Microsoft open sources parts of Minecraft: Java Edition

Of note is the Minecraft website from 2011 [1], where Markus Persson said: &quot;Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I&#x27;m not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110920065648&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.minecraft.net&#x2F;game" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20110920065648&#x2F;http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.minecra...</a>

Two of the most boring parts of Minecraft, unfortunately. Both are something your average first year CS student could put together in a weekend or two.<p>If I can indulge in some self-promotion, I have written mountains of code which implements many of Minecraft&#x27;s behaviors down to the last detail, which may be a more interesting candidate for study:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sircmpwn&#x2F;truecraft" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sircmpwn&#x2F;truecraft</a><p>Seeing Balze3D open-sourced might end up being pretty cool, though.

The code is being open-sourced as MIT-licensed libraries. The libraries mentioned in the article are Brigadier [0], a command parser and dispatcher, and Data Fixer Upper [1], which is used to migrate older chunk data to newer versions of Minecraft.<p>Apparently more libraries are in the pipeline to be open-sourced alone these two. One possibility is Blaze3D, which is a rewrite of the rendering engine that is planned on being included in Minecraft 1.14.<p><pre><code> [0]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Mojang&#x2F;brigadier [1]: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Mojang&#x2F;DataFixerUpper</code></pre>

As some who loves the lens library in Haskell, this makes me in awe:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Mojang&#x2F;DataFixerUpper&#x2F;tree&#x2F;8b5f82ab78b30ff5813b3a7f3906cd3f4f732acf&#x2F;src&#x2F;main&#x2F;java&#x2F;com&#x2F;mojang&#x2F;datafixers&#x2F;optics" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;Mojang&#x2F;DataFixerUpper&#x2F;tree&#x2F;8b5f82ab78b30f...</a><p>Profunctors, lenses, prisms, traversals… all there :)

It would be really cool if Minecraft, Minetest [0], and Terasology [1] development communities could somehow join together to create a cross-compatibility between their games. There are a lot of open-source developers in those communities who can combine efforts take voxel gaming to new heights.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;minetest.net" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;minetest.net</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terasology.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;terasology.org&#x2F;</a>

Back when we were working on Bukkit, when Dinnerbone and the other three were aquihired? by Mojang, one of the main things they wanted to do was implement a proper modding interface into the game.<p>Lots of things conspired to make that not happen, undoubtably including feature creep (because it was going to be the official mod api, it had to be <i>correct</i> not just good), but it finally looks like they&#x27;re moving in that direction.

Worked on a fairly major PvP minecraft community &#x2F; mod website at the start of this year. Minecraft PvP is sort of a competitive set of modifications that build out entire networked games. The games use normal minecraft concepts like item consumption. Almost all &quot;fighting&quot; is done with swords, with people clicking their mouse very fast.<p>All of the mods were based on 1.7.10, which is pretty far back, looks like 1.13.1 is the latest.<p>There are still a lot of young people playing minecraft PvP, particularly outside the US. But you could tell even then that Fortnite was eating up younger players.

Minecraft&#x27;s deobfuscated source is publicly available for viewing for those who are interested through Minecraft&#x27;s Mod Coder&#x27;s Pack.

I looked at DataFixerUpper - should I be surprised that there appears not to exist even a single test for this piece of engineering?<p>Boggles my mind that someone would engineer something so sophisticated and not write even a high-level test script of some kind.

This seems to only be the command engine itself, which by the way is the sorry excuse for modding support that Mojang put out after Notch&#x27;s promises. Not particularly exciting, but Blaze3D seems a little more interesting.

Thank you for your hard work. I&#x27;ve enjoyed countless hours meditating while chipping away at blocks that later went towards my castles. Anything further that you choose to release, I thank you again. And thank you for providing the venue to allow me to connect with my little brother, for that I can never repay you.

Not really that surprising since there seems be a lot of focus on things like Minecraft Education Edition, which isn&#x27;t Java based.<p>(Which, as a teacher, I am finding a fantastic tool for both introductory programming and other topics)

Why did they choose to implement various functional programming concepts from scratch? Were there really no suitable preexisting implementations at the time?

What is something one could develop with this source code that would have been more difficult or impossible before?

Interesting, but how much of this has been reverse engineered from decompiling the Java classes already?

I remember BUILD 2015 when a Minecraft mod was used as a demo and the team complained.

Instead of open sourcing code, they should fix the Aquatic update. All Minecraft versions after 1.13 are literally unplayable for me (mid to high end gamer PC) due to freezes. Every 5 seconds, the game freezes for two seconds for me. Increasing RAM for the JVM was useless. After the update, the game needed more than 3GB of RAM when before it ran just fine on 1GB (I have 16GB of RAM so no problem there, but the game still freezes). I have never seen more broken updates except with Skype - which, now that I think about it, makes perfect sense, considering it&#x27;s also from Microsoft.<p>Why would I use their game library when they ship such incredibly broken updates?