Happy New Year as well, by the way. So I'm back home and I had an awesome time in Germany, it's my birthday on Friday so as a little present to myself I bought Minecraft. Now I knew in advance that running it out of my netbook was probably not a wise idea but I thought I'd give it a go anyway and if it didn't work I've got a more powerful machine at home anyway.
Hardware
First up let's look at the hardware I'm trying to do this on. It's an HP Mini with:
- 1.6GHz Atom N450 cpu
- 1GB RAM
- Intel N10 integrated graphics
Software
As you can see this is a fairly lowspec machine, now for the software:
- OS version: Linux Mint Debian Edition, Xfce Desktop
- Kernel version: Stock debian 3.0.0 686 pae
- Java version: Sun Java 6 (6.26)
Let's do this
For my little experiment I've killed all extraneous programs and disabled window manager compositing. All that's running at the moment are two terminals, current memory usage is at 106MB. Running from a terminal we use the command:
java -Xmx1024M -Xms512M -cp minecraft.jar net.minecraft.LauncherFrame
(as recommended by the minecraft website) to launch the application aaaaaaannnddd pow! we have a launcher, so far so good!. I key in my username and password to log in and let MC run its update which goes fine. Okay, let's check out the graphics settings, I bet we can shave off some cpu cycles by turning everything down to a mimimum.
My initial graphics settings
- Graphics: Fast
- Render Distance: Tiny
- Smooth Lighting: OFF
- Performance: Max FPS
- 3D Anaglyph: OFF
- View Bobbing: OFF
- GUI Scale: Auto
- Advanced OpenGL: OFF
- Brightness: Moody
- Clouds: OFF
- Particles: Minimal
This should give us the absolute minimum graphics with an FPS that doesn't cause severe internal hemorraghing and to give us one last little boost I'm going to halve the size of the game window. Yes, it'll be small but it should be playable. Click here for a screenshot.
Now lets create a world and see if the game itself is actually playable. Since this is just a test we'll start in creative mode and call our world Thumbnailia (imaginative, I know!). I kept the settings to default and let it generate and then started playing. Verdict? Success. The first few seconds were a little choppy while it loaded but after that the framerate was perfectly viable. Some people in various forums have noted that on linux they find that using the punch button often pauses the game, this may be a result of using the OpenJVM rather than the Sun JVM but even with the Sun JVM I had this bug occasionally. I found that holding it down rather than using lots of clicks seemed to solve it. I hope this post is of use to other people trying to get minecraft working on relatively lowspec machines!
Ciao, I'm off to build a castle :)
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