Minecraft – How to get Minecraft to work in the Oculus Rift

minecraft-java-editionoculus-rift

I've recently got my Oculus Rift and one thing that got me excited during the period the Rift was developed was the prospect of playing Minecraft in VR. So I searched the internet on how to get the game running in VR which, so far, has been a bit disappointing.

As far as I can tell, the Minecrift mod is no longer actively developed and the version that can be downloaded from either the mod-maker's website seems to be compatible with Rift DK2, but the consumer version is not mentioned. Of course, Microsoft also announced VR support on the PE/ Windows 10 version, but so far I can only find it for the Gear, not the Rift.

So my question is, can I, and if so how, get the consumer version of the Oculus Rift working on my pc with any version of Minecraft? Any (preferably first-hand) information on official Rift support on the Windows 10 version of Minecraft is also appreciated.

Best Answer

MineCrift has evolved into ViveCraft, targeting the HTC Vive and OpenVR (see: http://www.vivecraft.org/ ). It has support for a seated experience so it can be used with the Oculus Rift as well. In the mean time Microsoft has released the Minecraft update for Windows 10 on the Oculus Store, so there is something to choose now.

Both mod and Windows 10 solution have options to customize the way you interact with and view the world, although I found the mod a bit easier to customize since I prefer a keyboard and mouse over a controller. You sadly can't rebind keys in the Windows 10 version, so it has some drawbacks. Note that the mod uses the Java version of Minecraft (v1.7.10 and v1.10.2) so you can still run other mods and use shaders (although I had issues using them).

Related Solutions

Steam – list of which Steam games support Oculus Rift

Since the "VR Support" list doesn't include the games that have the "Oculus Rift" banner (as shown on your link to Doorways: Chapter 1 and 2) and the fact that none of the games returned by that search query have the same banner, it would seem that this is functionality that has not yet been fully implemented and/or it could be for games supporting Valve's own upcoming virtual reality hardware.

However, there are a couple of manually maintained lists available;

This one on Steam contains quite a few more games than are returned by the "VR Support" search query but doesn't seem to be actively updated anymore,
This one on Wikipedia is about games in general that support the Oculus Rift, not necessarily games specific to Steam,
Not specific to Steam, but RiftEnabled is a wiki-like site that keeps track of Rift support in games

There is also the Oculus Rift Owners Group which may help you find out further information on which games directly support the Oculus Rift, but mainly seems to be full of tweaking games that don't officially support it yet.

Minecraft – Finding the current installation of minecraft

I just checked the launcher and this is how it does it:

It loads .minecraft\launcher_profiles.json and looks at "selectedProfile":

  {
    "profiles": {
      "1.6.4": {
        "name": "1.6.4",
        "lastVersionId": "1.6.4",
        "playerUUID": "---"
      },
      "default": {
        "name": "default",
        "playerUUID": "---",
        "launcherVisibilityOnGameClose": "close launcher when game starts"
      }
    },
    "selectedProfile": "default",
    "clientToken": "---",
  }

Then it looks at the selected profile's lastVersionId and uses that version (e.g. 1.6.4). If there is no such attribute (as in the above example), it lists all versions from the versions folder, reads the json files and chooses the one with latest "releaseTime" attribute. It also filters the versions by "type" == "release" attribute (this filtering actually depends on the profile settings, but by default only "release" versions are considered).

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Steam – list of which Steam games support Oculus Rift

Minecraft – Finding the current installation of minecraft

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