wgpu-mc

🚀 A blazing fast alternative renderer for Minecraft

Intro

WebGPU is a new web specification designed to provide modern graphics and compute capabilities in an API. It is in its very early stages in web browsers, but has had a very promising cycle of development. It's inspired by Metal & Vulkan's render pipelines, and is able to efficiently provide lower level access to graphics hardware, in a modern and (relatively) easy to use API.

wgpu is the name of a crate which implements this specification, and it is written in Rust, allowing safe and blazing-fast use of the WebGPU standard, which makes it a prime candidate for a replacement of Blaze3D.

Goals

wgpu-mc is eventually meant to be a full replacement to the standard, official renderer "Blaze3D". It will be used as a Fabric mod, which will disable the original OpenGL code and interface with wgpu-mc, using the native Java interface.

Fabric

The repo for the Fabric mod which interfaces with wgpu-mc is located at https://github.com/birbe/wgpu-mc-fabric

Usage

Grab the assets directory from the Minecraft jar and copy it to /res/assets, and build.

Roadmap

World rendering

• Discover and load blockmodels
• Generate a texture atlas of all the block textures
• Convert the blockmodels into a mesh (somewhat broken)
• Properly assign UVs to the meshes (doesn't handle UV rotation yet)
• Generate optimized render chunk meshes (working on it)

Gameplay

• Convert main menu and options menu into compatible code
• Render the in-game HUD
• Render the in-game chat
• Handle block animations

Entity rendering

• Render entity models
• Properly render entity parts and their animations

Java Interface

• Interface with the Fabric mod to use wgpu-mc

Shaders

• Have built in shaders that mimic the original Minecraft style, and also built-in more advanced shaders
• Ability to use custom shaders

Maybe features (far future)

• Combine this project with https://github.com/birbe/jvm to run Minecraft: Java Edition in the browser