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.
Around the Community
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.
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…
Roomscale Crawling
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.
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.
New Touch Hotbar
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.
Get It
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.
What’s Next
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.
Hey just a quick update. Vivecraft for 1.16 and the forge-supported Vivecraft for 1.15 have been rolled out to the downloads page and github.
Both of these are still beta since they are based on preview versions of Optifine, and will likely be getting multiple revisions in the near future, but stable enough to bring out of Discord testing.
Just a quick update to commemorate this most cacophonous of days. As you’re likely aware, Minecraft 1.16 landed recently, and the questions about when Vivecraft would update started pouring in almost instantaneously.
I can actually answer that and the answer is ‘very soon’.
The Optifine preview for 1.16.1 came out much, much quicker than previous versions, meaning not only that we can get to work on Vivecraft, but also that the internals of 1.16 are not so different from 1.15 to cause a headache updating. I’ve started on 1.16 already and would expect preview builds out sometime this week.
I would guess that 1.16.2 will drop in that time frame, possibly setting things back a bit as the build chain is updated, but I don’t expect any major road-bumps.
Forge mod support
Support for Forge mods has actually been available on 1.15 by heading to the Vivecraft discord and downloading the beta builds. These builds are a little out of date but I’ve been waiting on a full release of Optifine for 1.15 before doing another update. That release has not been forthcoming. The plan according to the OF folks is to get 1.16 out, then go back and polish and release 1.15. So we’re going to have to follow suit.
The good news is 1.16 Vivecraft is based on the Forge-capable 1.15 beta, and by all accounts it works fairly well, so 1.16 should launch with Forge support already. Huzzah.
People ask me all the time, they say “jrbudda, can I catch coronavirus in VR?” and I tell them, “Sure?, Maybe?” No one really knows. No one really can know. The mysteries of the universe are closed to us.
My point is I’m not a doctor. Also you should probably wash your hands after touching any other players or animals. Safety first.
Today is the release of Vivecraft for 1.15.2. I hope this brings some joy to your quarantine. Did I say joy? I meant bees. BEEEEEEEES.
First a shout out to @Naeqirelle on discord who is the best bug tester ever. He finds bugs in features I didn’t even know we had. Also a thank you to Techjar, who brings you the awesome Main Menu Worlds which are a big pain to update each time.
The Update
You can find links to the VR, NonVR, and Server downloads for 1.15 over on the downloads page. (Shocking, I know.)
The bad news is we still don’t have Forge support. The good news is quite a bit of work was done in the update to prepare for Forge support sometime in the near future. Once Optifine is up and stable on 1.15 and working with Forge. We will begin the process of making Vivecraft compatible once again (for the third time).
Other than the version update there isn’t a ton of new in this one. A couple of bugs that were lingering in older versions have been squashed, and some new features for the desktop mirror were added.
One exciting change for a very small number of people is that the rendering of items held in the hands is now based on the vanilla first_person transforms. This lets resource pack authors, or highly motivated users, tweak the transforms to make custom-modeled items appear correctly in VR. Yay!
Stay safe. Stay indoors. Play Vivecraft. Support us on Patreon.
Feliz Navidad to you and yours, people of the internet.
New VR Owners
For those of you waking up this morning to find St. Nick has left you brand new VR equipment ‘neath your tannenbaum: Welcome to Virtual Reality! We have cookies. Virtual cookies!
Let’s provide you with a quick overview of Vivecraft compatibility with the latest gear:
Vivecraft works natively with any SteamVR-compatible headset. This includes:
The HTC Vive, Vive Pro, or Vive Cosmos
Any Oculus Rift (DK, CV, or S)
WMR Headsets like the Samsung Odyssey or HP Reverb
The Valve Index
All of the above have pre-configured controller defaults in the latest versions of Vivecraft. See this page to learn all about customizing the controls to your liking.
Additionally, Vivecraft can be streamed from your PC to standalone VR headsets with some additional software. This includes devices such as:
The Oculus Quest
The Oculus Go
Samsung GearVR
Google Daydream
Google Cardboard (basically any phone-based VR headset)
Important things to remember if you’re using a standalone headset:
Vivecraft still requires a robust gaming PC with a dedicated GPU (AMD or NVIDIA)
Controller support for standalone solutions will vary with the devices. Vivecraft has a keyboard/mouse seated play mode for systems without controllers. There is no gamepad support at this time.
