A developer remaking Minecraft for older consoles such as the Wii, GameCube, and Dreamcast has shared a progress update on the engine they're building, and it looks incredible.
Dubbed the Meese Engine, the developer, known as Meesedev on Twitter, has stated that their goal is to use Minecraft beta 1.7.3 as a design reference to build an engine that can handle voxel-based games. Once the technology has been made, they'll replace all the Minecraft assets with original ones so that they can make a new game that surpasses Minecraft "in both gameplay and graphical fidelity." They've already managed to get 25 million blocks in just 24 MB of RAM, so I'm excited to see how far they can go.
The latest video they shared shows them "Blasting through an existing world file at 2,800 km/h, holding a perfect 60fps with a 64-chunk render distance on the PC port of my Gamecube voxel engine." So, the caveat here is that this is running on (likely more powerful) PC hardware, and the world had already been generated, so all the engine had to do was render premade chunks rather than generating them too, which would probably be slower. Still, it looks great. The render distance is higher than the Switch version of Minecraft.
"Feels unreal how well this thing is running," Meesdev writes. "This is shaping up to be one of the most high-performance Minecraft-style voxel engines out there!" They share an additional clip flying through the world at 3,700 km/h and it still runs smoothly.
They've also added "world saving and loading" to the engine and it can load "14,000 chunks (~500 million blocks) in just a few seconds, enough for a 64-chunk render distance." What's most impressive about all this is that the dev says they only work on this project once a week.
Blasting through an existing world file at 2800 km/h, holding a perfect 60 FPS with a 64-chunk render distance on the PC port of my Gamecube voxel engine. Feels unreal how well this thing is running. This is shaping up to be one of the most high-performance Minecraft-style voxel… pic.twitter.com/yiXDeFj5sTFebruary 12, 2025
If you can't wait to get your hands on the Meese Engine, you'll have to hold your, uh, mooses, because Meesedev doesn't plan to make the whole thing open source. "The costs outweigh the benefits, especially since companies could take advantage of the work without giving back. That said, some smaller parts might be made open source down the line."
If you're in the mood for some more block-y fun, try out some of the best games like Minecraft you can play right now.
