Description for Minecraft Renderengine

Question

I'd like to find out how the minecraft renderengine works and perhabs adapt it to other technologies. Is there an analysis of the seemingly quite simple render engine of minecraft?

Voxels, just orthogonal borders and some other constraints apply to this engine.

Answer 1

I already tried this. I cannot recommend it. The Minecraft "Engine" is just poorly designed and sometimes I think Mojang has broken every single best practice I know.

Programming a new "Block-Engine" leads to much better results than guessing what Mojang tried to do in their obfuscated code.

Answer 2

Have you considered using the Unity3d game engine. It is a game engine that can run in the browser, on IOS or Android so it could be a good option for you to investigate and will run faster than canvas/js. Either way the following source code and discussion links should give you some ideas.

There is a very active discussion thread over on the unity forums. A few people were making a Minecraft clone for learning purposes. Eventually one of them released the full source code and project files online here http://www.filefactory.com/file/b48a41e/n/MinePackage.unitypackage.

Here is a video of someone demoing a Minecraft clone they are making in Unity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADnPbeg1aXk. So it is definitely possible.

If you are interested in using voxels you can look at the VoxelForm unitypackage here http://www.voxelform.com/. The cool thing about this is it can do a lot more than just blocks see this demo video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fc-VQL8VyIY of it being used with infinite terrain.