1.17 and Vivecraft after 5 years

Happy 4th of July, again, to you wonderful people.

I can’t believe it’s been 5 years today since I launched the Vivecraft website, and only a few months more than that since I got into VR and started modding it. It’s been fun and rewarding.

I also can’t believe how little the VR landscape has really changed in all that time. As novel as VR was when it was new, I’m still here with my O.G. Vive (plus upgrades and index controllers), and I really don’t see much reason to buy anything newer. Here’s hoping the future holds some more innovation.

Anyway, Mojang seems intent on releasing new versions of Minecraft well into the next century, so here’s to 70+ more years of Vivecraft! (I don’t care how outdated the name gets, I’m not changing it)

1.17

Speaking of which, many of you are likely wondering about a timeline for the 1.17 release, and many of you have already come and pestered the discord bot about it. Well, we’re working on it. I would guesstimate another 2 weeks or so til there’s a working build. 1.17.1 should drop in that timeframe so that will be our target.

I currently do not have any new VR features planned for Vivecraft 1.17, as there was already a lot of under-the-hood work needed, but am always open to suggestions. What I do have planned, however, is native Oculus support. I was going to add OpenXR support, but after talking to folks that have used it, the consensus is it’s just not ready. All the implementations of OpenXR (steamvr, oculus, and wmr) leave a lot to be desired, so we’re not pulling the trigger on that yet. Will evaluate again in 6 months or so. Instead, I went through the exercise of making Vivecraft function on different VR runtimes, adding back in the native libOVR support that it originally had in Minecrift as a test. So look for that in 1.17.

Also keep an eye out for a new installer that allows you to pick your version and VR runtime and is a little less janky than the java installer we’ve been using up until now. Should go live with 1.17 as well.

Fabric

On another topic, we get a lot of questions about a Fabric version of Vivecraft, or at least a Fabric-compatible version. For those of you unaware, Fabric is a Minecraft modding API that has exploded in popularity over the last year or so as an alternative to Forge. Lots of mainstay Forge mods have launched Fabric versions and quite a few of them have dropped Forge altogether. These reasoning for this I won’t get in to, but it’s something we’re well aware of. Vivecraft itself is not a Forge mod, but we’ve staunchly maintained Forge compatibility over the years because, well, Minecraft without mods just wouldn’t be the same.

The obstacle for us at this point is that, frankly, neither Techjar nor myself have any experience writing Fabric mods, or the time and motivation needed to rewrite Vivecraft from scratch. So I’m asking for your help.

If you, or anyone you know, is well versed in mixins and Minecraft and wants to take up the mantle of a Fabric conversion, send us a message on our discord and we’ll talk about it. If we can’t find any volunteers to bring on the team for this, I don’t foresee any progress towards a Fabric version until something significant changes with Forge or Optifine that forces the issue.

Cya Soon

Keep an eye on this space for more 1.17 news and have a safe and happy holiday!

-jrbudda out

Support Vivecraft on Patreon