Minecraft Xbox 360: the five greatest technical challenges

Getting Minecraft to work on an Xbox 360? Piece of cake, surely. It's an attractive game, but in terms of cold hard technical gubbins like texture quality and lighting sophistication, it's hardly up there with the likes of Crysis 3 - bar-raising PC titles that require careful optimisation if they're not to reduce console hardware to a juddering mush.

Ah, hypothetical reader - how naïve you sound. How blissful in your ignorance. Truth be told, 4J Studios faced a steep challenge porting Mojang's world creation sim to Xbox Live Arcade. Speaking to OXM this week, the studio's Paddy Burns detailed a few of the bigger hurdles in brief. We reproduce them below, for science.

Local server and splitscreen

Minecraft Xbox 360's big new feature is, of course, local splitscreen co-op, and 4J was obliged to revisit prior projects for pointers. "Persuading the game to deal with four local players and clients and server on the same console when it hadn't been written to do that was a challenge, but our experience with Perfect Dark helped us out here."

Memory requirements and frame-rate

The sheer scale of Minecraft's worlds posed a problem when porting to console. 4J has spent a lot of time tinkering with the boundaries. "The game had been written to basically have no limits, so we had to spend a lot of time changing things to ensure it worked within the Xbox 360 memory, and hit our render target of 60 frames per second."

Networking

Lacking dedicated servers, Minecraft Xbox 360 has to work harder on the networking front. "Given the increased bandwidth caused by running clients and server on the same console, we had to look at reducing the packet sizes for the network traffic as much as we could."

Multiple cores

The Xbox 360 has three PowerPC cores, and meshing their activities smoothly is key to getting the best results. "In order to get the game running well on the Xbox, we had to look at where we could use the multiple cores, and split out parts of the code to run concurrently, while sharing game data between cores."

Minecraft on PC speaks a different programming language to Minecraft on console. Somehow, 4J has got the pair chatting away nicely. "There were some interesting challenges in persuading C++ to do some of the things Java does."

For more on Minecraft's development, read our interview with lead producer Roger Carpenter. The game will be updated to version 1.7.3 in the not-too-distant future, adding pistons, shears and new block types. Burns says the bigger challenge will be introducing Minecraft update 1.8.2, which folds in a stamina system, Creative Mode, NPC villages and much, much more.