Minecraft is what most people would call a very accessible game, Minecraft can be played through a large variety of devices ranging from your cellphone to consoles to high-end and low-end computers. This led to Minecraft’s immense popularity, and this popularity has also led to Mojang Studios creating spin-off games like Minecraft Earth and Minecraft Dungeons.
The Modder, B4n4n4, thought that Minecraft’s current offering wasn’t enough, so B4n4n4 ported Minecraft into the GoldSrc engine. This engine is the same engine that Half-life runs off of, and through doing this, B4n4n4 can play Minecraft in Half-life.
B4n4n4 named this mod, Half-Craft, Players can fly around and have infinite blocks which are similar to Minecraft’s Creative game mode.
B4n4n4 in this blog post on moddb.com goes over how the original version of this mod was unmanageable, and B4n4n4 ended up having to completely re-write the mod.
B4n4n4 also goes over the two main issues that this mod has been facing in this post, and the first issue is the fact B4n4n4 started to use the easier and safer C++ code for the data of the mod. B4n4n4 also goes over how he ended up looking into OpenGL instancing, which makes the rendering easier because the graphics data is uploaded first before rendering it to the screen.
The second main issue that B4n4n4 had to deal with was networking for the Half-Craft mod.
Half-Life works as a standard server-client model; this means that while in Half-Life, this model may work for a game like Minecraft, which has a large amount of update that it needs to be sent continuously. B4n4n4 looked into a variety of different ways to offer networking. B4n4n4 ended up using ZSTD compression, which lowered the number of bytes per chunk to just ~200 bytes and allowed for up to 20 chunks to be updated per second.
B4n4n4 did explain that while B4n4n4 has completed some fantastic work on this mod, this mod is still an early access version and has some bugs as well. B4n4n4 also goes on to say that the gameplay is very simplistic, this gameplay includes placing, breaking, exploring, and shooting blocks.
While B4n4n4 did do a lot of work to get the networking somewhat working, B4n4n4 states that the code isn’t written to host multiplayer games.
Go check out B4n4n4’s fantastic work, download it, and see how amazing it is to play Minecraft in another game!
