o/ hii
I recently came across an old jsfiddle ech demo that Markus Persson (Notch) shared on Twitter back in 2012. It’s an early JavaScript iteration of what later became Minecraft 4k (an extremely stripped down version of Minecraft that fit into a 4-kilobyte Java binary after compilation).
Given that the entire implementation fit in just over 200 lines, and was an incredibly simple implementation (no external dependencies, even the texture maps were generated at runtime with code), I figured it would be a pretty easy task to port it to just about anything. So yeah, here it is:
It actually runs terribly (in the ballpark of 4 seconds per frame), since Notch’s implementation was designed to be incredibly simple over being performant. Even running it on my modern system without compiler optimizations yields about 10fps. This version of the game uses a raycast voxel renderer rather than a traditional rasterization pipeline. Rendering is done entirely on the CPU (not like the V5 has a GPU we could use) and I can’t really be bothered to optimize it any further.
There isn’t really any gameplay either, as this early version had no controls and simply panned the camera through the world automatically. Still neat to see this piece of hardware rendering 3D scenes, though.
