M4KC

Minecraft 4K - C Rewrite

For those who don't know, Minecraft 4K was a stripped down version of Minecraft submitted by Notch to the Java 4K Game Programming Contest, where each submission had to be under 4 kilobytes in size. Its wiki page can be found here.

Being so small, the game proved somewhat easy to de-compile and edit. Multiple people have given this a go, including me.

This project is an attempt to translate the game into C in order to increase its performance, and to provide a platform upon which to add new features.

Bug list

• Raycaster breaks at -64 along any axis
• Infinite terrain generation is not fully functional, issues such as chunks flashing in and out of existence are common
• Structure generation does not work in some chunks

Some goals for this project

• Maintaining the original look and feel as closely as possible. ✅️
• Keeping the final executable under 20 KB (on Linux, with the system I have set up in build.sh) ✅️
• More blocks 🏗️
• Perlin noise terrain generation ✅️
  • Water ✅️
  • Biomes 🏗️
  • Caves ✅️
• Infinite worlds, horizontally and vertically too 🏗️
• Mobs and multiplayer (this would require changing the rendering engine to some degree) 🏗️
• Day/night ✅️

✅️ - got that!

🏗️ - not yet...

Dependencies

Bare minimum to make this code run

• SDL2
• A C compiler, such as gcc or clang

To get it down to a small size, you need

• gzexe

On windows, you will need

• Mingw-w64 installed
• gcc in your PATH

Build instructions

Linux, unix, etc

• To just get a binary, run ./build.sh small or ./build.sh all small
• To run an uncompressed version, run ./build.sh or ./build.sh all
• To install the program, run ./build.sh install
• To uninstall, run ./build.sh uninstall
• To clean, run ./build.sh clean

Windows

First, create the directories win/bin and win/o

Run win-build.bat. Inside of the win/bin directory, you will find m4kc.exe and SDL2.dll. In order for m4kc.exe to run, these two must be in the same folder. If it doesn't work, open an issue.

Places

There is a forum thread for this project here

I will be uploading binaries here

Holanet was recently migrated to the hlhv architecture. The software page has not been migrated yet. For now, binaries will be uploaded to the releases section on GitHub.

FAQ

I've either been asked these, or I expect to be at some point.

What's with the cryptic variable names like f22 and i6?

A lot of this code is decompiled from the original java version, and those are names the compiler assigned to the variables. Much of the code is extremely obfuscated due to what are probably compiler optimizations, and a lot of them have not been deciphered and renamed yet. This is why they mostly appear in the gameLoop function.

Why is it so slow?

The game uses a 3D voxel raycaster to render things, which is a lot slower than more traditional methods of rendering. Luckily, C provides more powerful ways to optimize something like this than Java - and optimizations will keep coming.

Screenshots

What this actually looks like.