Chapter 231: Transfer Complete
The development of Minecraft continued after Chinese New Year.
The game was still a ways away from the final product after the first stage. It was already quite a feat to recreate Minecraft, but Chen Mo wanted more, hoping to recreate it in VR.
The next step was to port Minecraft to VR.
-Second floor of the experience store-
Chen Mo took off his special consciousness gathering helmet to stretch his neck.
The consciousness gathering was complete, now the thoughts of moving, jumping, attacking, placing, using, crafting were translated into actions in VR.
Chen Mo then entered everything into the Illusion Game Editor, linking the thoughts to movements in game.
Conversion of the rules from PC to VR was also ongoing in the game editor.
The conversion to a 3D PC game to VR was quite quick. Of course, if the game was innately big and had a lot of resources, this process would be much longer.
Luckily, the rules of Minecraftwas quite simple with not many resources in play, so the conversion happened quite quickly.
Chen Mo installed the VR version of Minecraft onto the gaming pod to try it out.
Soon, Chen Mo’s consciousness entered the VR world.
A new world was generated as specified, and Chen Mo could feel himself fully immersed in the world.
However, the situation could only be described as very terrible.
First was the horrible graphics.
In VR, the field of view of the players were increased, so some of the rougher details can’t escape the eyes of the players.
The jaggedness of the pixel graphics were incredibly obvious.
Looking down revealed an ugly, blocky person, with legs like meat in a can and no fingers.
Looking around revealed the trees, rivers, mountains, and animals, all of which wasn’t what Chen Mo had in mind.
These graphics were acceptable on PC, but with the wider field of view in VR, all the flaws were magnified, so bad that it almost feels like another game.
The movements were smooth, and the feedback from the environment was incredibly lacking.
In VR, players didn’t play the game using keyboard and mouse, but using their consciousness. Although CHen Mo already gathered the thoughts for all of the controls, he realised that it was far from enough after trying it out in game.
It was quite lacking, especially when compared to a mature VR game like Earth Online.
For example, Chen Mo felt as though he was on a unicycle when he was moving as it was really weird without any bobbing. It felt like he was floating through the air too, as opposed to having his feet on the ground.
There wasn’t any feedback grabbing tools, and actions such as jumping, mining, and placing felt like someone else was doing it.
All in all, the first VR version of Minecraft felt the same as VR goggles in his previous life, other than a change in perspective, there wasn’t much difference.
This version was so bad it felt insulting to have his VR pod run the game.
These problems seemed to have stemmed from Chen Mo’s inexperience with VR games. Luckily it seemed to be an easy problem to solve with enough time and effort into it.
Improve actions, add view bobbing.
Add various haptic feedback.
Add resources for the other senses such as smell and hearing (improving them to a high quality of course).
And improve all aspects of the graphics at the same time.
Although it was still the same pixel art style after being imported to VR, Zhou Hanyu improved on many aspects as per Chen Mo’s request.
Basic blocks such as dirt, stone, gla.s.s, good, and leaves had patterns to make it feel more textured and softened the edges.
These changes surpa.s.sed the graphical quality of many mods in his previous life.
Moreover, Chen Mo added a ‘Chisel Mode’. This allowed basic blocks to be broken into sixty four different pieces to allow players to perform detailed work, making creations resemble closer to real life.
This ‘Chizel Mode’ was also used during world generation to soften the edges of the blocks to make the world feel more tied together and realistic.
Other than blocks, characters, animals, adn weapons were all formed as though they were Leggo, keeping its cute art style while adding detail.
The characters for example, although it still maintained the 3:1 ratio of body to head, the head, arms and legs were no longer cubes, but round, just like Disney characters in Leggo. It made the characters fit in better in the world, while giving the models more detail.
At the same time, in order to make it better fit with multiplayer, CHen Mo added a few more models.
These models also took inspiration from the people from Leggo, with various different types of costumes such as suit and tie, cowboy, casual wear, firefighter, race car driver, pirate…
Moreover, the players could mix and match their tops, pants, hats, and shoes.
These clothes didn’t take much effort as they were cute versions of it after all, unlike the bigger games that specify every single strand of hair.
Chen Mo also added a basic set of facial expressions with a happy face, sad face, and angry face, allowing players to freely use in game.
The second stage took a relatively long time, over two months in total.
This version was finally a pa.s.sable VR game.
Although it’s still pixel graphics, it wasn’t rough or repulsive.
The characters were still cute and simple, but had various different animals for walking, jumping, and taking damage. The field of view would slightly move as the body felt the vibrations, just like real life.
The feedback from the game was also quite complete, making the game feel much more realistic with walking, jumping, attacking, placing feedback implemented.
The players would feel their hands grabbing onto the wooden handle of their pickaxe when mining, and they could feel the vibrations through their hand into their body.
Minecraft had been successfully ported from PC onto VR. Next was the most important step or adding more to the game as well as additional game modes.