You need to load the correct software onto your device, and have its mate running on your PC. You also still need to install and configure SteamVR.
When you’re ready to play, head over to the downloads page, have a good read through it, and hit the links to the installers.
If you have any questions about Vivecraft please read the FAQ page first, and carefully.
Oh and if you’d like to get me something for Christmas, why not check out theĀ Patreon. There’s in-game rewards and stuff!
Development News
Just a quick status update on Vivecraft development now that we’ve got the newbies taken care of.
Right now the latest version of Minecraft that can be played with Vivecraft is 1.14.4. The latest version that can be played with additional mods via Forge is 1.12.2.
We’re well aware that Minecraft 1.15(.1) is out. At the time of writing this on Christmas morn’, we are waiting on a release of Optifine to begin development on Vivecraft for 1.15. There seem to be no big surprises in 1.15 and I’d guesstimate Optifine will be out in early January with Vivecraft to follow a week or two afterwards. Then you can have your BEEEEEES.
Forge support in the post-1.12 era is a little bit trickier subject. Forge underwent a hefty re-write in 1.13, especially related to coremods, classloading, and other startup shenanigans. Optifine took several months to update and, even using it as an example, we’re looking at a re-write of our whole build process in addition to actually making the 1.13+ VR code compatible with Forge.
In other words: it’ll be done when its done.
Around the Community
Vivecraft had a great showing in 2019’s SUMMER OF MINECRAFT.
Just a couple of the e-famous names on the list:
Slimecicle
Shroud (who one time personally killed me in PUBG)
And the big man Pewds himself.
I’m sure there’s a ton more great videos out there but Youtube’s search is so horribly broken I’ve given up trying to find them. If you’re a smaller youtuber with some good Vivecraft content I’d be happy to drop you an embed in one of these posts, just lemme know on discord.
-jrbudda out.
Instructions for installation can be found on the Downloads Page.
Three years ago to the day marks the launch of the Vivecraft website. So auspicious was this event they now set off fireworks to celebrate it annually.
Happy 4th, everyone.
The past few weeks have been non-stop activity here at Vivecraft HQ. The availability of 1.14 modding tools and the release of the Valve index hit us at about the same time. I’ve been dead-ahead getting 1.14 working and Techjar jumped on Index compatibility.
So we’ve got a bunch of new stuff to announce today.
Valve Index and SteamVR Input
Last year, Valve introduced a new input system for SteamVR called SteamVR Input. Instead of handling button presses directly, games using this new system provide a list of ‘actions’ to SteamVR, and SteamVR provides a user interface for mapping those actions to whatever hardware the player is using. Maybe you’ve seen it in other games. You get to it through the SteamVR Dashboard and it looks like this:
We’ve decided to go ahead and convert Vivecraft to SteamVR Input. This adds much better support for the Index than we ever could using legacy button code, and also provides more flexible button mappings for Vive, Touch, and WMR controllers.
The initial release of 1.14 uses this new input system and a new release of 1.13 is available as well.
1.12 (the latest version with Forge mod compatibility) will get this new input system as soon as possible which is very exciting. We generate the action list at runtime so all of your mod keybindings will be available. SteamVR Input allows for single press, double press, long press, click, touch, and toggle, so the number of buttons and flexibility means better interaction between a large mod set and VR controllers.
With these releases we’re also shipping a brand-new set of defaults for all controller types based on user feedback.
That was the good news. Now for the bad news.
You’ll get to try the new defaults whether you like it or not, since any existing controller setups cannot be converted. I’m sorry, I’m not happy about it either.
Another caveat is Steam itself is now a dependency. SteamVR Input uses the Steam Workshop to save (and share!) controller bindings, so you will need to have Steam running before launching Vivecraft if you intend to edit your controls.
One last thing: You cannot edit Vivecraft bindings without Vivecraft running. It will not show up in the ‘recently played’ list. It’s not a Steam game so we cannot use a permanent manifest. You also need to fully exit the controller settings and re-enter it if you restart the game, or any changes made will not be applied or saved.
I’ve written a full set of instructions for working with SteamVR Input here. You may wish to give it a read before diving in.
