A Wayland Compositor in Minecraft

4 days ago (modrinth.com)

https://github.com/EVV1E/waylandcraft

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTkEM7b0IQw

I can't wait to have windowing bugs and UI issues but in Minecraft!

Jokes aside, I've grown to love "XYZ in Minecraft". It's like a newer (still 2011 was a long time ago!) version of "Doom on XYZ".

  • I haven't used Linux desktop in 6 years but I remember when Wayland was new and started replacing X about 15 years ago and these were common complaints... I hope this is a joke and still isn't the case!

    • I've been using Wayland for some years (at least since Debian switched to it as their default) and not had any issues with it. I think complaints were more common about X, and Wayland has resolved a lot of it for the average user. For example my switch to Wayland was the first time I had 100% working video playback on Intel iGPUs without tinkering with conf files. I appreciate there are still some edge cases where X11 is still better -- but I think for 95-99% of users Wayland has just worked.

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    • Significantly less so than before, but it's unfortunately still the case. It's also just now getting features that people have been asking for for over a decade, and of course due to the nature of Wayland the implementations of these features are sporadic and inconsistent.

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    • It's not. Wayland has really gotten its shit together in the last 5-ish years. A lot of the desktop ecosystem has matured in the last few years, actually.

      I maintain that the Linux desktop in 2021 was actually less usable than it was in 2016. But things have really turned around since then.

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    • Wayland is a bunch of amateurs trying to be strict and secure and the end result is everyone opening their own security holes to make it usable. It's working now, mostly.

      KDE got some kind of video bridge recently which is an insane workaround for something that should've just worked.

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Minecraft is becoming DOOM in terms of crazy technical feats.

I love it.

  • Becoming? crazy stuff has been done in Minecraft for the longest time. Someone built a functional CPU and computer in Minecraft in 2010.

    • I agree: running simulated computers inside of Minecraft is a significantly more impressive technical feat than bolting on display surfaces to planes with a mod.

      There's a big difference between something being compiled to run inside of Minecraft, versus running a sidecar that streams back a display. It's the difference between compiling and running on your machine, and streaming back a cloud machine using RDP.

      Not like this makes a difference to users, who don't know how any of this works. But we are on Hacker News...

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    • People not only built a functional computer in Minecraft, people have run Minecraft on that functional computer in Minecraft. Extremely slowly, obviously, but it did technically work.

  • Now if only someone could make doom run on Minecraft, that would be the ultimate flex.

    • Pretty sure this has been accomplished on redstone. It was definitely a demake and sped up >10000x not realtime but I believe it was done.

I'm impressed by the coding skill to achieve a seamless integration and "usability".

But other than a demo "because we can" I'm confused on what this could ever be useful for. AR/VR prototyping? Virtual showroom?

Or maybe for an online presentation? Stream a video of playing Minecraft and get fancy slide transitions? "let's go to the next slide" and "now we enter dangerous territory".. "over here I can show you how this program looks like in real life"

Not sure why people praise Minecraft for this. This is huge feat of Wayland, and was possible because devs took time to consider use cases outside of current norm, and why it took so long to migrate the ecosystem. People liked to bitch about the "Gnome blocking/not implementing essential protocols" part, but even that partially made this possible

  • Is there any reason that you couldn't implement this on Xorg?

    • absolutely not.

      a very near example would be immersed vr which is compatible with xorg and does essentially the same thing (2d windows pasted all over a 3d world), although not integrated into minecraft. also since their solution isn't wayland-centric it has ports to osx and windows.

      wayland deserves credit but not for this concept.

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Is Minecraft dethroning Emacs as the new weird OS that can do everything but probably shouldn't? Can I check my email in minecraft yet?

I wonder how this would pair with a VR mod. It doesn't seem like Vivecraft supports the version this was posted for at the moment, but if they had the ability to play nice that seems like it would would be a fun way to experience software.

  • There are already VR overlay applications that do this on top of any game, not just Minecraft.

    • Yes, but part of the fun is doing it in Minecraft and using Minecraft's language for it (e.g. putting windows in your inventory, pulling them out of chests, etc)

A friend sent this to me yesterday - I was very disappointed that the video didn't show off Minecraft in Minecraft.

I was hoping Wayland pixels would be Minecraft blocks, so you could make gigantic Wayland screens, or use one block as a 1x1 pixel Wayland screen.