Chapter 228 - Basic Rules of the World (1/2)

Every game had design restrictions based on their platform.

For example, racing games on PC always only had two perspectives, from the inside of the car or outside the car.

It was because the field of view in first person PC games are usually 75° to 90°, whereas humans have a 124° field of view.

Meaning, because of restrictions of a display on PC, it was impossible to have complete representation from a human point of view outside of having two more monitors.

Most players wouldn’t get two more monitors just to play racing games, so the viewing angle within the car would feel really narrow.

At times like these, a view from the top of the car is needed as the field of view is widened, meaning that the players could see more, making it feel more natural.

(This applied to PUBG as well.)

This design of having two different perspectives was a result of limitations of PC.

Similarly, although VR games were way better at conveying games than PC, it also had a similar downfall. The designs of VR games were also restricted by VR technology.

Most popular VR games were in first person mode, and the flow of producing games all followed the same ‘release on PC before porting to VR’ model.

First step of porting a PC game was to improve the quality of the graphics and models to meet the requirements of a VR game. This improvement would normally cost about ten times the resource. This was also where most of the money goes.

The second step was to port PC controls in VR controls. This was mostly done in the game editor, converting signals received from players using special equipment and converting it one to one to the established controls.

For example, the design could use his intentions of jumping and link it to jumping in the game. When the players would think about jumping, the character in the game would follow.

The game would also have an increased field of view up to 124°. Other senses such as smell, hearing, and touch would also be ported to the VR.

Third step was to make minor changes according to the game to make it feel better for VR players.

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After looking through the main points he had to consider making a VR game, Chen Mo started working on the rules of Minecraft.

In the first stage, Chen Mo planned to make it on PC and recreate the original before porting it to VR.

First was the basic rules of the world.

Chen Mo planned for single player modes as well as local and online multiplayer modes.

Of which, singleplayer and local multiplayer could be interchanged (just like Diablo 3), and the worlds could grow indefinitely as it would be procedurally generated by the game (A limit on players should be added.).

Online maps should support up to ten thousand players. The world would be locked at one hundred thousand square kilometers, which would be similar in area to a province.

The basic resources would be more or less the same as the original Minecraft, such as stone, water, lava, sand, gravel, gold, iron, coal, wood, leaves, diamond, ice…