I just had a fascinating chat with Rashid Mansoor of MetaGravity, who told me about this seriously cool demo project using their Quark Multiplayer technology: A Minecraft world server that's playable (with low lag) by 100,000 concurrent avatars, versus the usual 20-100!
In the video above, you're mostly seeing bots to stress test their tech. (Up to 5,000 bots can be rendered on one screen, he says.) MetaGravity is planning to make this Minecraft server publicly available soon, when they're aiming to reach 1 million concurrent users.
Last I checked in with "Markcreator" in 2020, the indie developer had somehow figured out how to recreat a Minecraft-like experience in VRChat, inevitably dubbing it VRCraft. This week, he's taken several leaps on that innovation, and is now making it possible for anyone to import their Minecraft worlds into VRCraft. (Watch above.)
"One of the things that VRChat added this year is the ability to load data from trusted sources like GitHub," Mark tells me. "So I got motivated to use that to load a list of community-submitted worlds into VRCraft for people to enjoy! It's also a nice way to give people that love building in VRCraft a platform to showcase their cool builds.
"As for how it's possible to convert Minecraft worlds to VRCraft: I personally wrote the file format for VRCraft worlds. If people are curious about the file format and know how to read code, they can look at it here. But long story short: Because I developed the file format I was able to rewrite it from Udon code to Java code pretty easily. Before I came to VRChat I actually wrote plugins for Minecraft servers full-time! So this was a fun throwback for me."
All Minecraft’s on-screen UI functions are based around the game’s initial core purpose: Use your creativity and gathering skills to Survive a night against the Creepers — in-game enemies that you must build defenses against in order to have another day of gameplay.
That way, players can remain focused on learning all the game’s functions and how they relate to each other, all for the purpose of surviving and defeating the Creepers and the world’s other attacking beasts. It’s only after this that players realize that the UI they first learned for survival purposes can also be leveraged to thrive — creating beautiful and ambitious homes for themselves, or even the collaborative artworks with other players, all of which helps make Minecraft enormously popular over a decade after launch.
Minecraft's user interface is actually pretty complicated, but its singular purpose makes it become, with repeated usage, intuitive and pass-through:
With news that Microsoft is shutting down its VR metaverse platform AltspaceVR, along with widespread layoffs across most of the major tech companies, you might assume the Metaverse as an industry is also feeling the string.
"It's using a Substrate C# library called Substrate (with some updates from me) to read the data [link above - WJA] and figure out which chunks are in the file and then uses another community tool called Mineways to export the chunks as geometry," he explains. "That geometry is then imported into Neos and post-processed with materials, positioning, adding some extra things like light sources where torches are and a culling system to handle large worlds."
Earphones on to hear a whole new way of experiencing Minecraft -- integrated with High Fidelity's 3D audio API. This not only makes it possible to talk with players around you on the same Minecraft server, but also experience the world itself in immersive audio, so when Creepers are groaning behind you, it will sound as if they are actually behind you, and when you're walking along a river, it'll sound like the river is literally right beside your computer, and so on:
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:
Last year I wrote about the ambitious Minecraft metaverse project of Kim Nevelsteen, a developer with a literal PhD in Mixed Reality, which enables users to jump from Minecraft world to Minecraft world through teleporters. (Watch above). Kim just let me know he's very close to making this project available to the public -- after some closed beta testing.
If you're interested in making the metaverse, Kim Nevelsteen is a man you probably want to follow. A developer with a literal PhD in Mixed Reality, Nevelsteen is creating practical applications of metaverse technology -- most recently, as featured above, this metaverse of connected Minecraft servers, enabling users to jump from world to world through teleporters.
The code he created to make this possible will be available soon for other developers to play with, and Nevelsteen says it will be relatively easy to set up:
"It should just be configure and run in order to get basic teleportation," as he puts it. "Enhancements to the code could be anywhere from super simple to extremely complex, depending on the functionality sought. It is a distributed system, and so the state space can be potentially large. As an example, consider the difference between querying the network to see if a specific existing server is ready to accept a teleport -- and querying the network to find all servers open to teleportation. The latter example means dealing with: multiple responses, at different response times, limiting broadcast length (for large networks), and more, while providing a responsive interface to the user.
And yes, Nevelsteen has shown an earlier version of this code to Minecraft its publisher. Sad to say, they didn't seem so interested:
Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting
I love “Minecraft” by Andrey-S on DeviantArt. The artist has few pictures, but I don’t care. This picture makes up for everything. Ingeniously recreating the iconic Beatles “Abbey Road” cover (compare below) with Minecraft avatars complete with proper shadows on the street reveals a sensibility to fall in love with.
