Agenda

Minecraft's charming, minimalistic art style has always been one of the aspects that defines the brand, but over time we've seen a growing desire from players for evolutions to the graphical capabilities of the game. While third-party mods are available on Minecraft Java to achieve these visual experiences, enhanced graphics were unavailable to most Minecraft players until recently with the release of Vibrant Visuals: a cross platform, 100% real-time, physically based evolution of one of the most successful games of all time.

This session explores the team's journey since 2018, discussing the development of the RenderDragon engine, the evolution of the game's art pipeline to PBR, and the development of Vibrant Visuals. It aims to share our learnings from when we upgraded our graphics engine, how we shipped a high-fidelity experience across such a wide variety of devices, and how we openly developed the upgrade with our players.

Takeaway

Attendees will get details on how Minecraft manages its rendering and how it has evolved to facilitate Vibrant Visuals. They will also learn about the trade-offs and optimizations we had to make to achieve our performance targets on a wide variety of platforms.

Intended Audience

Graphics programmers, engine architects or technical artists. This talk will cover technical details of rendering architecture, shading pipelines, and cross-platform considerations for scaling across a variety of hardware.