At first sight, the answer to this question is obvious – at least for people who are familiar with both Minecraft and LuciadLightspeed.
Minecraft is a video game that allows players to build with a variety of different blocks in a procedurally generated 3D world. Its sandbox-style gameplay grants players the freedom to explore objectives at their own pace and choose how to play the game. The game world is composed of rough cubical 3D objects — commonly called “blocks” — that make up surfaces and fluids. The blocks vary in texture and function, as they represent numerous materials such as dirt, stone, ores, tree trunks, water, and lava.
The Luciad portfolio, while serving a different purpose, grants its users a similar environment. With its latest version available now, Luciad portfolio provides software components that serve as key building blocks for leading companies worldwide to create accurate and high-performance geospatial representations, applications, and solutions.
Multiple gameplay modes that offer the player uniquely different experiences are available in Minecraft. These include survival mode, in which the player must acquire resources and build with them in order to survive the natural elements of the world, and spectator mode, where players can freely move throughout a world but are not allowed to destroy or build anything.
Similarly, various unique Luciad software licenses exist for developers and end users to use the software in the way that best services their goals.
Yet another similarity between LuciadLightspeed and Minecraft is that they both can run on multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.
Apart from Minecraft: Java Edition and Minecraft for Windows 10, there are other versions of Minecraft for PC, including Minecraft Classic, Minecraft 4k, and Minecraft: Education Edition. LuciadLightspeed also has a number of derived products such as the Lucy Test Drive and the Luciad AIXM 5 Viewer. Both are freely available, by the way!
All these Minecraft similitudes already existed with the previous versions of LuciadLightspeed. However, with the V2019.0 release, LWJGL will replace JOGL, which gives LuciadLightspeed an additional feature in common with Minecraft.
LWJGL is the LightWeight Java Game Library, which is essentially what Minecraft uses for graphics, sound, and input. LWJGL is a Java library that enables cross-platform access to popular native APIs useful in the development of graphics, audio, and parallel computing applications. This access is direct and high-performance, yet also wrapped in a type-safe and user-friendly layer, appropriate for the Java ecosystem. LWJGL is an enabling technology and provides low-level access, reflecting only the utilities that the native libraries expose. LuciadLightspeed uses this library in a transparent way, offering high-level tools for visualization without the need for any knowledge about LWJGL.
The implementation of LWJGL is a change that was made “under the hood” in LuciadLightspeed. Except for a few well documented upgrading considerations, this change will have no impact on your code. However, users may notice a number of improvements such as increased stability, optimized memory usage, up-to-date support for Java versions, and complete and up-to-date support for OpenGL versions and extensions.
See what else you can expect from the Luciad V2019 release.
