different levels of completeness.Reply