Yes, what you're looking at above is Minecraft-style group building in VRChat. The insanely cool brainchild of "Markcreator" (his VRChat account name), it's now available to play for yourself: Click on his Twitter here for more details and the VRChat teleport link.
It's actually dubbed "Udon Minecraft", with "Udon" being VRChat's scripting language, and to judge by the demo video, it captures all the prim-based group building fun that made Minecraft so massive, transplanted to a new platform.
"The goal was and is to make a playable version of Minecraft in VRChat," Mark tells me, "that supported Minecraft building mechanics in real-time with friends and other players.
If you're a developer, you'll want to read Mark's behind the scenes notes, because he came up with some clever workarounds to make this possible in VRChat. Read on:
Minecraft in VRChat (also known as Udon Minecraft) is one of my hobby projects and is the accumulation of about 100 hours of work.
The technology that was used is called UdonSharp, an experimental compiler with a small community that has enabled the creation of Udon (VRChat's scripting language) scripts using regular C# code, allowing for much more complex functionality than the regular Udon Graph Editor.
It is currently still a very young but promising technology with little documentation, but has inspired some programmers such as myself to push the limits of VRChat's exposed programming interface.
Some of the biggest challenges making the world were getting it to run fast and play well, as well as synchronizing the world between the connected players.
Instead of using solid blocks to represent the world, my implementation builds meshes out of triangles (vertices) using a lot of math magic to get as much performance out of VRChat and your computer as possible, making it the first interactable Minecraft world of its kind that actually plays well.
Building these meshes is actually very computationally expensive, and Udon does not support multi=threading (which means any code that has to run will freeze your game temporarily), so getting the meshes built as efficiently as possible was crucial to make the world run as smoothly as possible.
As for networking, Udon and UdonSharp are very limited when it comes to synchronizing data between the different players, so I had to invent a custom protocol to allow for up to 10 players to change a block at the same time without any blocks not getting shared with the other players in the world.
Currently the world is comparable in functionality to Minecraft Classic, and old and nostalgic version of the original game.
In the future I hope to add more functionality to this world, as well as starting up new challenging projects to push the envelope even further.
VRChat is kind of new name for me, can somebody explain to me what is?
Posted by: Kerry | Saturday, August 22, 2020 at 06:43 AM
Wow, great job!
Posted by: Pulsar | Monday, August 24, 2020 at 10:18 PM