Minecraft on Wii U!? 'very unlikely' says Mojang, 'Possibly' on Playstation

[wolfmanz51]

Actually this statement has since been corrected To say:

The reason I said that is that the Wii U hasn't even been mentioned when we're talking about Minecraft platforms. However, I'm only responsible for the PC and Pocket editions, so the question wasn't mine to answer. The Wii U is no more likely than any other platforms, but no less either.​

Mods or Op can you please update this post to reflect this.

 

[VMM]

What argument?

You are saying that writing a game in Java is nonsense and madness.
I am saying that that is obviously false, because it's a working product.

Working is the basic, it can't even be considered as an argument.

Notch hasn't worked on the game in a while, and what do you mean "than it should be"? What exactly are you basing this off of?

• Minecraft's terrain contains more polygons at a set render distance than even games like Crysis. Yes all the polygons are at right angles, but video cards don't care, it's still more to render in the viewport.
  
• Minecraft specifically uses an older OpenGL version so that machines with an older GPU (or cheap machines with an IGP) can run the game at all. This means that some more advanced API-level things that can cut back on rendering time aren't available, sadly.
  
• Minecraft needs to keep track of lighting levels on the CPU and access them for varying calculations in-game. Monster spawning, whether wheat stays in the ground and grows, snow/ice melting, grass spread, and things like that which affect the game in ways more than just the client's display, so lighting can't be done on the GPU otherwise servers wouldn't work right (as they need to keep track of all the lighting data). This is in stark contrast to most other games that offload all the lighting and graphical calculations to the GPU, where the game will still function just fine if there's no graphical calculations being run at all.
  
• Sort of linked to the above, Minecraft simulates a world with a lot of interactivity. Trees grow, water and lava flow, the player places and destroys chunks of land, redstone logic, and the things mentioned above all need to run. This is a lot more logic to be kept track of than your standard FPS-type game where the majority of the world is a static landscape.

Minecraft is a heavy, modern game that just stylizes itself with low-resolution textures and right-angles for the polygons to give that old-style look.

So many polygons for such shitty graphics, honestly, minecraft could be developed with half or less of these polygons.
Having low textures, but a high amount of polygons seems at best controversial·

No, it needs to be re-written for consoles because it wasn't originally made in something that could be ported. I already covered this.

You said exactly the opposite. It was made in Java for been easily portable.

I won't argue that if it was written in a different language it could be a bit faster, but if you think that Minecraft is so heavy just because it's written in Java, you have a lot of learning to do.

Java is just the tip of the iceberg

 

[Issac]

So many polygons for such shitty graphics, honestly, minecraft could be developed with half or less of these polygons.
Having low textures, but a high amount of polygons seems at best controversial·

No. A polygon is a flat triangle, and it takes two to make a square. then, to make a six sided cube, it takes six squares. That is, 12 polygons. And that's the minimum for one cube.
Imagine a cube mountain of 10x10x10 cubes, that's 1000 cubes. each cube has 12 polygons. 12000 polygons for a small mountain. The mountains in the games are much larger.

Now, there are some back-facce culling going on for sure, but that's not the point.

Oh, and this is what a cube looks like:

 

[Rydian]

So many polygons for such shitty graphics, honestly, minecraft could be developed with half or less of these polygons.

Issac already mentioned the base of it, in that you need a certain number of triangles (barest form of polygon and often the only kind used in games, higher-sided polygons are more complex to handle and often used in just modeling and things will be converted to tris upon export) in order to display regular geometric shapes, and Minecraft has a lot of blocks going on in the terrain.

Every single block face exposed is two triangles. That really adds up.

For comparison, here's a diffuse+wire render of a piece of landscape I built in Blender, where you can see how many polygons are needed for smooth shapes and hills when you have proper sculpting tools and are pre-creating land. This is the sort of thing you'll see in games with more realistic terrain.

The hills seem relatively smoother, but are also using a lot less triangles, and so there's way less complex terrain to render.

Having low textures, but a high amount of polygons seems at best controversial

And using Amiga-style graphics on a modern machine may seem controversial, but VVVVVV went ahead and did it just fine. Minecraft uses the style it uses on purpose, just as well.

You said exactly the opposite. It was made in Java for been easily portable.

It was two statements.

1 - They wrote it in Java to make it portable across computers, and it is (Windows, OSX, and Linux).
2 - They had no intention of it being on consoles when it was originally made, so portability outside of Java's domain wasn't even thought of.

Java is just the tip of the iceberg

Of your lack of knowledge on the subject, yes.

 

[wolfmanz51]

As much as you're "100%" right Rydian why do you care so much to argue with him? Arguing with people on the interwebs this much is a waste of time, even if you change his mind it's not knowledge he was seeking or he would listen and ask questions. More than likely even if you proved your point to him he will now be left resentful toward you for publicly humiliating him. Further decreasing your chance of getting knowledge across to him. It's basic Human Psychology we don't handle criticism very well.

 

[Rydian]

As much as you're "100%" right Rydian why do you care so much to argue with him? Arguing with people on the interwebs this much is a waste of time, even if you change his mind it's not knowledge he was seeking or he would listen and ask questions. More than likely even if you proved your point to him he will now be left resentful toward you for publicly humiliating him. Further decreasing your chance of getting knowledge across to him. It's basic Human Psychology we don't handle criticism very well.

The people who aren't taking personal part in this conversation, however, get to take in the info too.

I'm so hard-ass about this kind of stuff in general because it teaches people, even if the person I'm directly quoting refuses to listen (and in fact that's often the only time info like this gets talked about, when somebody's being thick-skulled on the issue so it NEEDS to be laid out in such detail).

 

[wolfmanz51]

The people who aren't taking personal part in this conversation, however, get to take in the info too.

I'm so hard-ass about this kind of stuff in general because it teaches people, even if the person I'm directly quoting refuses to listen (and in fact that's often the only time info like this gets talked about, when somebody's being thick-skulled on the issue so it NEEDS to be laid out in such detail).

good point.