The Evolution of Minecraft Graphics…

If you look at this screenshot here and then at this one here could you roughly tell me what version of the game each one was from if you are confident you could then good job but it’s not as hard as you may think you see throughout the game’s more than

10 year lifespan slowly over time many things have been changed and no longer look like they used to not only that with the game’s increased modding development as well as community projects and resource packs minecraft has come a long long way visually and not even just a community with the recent

Rtx support from not only prominent modding figures such as sonic aether but also from nvidia the game has begun to look like something one could only dream of a few years ago and the game’s continued development is only looking more and more promising with mojang also experimenting with and changing the

Textures in later updates making the game look even more unrecognizable from its original form so how has minecraft’s graphics and textures evolved over the past decade and how did we go from this to this well today’s video is gonna be a fun one so without further ado

Let’s begin alright so to begin let’s look at the oldest versions of the game and their textures and visuals the first time we would ever see any minecraft textures was way back in 2009 before the game was even public in a video released by notch himself called cave game tech test

Originally uploaded on may the 13th 2009 four days before the game went public now i’ve talked about some of these old videos by notch and this one specifically in another video but as you can see well hopefully anyways with the horrible video quality there are only two blocks in this version

Of the game grass and cobblestone the grass block is completely green with no dirt side to it and cobblestone looks much more rocky with a much stronger outline in its cracks and crevices these textures wouldn’t last long however as only about two days later in a pre-classic version of the game

Also never released to the public and only available in notch’s old videos the textures of cobblestone and grass were once again changed closer resembling what we would see today and grass or rather dirt blocks as they were known look almost identical to their later form around this time the original

Wooden planks and stone were also added where the wooden planks had a very desaturated purple shoe to them and stone also looked almost identical to how it would in later years but let’s skip ahead a bit now because i don’t want to bore you and talk about

The addition of every single block to the game so let’s move on to minecraft classic during minecraft classic we saw the addition of many of the blocks which remain core to minecraft to this very day including wood sand leaves glass color iron ore gold ore and more and many of

These textures still look almost identical or didn’t see any changes at all for the better part of the game’s life proving that classic was a very influential phase in minecraft’s development that being said there is a major recognizable difference and that is of course the grass and the leaves

Back in this version of the game biomes did not yet exist so grass and leaves were always one colour and this colour was very neon and bright really standing out this neon coloured grass and leaves is one of the most commonly associated features of early minecraft lasting all throughout minecraft in

Devon inf dev not receiving any changes until later minecraft alpha versions where development of the game really began to pick up minecraft alpha began in late june of 2010 over a year after the game went public and for majority of the first alpha editions many of the textures remain the same

With the game seeing the addition of a few extras throughout its time period but in alpha 1.2.0 the minecraft halloween update released in october of 2010 biomes were added and due to this whenever you in certain biomes the color of the grass and leaves would change significantly we went from the

Incredibly neon grass to a much more realistic but still highly saturated green in the standard forest biomes and as i mentioned depending on what biome you were in sometimes the grass was even less saturated and look more yellowish anyways this update was one of the ones which

Really began to bring the game together visually making it look much more like a game with depth and detail to it rather than just a small sandbox builder many of the blocks in this version of the game will continue to look the same way for years to come

One other addition around this time was the option to choose between fast and fancy graphics with fast changing the look of textures such as leaves moving into minecraft beta and the game kept on becoming more and more polished there weren’t any major changes to block textures with grass

Cobblestone and only a few other blocks receiving minor updates but more notably around this time the minecraft community had grown substantially and due to this community content had become much more prominent and in early january of 2011 one of the most famous and game-changing minecraft mods of all time would be developed glsl

Shaders originally created by dax nitro and released on the minecraft forums but before we get into that consider subscribing as only a small percentage of you guys are actually subbed and it really helps me out now at its core this mod wasn’t anything crazy like the shades we have today and

It was very gpu and cpu intensive for the time it supported waving grass and leaves a cool cartoony cel-shaded look and bump and specular mapping which was likely the best feature at the time which added depth reflections alternate lighting and depth of field blurring things that weren’t directly in your line of sight

And this was massive at the time as just remember that we are still in minecraft beta here and yet the textures look almost like those super realistic resource packs and what not we have today and about a year later shaders had really developed adding dynamic shadows

Starting to look like what we would know today using custom shader packs created by other members of the community largely sonic aether’s earlier ones you could really make the game look amazing all the way back in early 2012 but we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves now we will return to shaders

A bit later on as around this time in early 2012 specifically in november of 2011 minecraft finally fully released and things were changing in minecraft 1.0.0 many new biomes were added and many old biomes either got removed replaced or updated grass once again began to look different

Depending on the biome you were in starting to look almost identical to today some textures such as stone and grass would change slightly once more but for the most part this would be the final update or tweak many of the textures would receive for at least eight years

Around this time period high resolution resource packs or texture packs as they were known back then also started to become much more popular as the game’s continued development led to its rise in popularity now the difference between high resolution texture packs and low resolution or standard ones

Is how many pixels make up each block so for example normal default minecraft vanilla textures have 16 little squares that make up the length of each side of the block this means that the current textures are 16 by 16. if we use a 32 by 32 resource pack

You can see that there are 32 pixels on each side of the block and therefore the block contains four times as many pixels in total being much more detailed texture pack resolutions can get really high with many five 12×512 resource packs not even having visible pixels on the blocks

But with each increase in resolution performance gets worse and worse with some of the higher quality 512×512 resource packs running very poorly anyways with the increasing variety of minecraft texture packs it wouldn’t be long until certain ones would stand out becoming much more popular for not only their

Unique textures but also for their quality there were many that could be talked about but i just want to discuss and briefly mention one which was very popular throughout 2011 2012 and 2013 and that was lb photo realism a texture pack with over 2.5 million downloads

