Comment by inigyou

1 hour ago

Well it did used to run on early Raspis. Maybe you don't realise how much less efficient it's gotten? It used to run fine in 256MB with small render distance.

So how did they break that?

* run both server and client when in singleplayer - doubles memory use

* turn byte block IDs into object pointers - octuples memory use for blocks

* make all game content into JSON object trees with huge amounts of indirection - adds about a GB of objects deserialized at startup that used to be simple if/then ladders

* add a whole bunch of code to handle these object trees, don't know how much this adds but probably 100MB of code when you include the raw class files through to the JIT-optimized assembly.

Are you referring to Minecraft Pi Edition that came with Raspberry Pi OS back in the day? The one made in C++ instead of the original Java edition?

> run both server and client when in singleplayer - doubles memory use

When did this change? It's been like that for as long as I can remember. It's actually a very common thing for games to do because it requires less code. Also it doesn't actually double memory use - game content can be shared, textures/meshes/audio is only on the client, etc. The chunk and entity data would need to be duplicated but they should be smaller.