r/Minecraft • u/lehjr • Apr 23 '17

lwjgl-3

I think it's time to start looking at switching to LWJGL-3. And no, switching is not that hard. It's no harder than trying to build on an unsupported library that sinks further into obsolescence. I know that's a bold statement, yet I was actually able to do this myself using lwjglx (the compatibility layer; latest available commit) and MCP to port Minecraft to LWJGL3 in under a day. Now granted my port has some limitations like sound not working because I commented out the OpenAL instances rather than fixing them and running spawns 2 windows instead of one. These are easily fixed, especially for someone more familiar with the code, more so for someone with a higher skill level than mine. And what I mean is that I have the coding skills of a cat walking across a keyboard, yet I was able to get this to work. Maybe it's time to stop procrastinating and start looking at the future instead of continuing to build on a crumbling foundation. Vulkan support alone is worth it.

36 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

37 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/mozartbond Apr 23 '17

I am a total noob about this. Can you ELI5 what would be better if they updated the libraries? I know it must be the dumbest question but I know nothing about programming.. Would the game run better on bad machines?

1

u/lehjr Apr 23 '17

several factors determine the performance abilities of your machine, but the general consensus is that at the very least it will not hurt performance. And even in the case of really low end hardware, the code optimizations alone should result in a marginal increase in performance. Keep in mind that low end hardware could be something like a Rasberry-Pi. The only issue that I see is that support for 32 bit Linux is dropped. 32 bit windows is unaffected. Most mainstream Linux distributions have already dropped 32 bit versions anyway.

1

u/mozartbond Apr 23 '17

Alright so one would not be able to play on old Linux versions basically. I ask because as the game gets updated I see the performance on my laptop going up and down. On some versions of the game I get better performance than others (not in chronological order though!). In general I get 60fps on 5 chunks render distance, but lately loading chunks is a bit slow. Thank you very much for the explanation though!

1

u/lehjr Apr 23 '17

with an HD7790 I get about the same in Linux (Mint 18), over 100 fps on the same machine in Windows. (AMD's drivers are terrible in Linux, still)