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

"Sticky" block collision - this behavior is present in the original version and I have been trying to work out ways to fix it for a while.
Raycaster breaks at -64 along any axis

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 the makefile) ✅️
More blocks 🏗️
Perlin noise terrain generation ✅️ (water, caves, etc) 🏗️
Infinite worlds, possibly 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

To get it down to a small size, you need

gcc (have not tried the flags with other compilers)
gzexe

On windows, you will need

Mingw-w64 installed

Build instructions

Linux, unix, etc

To just get a binary, run make or make m4kc
To run an uncompressed version, run make run
To install the program, run make install
To uninstall, run make uninstall
To clean, run make clean

Windows

Run win-build.bat. Inside of the win directory, you will find m4kc.exe and SDL2.dll. In order for m4kc.exe to run, these two must be in the same folder.

Places

There is a forum thread for this project here

I will be uploading binaries here

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.

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.

SamantazFox/m4kc