Virtual Reality Minecraft for SteamVR
Hi, builds of Vivecraft for 1.19.2 are now available on Patreon. This build includes beta Forge mod support and some bugfixes!
The spigot plugin released for 1.19.1 works with 1.19.2.
Finally, a huge thanks to everyone contributing in the current Patreon push. It means a lot and I’m super happy at all the support!
-jrbudda out
Patreon subscribers of any tier can now download the VR or NONVR client installers for 1.19. The spigot server plugin is available on Github.
Yes. Eventually. If you cannot or will not support the project, all the previous versions of Vivecraft are still available on the downloads page. 1.18.2 just got mod support too and is still in active development.
There is no firm timeframe for 1.19 to be public. It depends very much on support levels. At the latest it will be made public when the next MC version supersedes it (Dec. / Jan. if Mojang holds to their release cadence)
This move was never going to make me popular, so let’s have at it.
My life and work situations have changed such that I no longer have the free time during the day that I once did to devote to hobby projects. In other words: Vivecraft now competes directly with my leisure and family time. To put it in concrete terms: this 1.19 update took me 2 solid weekends plus some evening time in the middle.
I now have to justify whether that time would have been better spent doing something else. I hate that I have to make that judgement, but monetary compensation for time spent is the most direct way to balance the scales, plain and simple.
There is a larger factor at play here, besides time, that I want to be clear about: I am not happy with the state of Vivecraft in general.
I love programming, I love VR, I love Minecraft, and I especially love making things that others find joy in. That’s what keeps me going. Sadly, forever updating mods in step with the 6-month release cycle is time-consuming, joyless, and frequently thankless. Ask any modder. Hours and days go by and the only result is a new version that does exactly what the old one did, but with a bigger number.
My sincere wish is that as the Patreon subscribers grow, I get back into developing fun new features and community compatibility. Here’s a quick list of what I would do if I could work on Vivecraft every single day:
The list goes on.
Lastly, let’s address the question a little less philosophically. Why Patreon, specifically? Why not ads, or sponsors, or some other form of monetization? The answer is simple. VR is still a niche industry. Minecraft VR is a niche community. I don’t have the luxury of millions of possible users out there to generate clicks.
One of the most beautiful aspects about the internet is in the finding of small, passionate communities willing to support the things they love. I’m only asking for a small donation to keep the joy in what I do, and your support means a great deal. Thank You.
-jrbudda out
Hello friends once again on July the 4th. Today is the 6th anniversary of the Vivecraft website, which means it qualifies for kindergarten this fall.
We’ve been busy in the past couple weeks. Doubtless you are aware that Minecraft 1.19 has dropped, and we will begin work on that version soon. In the meantime, we’ve been chipping away at Forge mod compatibility on 1.18.2.
The update is almost ready for release but if you’d like to help move it along or try it out now, you can grab a beta copy in the #testing channel of the Vivecraft discord. One neato new feature of the Forge-compatible version is Vivecraft can now be loaded by placing the mod jar into the /mods folder of your instance or modpack. There is a new button in the installer to help with this.
We’re waiting on Optifine to stabilize before proceeding but I don’t expect much trouble from this version, should be pretty quick and come out of the gate with Forge compatibility. It might also have limited support for OVR to avoid the need for SteamVR. The Quest 2 is by far the most popular VR headset nowadays, and I now own one myself to make testing easier. Keep an eye here for the release or hop into the discord to follow along.
Wish I had posted this sooner. R.I.P.
-jrbudda out
Hello. You can now find the 1.18.2 downloads on the downloads page. Forge compatibility is still on the to-do list, so stay tuned for that.
-jrbudda out
Hi ho and Merry Christmas. The 1.18 VR client and Spigot plugin is now out for download. These are in alpha as there are some planned features still missing. Please repot bugs either on github or discord.
-jrbudda out
Updates have been released for Vivecraft 1.16 and 1.15 to address the log4j security issue. Other versions of Vivecraft were not affected and the affected one’s only when installed with the Forge option checked.
Work on Vivecraft 1.18 will begin this weekend and it should launch with Forge support before Christmas.
-jrbudda out
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)
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.
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.
Keep an eye on this space for more 1.17 news and have a safe and happy holiday!
-jrbudda out
VR and non-VR clients now available through the downloads page. This is mostly just to update Optifine and Forge for compatibility.
Stay safe out there.
-jrbudda out
Hello you Covid Cats and Quarantine Quetzalcoatls. I hope you are all keeping safe and distanced out there.
Just a quick update to point out that the clients and plugins are all now updated for 1.16.4. Hit the downloads page to get yours.
I’d like to make a special shout-out to this recent UpIsNotJump video. Funny and of a questionably high production value.
Also this video from Mully, Joshdub and their… friends. It’s none of the above. It’s mostly incoherent shouting, but I’ve come to expect nothing less.
I haven’t been doing a very good job recently of finding and promoting quality Vivecraft content on youtube or twitch, and I know there’s a ton out there. If you find some great content you think I should link, or even want to promote your own, please drop me a line on discord. I promise I’ll watch it.
-jrbudda out.
Releasing version 2 of 1.16.1 today. Version 1 was the beta, but we started cramming in too many new features late in the cycle to keep that number, so here we are at 2.
Optifine has been updated to the first full release, and Forge is as up-to-date as I can make it right now.
What new features, you may ask? Well…
Waaay back in 2016 I thought it might be fun for the player to get down on the carpet and wiggle their way through small openings.
This went very poorly.
Minecraft at that time had no way to modify collision boxes arbitrarily and the feature was abandoned. The setting, however, has been sitting there in the code, Waiting.
Minecraft 1.14 introduced a ‘pose’ system for reduced collision size when swimming and when squished by a piston on land. While preparing Vivecraft for translating, techjar came across this setting and though he’d take a stab at making it work now.
A couple of significantly clever hacks later and we had a system to set the ‘squished’ pose whenever we want and boom, crawling. He somehow even got this working on Spigot using, I can only assume, witchcraft.
It then fell to me to make crawling look correctly in the animations.
Mistakes were made along the way.
In the end it worked out pretty good, might get a little more polish in the future.
Give roomscale crawling a try! Note that if you’ve played vivecraft at all in the past 4 years, you likely have the roosmcale crawling setting off. Go into VR Settings > Interaction Settings and turn it back on!
For server owners, you need the very latest plugins and you do have to specifically enable crawling in the config.
This should have been done ages ago.
‘Touching’ the hot bar to select a slot is a useful feature, but it is so easy to do accidentally a lot of people just turn it off. A couple versions ago we added a ‘context sensitive’ button click system to Vivecraft, and it did not occur to us until now that the hotbar should be using it.
This is much nicer, and has some feedback. You can even use it to do a hand-swap.
If you’ve turned this feature off in the past, it can be re-enabled in VR Settings > HUD and GUI settings.
Buckets are also context-sensitive in this manner as well, which was the last of the ‘touch’ actions you can do, aside from attacking and mining.
The full details of the update, as usual, are on github. Please report any bugs you find. Server plugins and whatnot are available on the downloads page.
1.16.2 should be out here in a week or so. We should be able to get a version out for it quickly. There’s still some bugs in the Optifine release that I expect will be patched soon, and then the plan is to update Optfine for 1.15.2. When that happens we’ll update Vivecraft 1.15.
-jrbudda out
