minecraft is making 33 million dollars, care to complain about that code?
it's got nothing to do with it, but it is horrible code, and could have a hell of a lot of features improved other than the biggest problem of it being slow
I've been experimenting with this: it runs flawlessly on my laptop when I boot in Linux, but when I boot into Vista it has an obviously lower framerate. This is a 1.6Ghz dual core with 2GB of ram, so not the greatest but still holding up pretty well.
I suspect this is where all the "it's so slow and crappy that it barely runs on my computer" complaints come from that I have never understood: they're running it in Windows and for some reason the Windows version of Java runs Minecraft slower than the Linux version. Why that would be, I have no real idea. A coworker suggested that it could be the memory model: Linux defaults to running the server version while Windows only has the client version, both of which handle memory and garbage collection differently. Or it could simply be that Vista really is as big a resource hog as everyone says and I should look into getting a copy of Windows 7 to further this experiment.
One way or another, Notch's code may be bad, but I fully believe that there are places for huge improvement that exist outside of that code base.
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