Minecraft 1.14
The VR and Non-VR clients, as well as the Spigot server plugin are all now available for 1.14. Consider these in beta, there are a few minor known issues. Will be spending this weekend polishing it up and maybe adding some new VR features (Roomscale crossbow and crawling, maybe)
1.14 is SteamVR Input Only. Sorry, no exceptions. We have too many simultaneous branches of Vivecraft to maintain as-is. I know the SteamVR input screen is complicated, and I know it sucks needing to set your controllers up again, but this is the way forward, and forward we go, together, hand in virtual hand.
So give it a go, update your servers, gather round a campfire or fight through a raid in VR. And then post any bugs you find.
Roadmap
We’re a video game right? so I guess we need to have a roadmap. And microtransactions recurrent user spending. We’ll stick to just the roadmap for now.
Now:
Take a nap
Read all the bug reports generated by friendly users during said nap.
Fix the bugs, release 1.14 out of beta.
Eat an entire cake to celebrate.
Flesh out the website with better info on all the new things.
Immediate Future
Port SteamVR Input to 1.12 for mod support.
Likely update from 1.14.3 to 1.14.4
Medium-immediate Future
Finally sit down and fix Physical Inventory. No we haven’t forgotten about it. It’s mostly there but still has some tricky bugs that lead to inventory corruption which are both un-releaseable and time-consuming.
Bring Forge support to 1.14. I don’t know what’s going on with this. The new Forge need changes to be compatible with how Optifine and Vivecraft operate. If Optifine becomes compatible, we will follow.
Far-future
Port game to to Minecraft 1.634.3
Add support for Samsung SmellTronics (did you know creepers smell like lemons?)
Take hyper-nap
Around the Community
A man spends 24 hours in Minecraft. You’ve probably seen this video already, but if you haven’t it’s very ambitious, well put together, and definitely worth a watch. No mention of Vivecraft on the video page tho š
A lot of people also saw Pro Mello’s ‘ray tracing video’.Ā He made 4 more videos after this as well. Which I didn’t know about, cause there’s also no mention of Vivecraft on this page either. Hey youtubers, what’s a guy gotta do to get a shout out around here?
More popular videos that follow this sinister pattern. Pretty funny tho.
Joshdub is back with some… friends. Surely he’ll list Vivecraft on his vide…. oh.
Greetings and salutations, Minecraft VR fans the world over! Today is the day. A momentous day. 2/22. The day we release Vivecraft 1.13.2 into the wild to take those first, hesitant steps towards being replaced shortly by 1.14.
This post will be a little technical as I go over the gory details of what has changed, so if you just want to play, hit up the downloads page and be off with you.
What the heck took so long?
1.13 was released in July 2018, and followed by 2 revisions, culminating in 1.13.2 in October. What have we been doing for 7 months? Sleeping? Playing other video games? How dare we?
1.13 is a a big update for Mojang and therefore a big update for everyone. Vivecraft is built on top of several other components, namely MCP and Optifine. MCP is a modding package that Mojang is supposed to release, and historically is what Optifine, Forge, and Vivecraft use for development. To date, Mojang still has not released the update for it, so we’ve been left to our own devices.
The Forge team decided to take this opportunity for a near total re-write, including development of their own modding tools which removes the need for MCP.
Optifine went and made their own update for MCP, and Optifine for 1.13 was released in October. I got a copy of the update and was able to start working on Vivecraft sometime in December. So a big thanks to sp614x for making this update even possible.
Porting the codebase to 1.13 took about 2 weeks, with another week actually getting it to compile. We then had 2 weeks of alpha testing and a week of beta testing. And here we are. Big shout out to everyone on Discord who helped with the testing!
What’s changed?
A lot, as Minecraft goes. Mostly under-the-hood.
The biggest change is the jump from LWJGL 2 to 3. LWJGL, which I pronounce ‘ligwuhjul’ and should likely not be pronounced at all, is the ‘lightweight java gaming library’ and is the third-party tool that Minecraft uses to talk to the operating system of the PC.
Access to to the Display, Mouse, and Keyboard are all done thru it, so it’s a pretty fundamental aspect of the code, everywhere. LWJGL changed significantly in the jump from 2 to 3, totally replacing the older Display, Mouse and Keyboard libraries with another third party tool, GLFW (Graphics Library FrameWork). This library is now responsible for handling all access to the GPU and input layer to and from Minecraft, as well as providing additional acronyms in case there’s ever a shortage.