Now this resource pack was one of the first to majorly overhaul minecraft’s default textures not only going for a drastic increase in resolution but also changing the textures to look far more lifelike and detailed and while it doesn’t hold up as well 10 years later you can imagine how

Good it would have looked back in the earlier days of the game couple it with even the most basic of shaders and you can see why it looks so good and became so popular and this resource pack would pave the way for even more realism resource packs

In the future some of which also accumulated substantial popularity continuing through the game’s lifespan now i wouldn’t see that many changes from mojang into 1.14 which wouldn’t release until 2019. so for a period of roughly eight years the game visually without any mods or resource packs looked very similar

Water would be updated in 2018 and many new blocks and textures were added that made the game look different but many of the fundamentals of the game such as dirt stone grass and wood remained basically unchanged but with such a time frame it was only a matter of time until the

Development of mods really started to break the boundaries to what we once thought was possible one of the earliest but more advanced shaders for the time which created by sonic aether who would later go on and create his famous zeus or sonic ether’s unbelievable shaders this

Paved the way for some of the most incredible minecraft graphics at the time of which there is quite an extensive list including shock epic shaders zeus of course silver shaders and suzuk dll shaders would become more popular and mainstream when the functionalities of the mod were integrated into optifine in 2015

Boosting its popularity immensely shader pack development continued to improve as the years went on and they became more and more refined over time but back to vanilla minecraft now as there were some really big changes in 1.13 with the release of minecraft version 1.13 in 2018 mojang also released their new and

Updated version of the minecraft textures created by lead artist japa but you would have to externally download them they weren’t actually added into the game in this update well almost a year later in early 2019 with the release of 1.14 the new textures would now be selected and enabled by default

Now this texture update changed almost every texture in the game besides a few iconic ones like creepers and in general most block textures were made far more smooth with the best examples being netherite sand and granite japa reduced the depth of a lot of blocks as well making them look much

More easy on the eye but also slightly less detailed the best example of this is oak logs take a look at all the notches and crevices in the old texture and compare them to the notches and crevices in the new update which texture has deeper looking notches

And crevices i think the old textures definitely do and this theme is consistent across many of the other textures as well anyways at original release there was a mixed reception of the new textures largely due to the fact that many people had just become accustomed to the old textures associating nostalgic feelings

With them or just generally disliking change but there were also many people who liked them as well i believe public opinion has only gotten better over the past year or so and while i personally still like the old textures more there are many who would disagree with me but it’s definitely a

Good thing that mojang is too updating and willing to experiment with many textures of the game continuing to make it look fresh and new but let’s finally move on to the part of the video i’m sure you’ve all been waiting for i have also been waiting quite some time

For this because it took me forever to get my hands on an rtx 30 series graphics card now we can finally talk about the future of minecraft and that is minecraft ray tracing i should clarify that while the official minecraft ray tracing is currently limited to the bedrock version of the

Game there is also an experimental shader alternative for the java edition of the game by sonic aether known as zeus ptgi we will talk about that in a bit but first let’s take a look at ray tracing on bedrock edition you see the thing about ray tracing is

That it doesn’t suffer from a major issue that many of java edition shaders suffer from java edition shaders while they look awesome and beautiful are actually a bit too over the top with their effects they can become annoying to play regularly with them especially in darker caves and areas

However because ray tracing calculates the color of pixels by tracing the path that light would take if it were to travel from the eye of the viewer many of these darker and annoying areas to play in are easily dealt with by natural and easy on the eye light sources where light effortlessly

Spills into the room as if like real life another issue i find some shaders have especially silver shaders is that the light doesn’t look real enough it looks too artificial often being far too orange or far too bright it just doesn’t feel realistic well that’s another thing ray tracing

Shaders do phenomenally the light looks so natural and accurate for example walking out of a building and into broad daylight is just like real life where it takes a second or so for your eyes to adjust to the light and walking down the narrow streets perfectly demonstrates how shadows

Should look in accordance with the sun but more than just the lighting ray tracing also makes water look beautiful and so much more detailed going underwater is mesmerizing the combination of the streaks of light would shine through with the addition of reflections make underwater areas feel much more alive and open

But i think without a doubt my favorite addition which ray tracing has brought to the game has to do with illumination currently with minecraft shaders blocks such as glowstone stained glass and other blocks which should give off or reflect light don’t really do it that dynamically as

In they all sort of reflect or project light in similar ways but ray tracing has enabled blocks to give of their own colour and light has made blocks such as glass very reflective and clear for example look at this small little pond here did you notice that it isn’t just

Water but there’s a layer of glass on top and look at how well it reflects the light around it this is especially noticeable in rooms with varying light sources i mean does this even need any explanation look how good it looks but anyways i could go on and on and on

About ray tracing so let’s wrap things up here ray tracing is definitely the future of the game and considering that it’s still in beta it will only improve more in the future i can’t wait to see how they eventually port it to java and how incredible it’s going to look

I should also mention before any of you comment about it that there is a version of java edition shaders by sonic aether called zeus ptgi which actually implements ray tracing to the game without the need for an rtx graphics card something which is required to use ray tracing in almost every other game

But as mentioned on his website it is in an experimental alpha version and there is still much more development that needs to be done so anyways that about wraps it up for today we talked about the history and evolution of minecraft textures and graphics as well as the many changes

Improvements and popular community additions to the game we then talked about the near future of the game as ray tracing continues to blow everybody away and make minecraft look more and more realistic the future is looking very bright and i for one am incredibly excited i hope you enjoyed today’s video be sure

To leave a comment and subscribe if you did be sure to join the discord and follow me on twitter links are in the description as usual thank you all so much for watching