OOP, faster data layouts, compilers

[Mike Parker]

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/