The GLFW change is actually wonderful for Vivecraft. Mojang had to sit down and re-write how Minecraft interacts with the Mouse and Keyboard, and they did it properly this time with an abstraction layer. We, Vivecraft, can now just hook right into that abstraction layer and mimic any kind of keyboard or mouse event without the 6 layers of hackery we used in previous versions. We no longer need window focus, or to emulate keypresses or any of that nonsense. 2 years of tedious workarounds went right in the bin and it felt great.
What’s even better, it is now impossible for other mod authors to write code that bypasses input from Vivecraft, meaning we no longer have to bend over backwards to support misbehaving Forge mods. At least that’s the theory, there’s no Forge support yet.
Wait, where’s Forge?
Forge for 1.13, as I mentioned, is undergoing a massive re-do. Beta versions of it are out there, and a couple mods, but frankly we had more than enough to do getting stock Vivecraft updated to worry about it.
We will add Forge back in a future update for 1.13, if at all possible.
What’s changed in Vivecraft?
For us this was mostly a technical update and not a lot of new features were added. Beyond the input stuff above, I had to re-write all of our settings GUI’s from scratch, which is a lot of work and results in zero noticeable change for players.
Techjar had to re-write large parts of the Main Menu renderer, which draws those cool pre-fab worlds around the main menu. We also had to make all-new worlds for 1.13 and some are really pretty. Thanks to NPC-8606 for finding cool places on the test server to export.
Techjar made a nice pass on the in-game GUI blending, transparency, and lighting code and that all looks great now. Also re-worked the ‘wrist’ HUD option to be more watch-like, requested by many.
One really cool new feature, also courtesy of Techjar, is a ‘physical’ keyboard.
The previous, pointer-based keyboard is still in there as an option.
I was told there would be fish
The aquatic updates for Minecraft are all integrated into Vivecraft for 1.13. The swimming mechanics have been updated, the Trident has some fun VR first person animations, and everything about works as you’d expect, thanks to our thorough testers.
He died shortly thereafter from falling.
You can pet the fish. You can put the fish in buckets. I really don’t want to know what else you’d like to do with the fish.
Full change notes are on the Github releases page.
What’s Next?
We’re going to start investigating how to get Forge support working for 1.13. It’s a high priority for us, we know people play Java Minecraft for the mods, after all.
I will likely push out an update to 1.12 with some minor stuff we found while doing the update. 1.12 has received numerous small updates over the past months, I just haven’t done any major features or blog posts. I expect 1.12 to stick around for a long time, having Forge available for 1.13 doesn’t mean popular mods will update, so we’ll keep 1.12 polished for now.
You’ve probably not forgotten about the physical inventory system we teased oh so long ago. We haven’t either, although the guy who was doing it has been busy and unavailable to continue. Forge compatibility was a big obstacle to getting that all working, so along with our evaluation of Forge 1.13 we will look into finishing that system and getting it in there without having to worry about compatibility.
I’ve had some other features on the TODO list for awhile now, like roomscale fishing, buttons and levers. Those are still planned will be continued as I have time.
Around the Community
For those of you who found us from SwaggerSouls recent video, welcome. Also congratulations on finding us since he gave us no attribution at all (:/) Video’s pretty funny tho.
Here’s the start of a let’s play from frequent Discord userĀ Insanegrox (using the 1.13 beta, no less)
And another long play from very helpful Discorders Princess Fuzzy and VRAdditct
Report the bugs.
Report the bugs. There will be bugs. The 113 github repo has a fresh clean, empty issue tracker waiting for you.
Many weeks of hard work have paid off and Vivecraft for 1.13.2 is now in Beta to get the last few kinks worked out. If you’d like to help test, downloads are available in the 113-Testing channel pins on the Vivecraft Discord.
We’ve started working on Vivecraft for 1.13. There is still no official release of MCP, but sp614x, who writes Optifine, has manually created the MCP update so we can all move forward.
There is also still no Forge for 1.13. So we are going ahead under the assumption the first releases of Vivecraft will not have Forge support, to be added later. Forge is undergoing a very, very extensive re-write so that may be a long time coming yet.
I’d like to get a working build of Vivecraft out for testing within in the next 2 weeks, so keep an eye on this space, or join the Discord for more timely updates.
