On 4/23/2011 4:22 AM, Andrew Wiley wrote:
The reason Minecraft runs so well in Java, from my point of view, is that the authors resisted the Java urge to throw objects at the problem and instead put everything into large byte arrays and wrote methods to manipulate them. From that perspective, using Java would be about the same as using any language, which let them stick to what they knew without incurring a large performance penalty.
FYI, Markus, the author, has been a figure in the Java game development community for years. He was the original client programmer for Wurm Online[1] (where the landscape is 'infinite' and tiled) and a frequent participant in the Java4k competition[2] (with Left4kDead[3] perhaps being his most popular). I think it's a safe assumption that the techniques he put to use in Minecraft were learned from his experiments with the Wurm landscape and with cramming Java games into 4kb.
[1] http://www.wurmonline.com/ [2] http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=home [3] http://www.mojang.com/notch/j4k/l4kd/
