Oh, hey there.

We’re still here! I am sorry there haven’t been better updates. I am a poor custodian of this, the most auspicious of VR mods for games more than 10 years old that also run on java. Thank you all for your patience. Thank you too, to the patrons who are still contributing, desperately hoping for any tiny nuggets of news.

Where have I been, you ask? Erangel, mostly, if you must know. I’m sorry for all those times I shot you around a corner.

In all seriousness, there have been a few updates since the last blog post, mostly updating from 1.12.0 to 1.12.1 and then to 1.12.2. The discord has remained active and I encourage you to hang out there if you really want to stay up-to-date. So version updates and a few bug fixes here and there, but nothing exciting.

That changes today! New Stuff!

The full change notes, as always, are on the Github page, but please continue on for a brief overview.

This is a 1.12.2-only release at the moment.

Something about eggs and omelettes

Since Mojang is busying itself breaking everything I thought it a fine time to undertake the same adventure.

In this iteration of Vivecraft we have re-written significant parts of the VR Movement system, the whole controller input and binding system (thanks, Techjar), and much of the GUI rendering.

The movement re-write comes with many palpable improvements, including a ‘smooth rotation’ setting, significantly improved handling of how vehicles and ladders work, much better roomscale rowing, and many little fixes to how you (the human), and Steve (the player), decide who’s actually the one in charge.

Techjar’s input rework has led to a much better button-binding menu as well as a new setting for splitting up the Vive trackpad into button regions. I believe he has added at least 37 different modes, including one in which each button occupies a slice of the pad 320 arcseconds wide and supports four thousand buttons.

These changes, especially the input handling, are just the beginning and pave the way for bigger and better things down the road. For a rundown of some of the really cool new stuff I plan to add with these new systems, keep reading!

Loot Boxes!

Just kidding.

LAN Play Now!

This was going to be the big headline of this release but then we just kept working and working on it and now it almost feels like a footnote. Both Vivecraft and the Non-VR companion can now host a LAN game supporting VR animations and movement. This saves the step of setting up and maintaining a server. Great for homes with a VR-rig and a couple old laptops floating around. Works with Forge mods, too!

I regret it is still not possible for a single PC to play VR and Non-VR simultaneously, but that is on the wishlist and we’re hoping Minecraft 1.13 brings us a way to make that happen.

To start a LAN game: Load up a world on the PC you want to host and from the in-game menu select ‘Open To LAN’. The other PC(s) should then see the LAN game on the Multiplayer selection screen.

MultiMC

Another great new feature is easier installation of Vivecraft into MultiMC. This is a great little launcher for managing many different instances of Minecraft with wildly different settings. Especially in this age of the ‘new’, ‘improved’, ‘totally-not-garbage’, ‘doesn’t-deserve-to-be-set-on-fire’ vanilla launcher.

It was previously possible to get Vivecraft working on MMC but required some tricky json edits and whatnot. Now our installer will simply detect multimc.exe, allow you to select your instance, and do the legwork for you. I should have switched to this thing for my own use months ago.

See this page for detailed instructions for both this, and older versions.

Pre-release Warning

Due to the extensive changes I am putting this out as a release candidate with full blog post and everything because, frankly, I need your help testing it. You will find things broken; For example turning on the Mixed Reality mirror mode currently causes Minecraft to leak into our reality. There was an enderman in my basement last night and I do not wish that experience upon anyone, so avoid that option for now.

There are multiple avenues for you to tell me all about the cool new bugs you’ve found. Github Issues are great. I regularly check the forums here, and am pretty much always on the discord. Emails, reddit messages, steam message, too are all acceptable. Bring logs and screenshots.

Yes I do plan on bringing this new stuff to the older versions of Vivecraft, or at least 1.10.2, but only after the bugs have been worked out. So it’s in your best interest to try this one out.

The Future?

So this update fixes up some of the more annoying and janky internal bits of Vivecraft. With these out of the way we can get back to work on real features.

By far the most requested new thing is more and better VR interactivity. Minecraft is chock-full of things that should be touchable but aren’t. Doors, chests, levers, buttons, crafting tables, the list goes on. Up til now we’ve relied on the stock Minecraft ‘left click’ and ‘right click’ buttons for standard things, but these will only ever work where the crosshair is pointing. Other VR interactions like ladders and animals I implemented by just ‘touching’ the thing with the controller, (no buttons involved due to lack of availability), but this has serious limitations due to accidental activation. Hence no doors or chests. Well with our new input system, we can fix all that!

My goal for the future is assigning a ‘VR Interact’ button to each controller that will be a context-sensitive override to the normal function of that button. For example touching a door will turn one of the buttons on that hand, lets say the grip (usually ‘sneak’ or ‘pick block’), into a ‘open’ or ‘close’ command. Sounds cool, right?

The biggest hurdle to this, now that we have the infrastructure to handle the buttons, is providing visual feedback to the player that the use of a button has changed. So that’s what we’re going to work on. Engines like Unity and Unreal make it very easy to highlight a controller button and show some text… but of course Minecraft has no such systems and we will have to start from the polygons and work our way up. Once we have a good feedback system in place, expect all the existing VR interactions to switch to this system as well a whole lot more becoming available. I’m really excited to get to work on this so stay tuned!

-jrbudda out

1.12 Releases

1.12 Issues

Instructions for installation can be found on the Downloads Page.

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