I love the concept of Minecraft and that it promotes imagination instead of being a FPS. But what the hell is with its resolution and pixelation? I am sure today’s computers can handle better graphics, so why does it have to look like a game from the 90s?
In: Technology
Because this is simple and easy to render. Minecraft is programmed pretty inefficiently in a language that’s really not intended for doing that kind of thing, which means it renders things poorly. This is why your framerate in minecraft can be as low as 30 even when you’re getting 120 in much more detailed games.
However, this has some advantages within the format of minecraft too.
Firstly, having more detail means having less flexibility. If blocks were more detailed, you would have less room for imagination. To take it to an extreme, imagine what minecraft would look like if you could make highly detailed scale model of St Paul’s Cathedral. Pretty awesome, right? But to do that, Minecraft would have to have blocks that specifically function as pieces of St Paul’s Cathedral, for example a set of blocks that do one of the stained glass windows. These blocks wouldn’t be able to do anything else. They’d only ever be the blocks of St Paul’s Cathedral, so in building St Paul’s Cathedral, you’re not really being creative, you’re just putting down pre-made St Paul’s Cathedral blocks in the places you need to put them to make St Paul’s Cathedral. Lower detail means more flexibility, because blocks aren’t designed to have a particular purpose, they’re just cubes with textures that you have to figure out an arrangement for that’s going to look good. Look at some actual examples of this, such as Sims 4. A lot more detailed, but also a lot less freedom – you can only use pre-determined furniture, pre-determined windows, pre-determined roofs, pre-determined wall arrangements. You can mix and match these and still do quite a lot, but it’s never going to be as much as the practically infinite possible things you can do with abstract cubes. Plus, what’s a more impressive as an achievement? Placing down the TV block, or figuring out which combination of blocks you can use to make something that looks surprisingly close to a TV?
Secondly, pixelated textures as opposed to photorealism (although photorealistic texture packs are available) means textures flow together more nicely. An inherent problem of the square-based texture format is that if you’re not careful, textures can start looking really bad when placed next to each other because you just have an endless repeating pattern of squares – take [this](https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F3.bp.blogspot.com%2F-DD3jF212nQ0%2FUuhZzgFufYI%2FAAAAAAAEea0%2Fi–1QVaOMmM%2Fs1600%2F5.jpg&f=1&nofb=1) for example. There you can see that they’ve gone to some effort to reduce tiling, but you can still see ugly straight edges where the blocks line up, that repeat across the floor. In an enclosed space it already doesn’t look great, but on a wide open space such as the world of Minecraft it gets real ugly real quick. By using very pixelated textures, this tiling effect doesn’t look as obvious. It’s still there, and you can see it on blocks that aren’t textured to blend well at the edges, but it looks a lot better. It also allows you to randomly rotate textures sometimes without it being obvious that that’s what you’ve done, which further helps to break up the pattern.
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