Minecraft Pocket Edition 0.8.0 will have mipmapping functionality, will make walking around smoother

Minecraft Pocket Edition is probably the most optimized version of Minecraft. It has to be, to be able to run on phones with an ARMv7 processor and 512MB of RAM. Thankfully, with the next update (presumably 0.8.0), the game will be even more optimized.

Minecraft Pocket Edition developer Tommaso Checchi said on Twitter today, "Some Saturday afternoon GL coding is always fun stuff! Also, now MCPE has mipmaps and uhm, I guess it's a good thing." He clarified later with, "mipmaps are just a thing that makes faraway things smoother when moving.."

To go even futher into what it does, mipmapping is used by video games and other software that renders 3D models. Mipmaps (ooh, that's a fun word) are pre-calculated and compressed/optimized images that accompany a normal texture. Therefore, when you are looking at a block a few dozen blocks away, you will see a low-quality version of that texture instead of the full definition one. As you move closer, the block will use the normal-definition texture. This saves valuable time rendering textures on blocks that are several dozen blocks away from you. See the first source link for the tweet, and the second link for a more detailed explanation of mipmapping (I still like that word).

Source: Twitter, Wikipedia