New policy: Privacy’s pretty good, I guess.

Old policy: Privacy is OK, better than a poke in the eye with a stick.

I need to get out more.

Anyway, happy Memorial Day weekend to you all, and thank you for joining me for this Vivecraft update. If it’s not Memorial Day weekend where you are in the world, then happy Stroopwafel day or whatever it is there.

This was going to be a stop-gap release to just update Forge and Optifine to the latest and greatest while our fancier new features were still being worked on, but we found a number of very useful and exciting things to add anyway. Onward to features!

New Keyboard

We’re finally moving away from the SteamVR keyboard, which has actually gotten worse since the launch of SteamVR 2 years ago. The new keyboard is much more minecraft-y and basically works like the old one, except you can actually type with 2 hands and it doesn’t take like 5 seconds to show up! There’s a lot more little details about it in the release notes, but for brevity have a gif.

New Radial Menu

A long term complaint about VR Minecraft, especially for heavily modded users, is the lack of availability of controller buttons. We’ve tried to make the controller button binding system as configurable as possible, passing literal raw keyboard inputs to the PC, etc, but there has never been enough dang buttons. So I copy/pasted the new keyboard tech and made a radial menu! This handy guy can hold 2 sets of 8 keybinds, for a total of 16 inputs. You map the radial menu to a button, and either press or hold that button to pop up the menu and make your selection to send to the game. This is super helpful, even in vanilla. Behold!

Horses and Boats

Our contributor, finaltransmit, who you may remember from last year as the dude who made roomscale swimming and other neat things happen, is back! He’s got some really cool stuff still in the cooker, but here’s 2 new things for right now.

Horses now have ‘roomscale’ riding with reins! Coconuts optional.

Due to an unforeseen equine emergency shorty before release, the roomscale horse riding has been temporarily disabled while the horses are retrained. Still.. they have reins!

And boats have proper oars and oar-ing!

New Forge and Optifine

The included version of Optifine is now 1.12.2 D3, up from C9. I do believe this one has some nice chunk load speed improvements in it.

Forge is updated to 2702. There was some significant breaking changes around 2655 or so, this will keep you running with the latest versions of all them fancy FTB modpacks.

In the Works!

No vague promises this time, I have video evidence!

What you see here is a preview of finaltransmit’s new physical inventory system! We’ve very excited for this feature, but are still working out the kinks!. Our hope is to have this in the next version of 1.12.2, before 1.13 drops!

I have also previously mentioned an overhaul of the roomscale interaction system to allow the physical pressing of doors, levers, buttons, gates, etc. That’s still planned and will hopefully release with the physical inventory. Immersion overload!

Speaking of 1.13, don’t get your hopes up for a quick update. Mojang is updating the underlying java/OS library (called LWJGL) for the first time in forever. The good news is the new version has built-in support for OpenVR and much fancier opengl techniques, the bad news is we have no idea if we’ll be able to use any of it! So there will be an extensive research phase before any updates can be started. We’ll also have to re-write all the mouse and keyboard input code too! Hooray for Progress!

-jrbudda out.

1.12 Releases

1.12 Issues

Instructions for installation can be found on the Downloads Page.

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