How’s your face? Is it ready? Is it ready to have Minecraft right up in it? It’d better be: today we’re releasing a FREE update to Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition Beta which will enable you to play Minecraft on Oculus Rift. Win 10 players just need to download the bespoke launcher from the Oculus store to get the full stereoscopic experience!
Back in April, we released Minecraft VR edition for Gear VR. It was the product of many, many months of hard work, reshaping the game you know and love to precisely fit the new medium of virtual reality. After such an achievement, you’d think we’d pat our beleaguered VR team on the back and send them on holiday, but, instead, we tricked them back into the Coding Pits by saying we’d spotted a Mewtwo in there and quietly barring the door. Since then, in exchange for scraps of old meat dropped from an overhead grill, our heroic team have worked relentlessly to further tweak and refine the experience, making our Oculus Rift feature-set even more impressive.
Well done, team! Double gristle rations for everyone! By the way, Owen tells me he spotted a Porygon in the Quality Assurance Gulag.
Anyway, what are these new features?
Of course, this is on top of the major VR-specific features we had already developed. We have a Virtual Livingroom, allowing you step back from the fully-immersive experience and into a virtual armchair - a great way to minimise the intensity of VR without breaking play. We’ve also made all kinds of tweaks to the way you move, some super subtle, some striking - like a special turning mode which breaks up the smooth rotation of your camera into abrupt jumps. It looks strange in videos, but it huuuugely improves the experience in-game.
There are loads more besides. You can read more on our dedicated VR page, or watch the video embedded above in which VR heroes Saxs and Tommo explain how we came to make some of these counter-intuitive discoveries!
So, get your peepers prepped!
Cheerio!
Marsh - @marshdavies
Continue reading...
Back in April, we released Minecraft VR edition for Gear VR. It was the product of many, many months of hard work, reshaping the game you know and love to precisely fit the new medium of virtual reality. After such an achievement, you’d think we’d pat our beleaguered VR team on the back and send them on holiday, but, instead, we tricked them back into the Coding Pits by saying we’d spotted a Mewtwo in there and quietly barring the door. Since then, in exchange for scraps of old meat dropped from an overhead grill, our heroic team have worked relentlessly to further tweak and refine the experience, making our Oculus Rift feature-set even more impressive.
Well done, team! Double gristle rations for everyone! By the way, Owen tells me he spotted a Porygon in the Quality Assurance Gulag.
Anyway, what are these new features?
- Innate keyboard and mouse support!
- VR control options for immersive comfortable turning with the Xbox One controller!
- Fancy-pants graphics stuff, like MSAA for crisp visuals, new render distance settings that will make use of powerful VR graphics cards, and optimized Windows 10 DX11 performance!
- Even more granular customisation of VR settings, so you can mix-n-match for personalised comfort!
Of course, this is on top of the major VR-specific features we had already developed. We have a Virtual Livingroom, allowing you step back from the fully-immersive experience and into a virtual armchair - a great way to minimise the intensity of VR without breaking play. We’ve also made all kinds of tweaks to the way you move, some super subtle, some striking - like a special turning mode which breaks up the smooth rotation of your camera into abrupt jumps. It looks strange in videos, but it huuuugely improves the experience in-game.
There are loads more besides. You can read more on our dedicated VR page, or watch the video embedded above in which VR heroes Saxs and Tommo explain how we came to make some of these counter-intuitive discoveries!
So, get your peepers prepped!
Cheerio!
Marsh - @marshdavies
Continue reading...
