4J Studios is the developer behind the many console editions of Minecraft (from the Xbox 360 Edition in 2012 to the Nintendo Switch Edition in 2017), and it’s clear that its upcoming self-developed & self-published game Reforj is inspired by the voxel world of Minecraft. And now, the company has unveiled ‘Rixels’ – reducing texture memory requirements by 98%.

Rixels is short for Reforj Pixels and introduces a new way of dealing with growing texture sizes. High-definition textures have become one of the biggest memory hogs, which is why some AAA games these days are making 8GB graphics cards feel like not enough. “The Rixel was our response to a problem with texture size,” says 4J Studios’ chairman in a recent interview.

Reducing memory requirements with Rixels for Reforj

In a recent interview with GamesIndustry.biz, 4J Studios chairman Chris van der Kuyl explains how the technology came to fruition. “We were using 512×512 normal textures, so a pixel grid with square pixels in it, but as [the game] got bigger and bigger and bigger, we realised that we were going to run ourselves into a wall with space,” he says.

Until now, 512×512 pixel grids in Reforj required 4MB – Rixels cuts that down to 72KB, a reduction of 98.2%. Reforj expands past the standard blocks in Minecraft, allowing players to carve and sculpt into smooth shapes. The game isn’t available in early access, and no release date is listed on Steam, but it’s currently available in a pre-alpha state for Xbox Insiders.

“Generally, when you get these block building games, or voxel-based games, they start to get performance restrictive quite early. So we asked ourselves, could we build an engine that gave you persistent 60-frames-per-second in this kind of game? It may be a geeky thing to say, but for a player it would transform their experience.”

Chris van der Kuyl, Chairman of 4J Studios

Van der Kuyl says the technology is “Deceptively simple,” thinking that “Surely somebody’s done this before”. However, it turns out they haven’t, so 4J has applied for a patent. “Nobody’s ever done it the way we’ve done it,” van der Kuyl added. The saved memory will help avoid performance dips, and the company is interested in applying the tech to different mediums.

“Because we genuinely have invented something brand new, if someone came to us and said, ‘Wow, we could use this in a graphic design tool’, we’d love to license it and see it used elsewhere. But we’ve built it to make this super efficient [game],” said van der Kuyl. “It may matter less to photorealistic games,” he admits, but it would be interesting to see how it fares elsewhere.

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Jack Goodall

At PC Guide, Jack is mostly responsible for reporting on hardware deals. He also specializes in monitors, TVs, and headsets and can be found putting his findings together in a review or best-of guide.