Felix "Xilefian"

16 and 17-year-olds to be able to vote in next general election - live updates Lowering the voting age across the UK means around 1.5 million 16 and 17-year-olds will be able to vote at the next general election.

I'm very happy about this, and frankly the argument of "young people aren't informed enough" is countered with "then you should be campaigning to improve their education so they can be informed to the level that you want" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c93kkg37n3kt

"Counter-Strike" Swedish bubblegum cigarettes. Wat

I've been writing a GUI window system for the Game Boy Advance and I wanted to try composition so wrote an Entity Component System
I am surprised how much ECS improves the writing and reasoning of even simple UI code
Far nicer vs inheritance

It is apparent that I need to teach Minecraft devs the common decency of replacing dead batteries in the office Xbox controllers

Decided to work some more on the overworld sprite
I want to avoid it looking too much like a Generation 2 sprite, but I think that is tough to avoid when trying to put personality into such a small canvas

My Bluesky bridge seems broken at the moment, sorry Bluesky users for missing out on my posts!

Genuinely upset about this. The industry needs more games to challenge Minecraft and evolve the genre further and everyone wanted Hytale to be the one to do that https://hytale.com/news/2025/6/a-difficult-update-about-hytale

I remember really disliking the Minecraft ladder climbing mechanics way back when I first played the game
Now I'm really struggling to remember what it was I didn't like... I've gotten so used to them now

My Pokémon ROM Hack Wild SIDE’HACK appeared!

I made a Pokémon ROM hack and wrote about it
https://felixjones.co.uk/2025/04/30/pokegreen.html

Yes my earlier post was in reference to something that happened at work today. Yes I failed to bury the evidence of it. Yes I am ashamed.

"Code looks great Felix, but can you remove the check that gives 26 netherite ingots to any player spawning with the name 'Xilefian'?"

I've been trying out some Game Boy pixel art on a Pokémon ROM hack (based on shinpokered)
Here I've implemented an optional girl player based on the manga character

I enjoy the "I recreated Minecraft" YouTube videos for the journey of learning the author goes through, but there is a pattern where they decide to spin it into their own game they somewhat combine Minecraft with some existing genre
It's a legitimate way to come up with a new game, but when you […]

I am excited to see what's to come!
Vibrant Visuals Java Edition | Minecraft
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/vibrant-visuals-java-edition

Totally forgot it's snapshot day today
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecraft-snapshot-25w15a
This one has the Locator Bar, a feature I've been working on, and we're open to feedback so I'm all ears!

Really happy reading player comments regarding the Vibrant Visuals shadows, I think it's a point of career pride for me 🥲

Loving the comments of "how come no-one has thought of this before!"

I wish we had written down or recorded some of our very early musings of an idea for visual direction […]

I'm quite envious of the Minecraft Java team's opportunity to implement Vibrant Visuals with a clear target of "this is how Minecraft looks"
Minecraft's technical design has so much opportunity for very novel solutions, and the ingenious art direction of Vibrant Visuals wants for that

What did everyone think of Minecraft Live? Specifically my appearance at the end 🤔

Sometimes scrolling through the Bedrock source code feels like browsing a secret McDonald's menu:
• McBlock
• McServer
• McActorId

"Yeah I know Minecraft commands" _proceeds to type a command for the other Edition_
Easy and consistent way that I embarrass myself at work ⛄

I was testing some Minecraft changes just now and panicked because a large village seemed to spawn with no villagers 😱
I was racking my brain over what could have broken Minecraft villagers, but then I heard a "Hrrrm"; turned around and a nitwit was staring at me for being a dorkus

Serialising Binary in C++23 This is the first post in a series that documents the interesting things I encounter as I develop a Game Boy Advance game in 2025 (not yet announced).

I ported Minecraft's Codec API to C++23 and it gave me zero overhead serialisation https://felixjones.co.uk/2025/03/01/serialisation.html

I really like the syntax of our Java DataFixerUpper library, so I tried replicating something similar in C++ with full compile-time support and I'm very happy with what I've landed with:


struct foo {
int a;
unsigned int b;
char c;
};

static constexpr auto […]

I have a definite philosophy difference between writing Java and C++
The C++ I write focuses on containers: how is data stored and accessed
My Java code, meanwhile, focuses on encapsulation: how are methods interfaced with

Java Edition's entity attributes continue to impress me. I've been experimenting with what can be done and my prototype of "trigger a breakpoint if attribute FELIX > 1" has much flexibility in how the player triggers it
Absolutely no effort required from me other than the if statement

Been using C++23 with inline assembly and I have an IRQ handler that puts a user defined handler functor into `r0` and performs a `thiscall` with the IRQ flags in `r1` and a pointer to the `operator()` in `r12`

Shockingly my `std::function` style template compiles all the way down into a […]

Using C++23's deducing `this` to pass-by-copy is proving extremely useful for inline thumb16 assembly
The `LDM` and `STM` instructions write back to the address register, so a const will be mutated: forcing pass-by-copy and admitting to the compiler "this will be mutated" gives optimal output […]

Compiler Explorer - C++ enum class my_enum_class : char { zero = 0, one = 1, two = 2, three = 3, }; struct my_foo_struct { my_enum_class member : 2; }; my_foo_struct foo() { return { .member = my_enum_class::three }; } enum class my_boolean_class : bool { no = false, yes = true, }; struct my_bar_struct { my_boolean_class member : 1; }; my_bar_struct bar() { return { .member = my_boolean_class::yes }; }

How the heck do I submit a GCC bug report? I've been waiting for this one to be fixed for years and it's still an issue https://godbolt.org/z/Yd66zqrGv

I've been trying out C++23 features and it seems like the changes so far are ideal for embedded systems

I saw some notable figures lamenting SLI not being a thing, but in its stead we have heterogeneous GPU support baked into Vulkan, allowing per eye GPU rendering as well as alternate frame rendering

What we're missing are games/engines that take advantage of this, and the fact that I need to […]