Minecraft 26.2 & Vulkan Support
Starting with CraftGround 2.7.8, CraftGround supports Minecraft 26.2 in addition to the existing 1.21.0 environment. The two versions are built and shipped as separate environments (minecraft/mc121/ and minecraft/mc262/ in the source tree), so existing 1.21.0 experiments are unaffected.
OpenGL and Vulkan rendering backends
Minecraft 26.2 can render using either OpenGL or Vulkan. Earlier capture code paths were tied directly to OpenGL (glReadPixels), which meant no frames could be captured when running under Vulkan. CraftGround 2.7.8 adds a backend-neutral frame capture path for mc262 that works correctly on both backends, supporting RAW, PNG, depth, and stereo capture modes.
Zero-copy GPU interop (Vulkan)
When running Minecraft 26.2 with the Vulkan backend, CraftGround can now hand frames to your ML framework via zero-copy GPU-to-GPU transfer instead of a CPU round-trip, on two platforms:
- Vulkan + CUDA (Linux/Windows) — via
VK_KHR_external_memory_fd/VK_KHR_external_memory_win32. - Vulkan + Metal (macOS) — via
VK_EXT_metal_objects.
This significantly reduces per-step overhead for GPU-based training pipelines compared to reading pixels back through the CPU.
Further reading
For implementation-level details (decompiled engine internals, frame/fence ordering, capture pipeline design), see the internal engineering notes in 26_2_vulkan_capture.md and 26_2_MigrationPlan.md.