This pack contains non-essential features to enhance your experience on the MC Liberty SMP server by allowing you to interact with players in VR, or Join them! As well Sodium mod is included to help increase client side visual performance while on the server allowing you to see the biggest builds without stuttering.
Vivecraft functions allowing VR gameplay as well as non-VR Animation support.
Sodium rendering to increase frame rate and overall graphics experience.
VR Features
- Full roomscale support: Walk around your room as you mine and build. Blocks in Minecraft are 1 meter in size. You’ll be amazed how big they really are!
- World scaling: Scale your size in the world up or down.
- Break blocks and fight by swinging your hands!
- Shoot your bow by drawing and aiming two-handed!
- Climb, swim, run, jump, sneak, eat, crawl, and row by actually doing the motion!
- Context-sensitive interactions for doors, pistons, levers, animals, buckets and more!
- Play with your friends and see each other’s VR movements. (even for 2d players!)
Sodium is a free and open-source rendering engine replacement for the Minecraft client which greatly improves frame rates and stuttering while fixing many graphical issues. It boasts wide compatibility with the Fabric mod ecosystem when compared to other mods, and it does so without compromising on how the game looks, giving you that authentic block game feel.
⚙️ Technical details
Of course, we can't just say that the game is magically faster without providing some kind of explanation. This list tries to cover some of the most significant changes which are responsible for performance improvements, but it's not complete or exhaustive of everything Sodium does.
- A modern OpenGL rendering pipeline for chunk rendering that takes advantage of multi-draw techniques, allowing for a significant reduction in CPU overhead (~90%) when rendering the world. This can make a huge difference to frame rates for most computers that are not bottle-necked by the GPU or other components. Even if your GPU can't keep up, you'll experience much more stable frame times thanks to the CPU being able to work on other rendering tasks while it waits.
- Vertex data for rendered chunks is made much more compact, allowing for video memory and bandwidth requirements to be cut by almost 40%.
- Nearby block updates now take advantage of multi-threading, greatly reducing lag spikes caused by chunks needing to be updated. (before, after)
- Chunk faces which are not visible (or facing away from the camera) are culled very early in the rendering process, eliminating a ton of geometry that would have to be processed on the GPU only to be immediately discarded. For integrated GPUs, this can greatly reduce memory bandwidth requirements and provide a modest speedup even when GPU-bound.
- Plentiful optimizations for chunk loading and block rendering, making chunk loading significantly faster and less damaging to frame rates. (before, after)
- Many optimizations for vertex building and matrix transformations, speeding up block entity, mob, and item rendering significantly for when you get carried away placing too many chests in one room.
- Many improvements to how the game manages memory and allocates objects, which in turn reduces memory consumption and lag spikes caused by garbage collector activity.
- Many graphical fixes for smooth lighting effects, making the game run better while still applying a healthy amount of optimization. For example, take this before and after of a white concrete room in vanilla, or this comparison while underwater.
- Smooth lighting for fluids and other special blocks. (comparison)
- Smooth biome blending for blocks and fluids, providing greatly improved graphical quality that is significantly less computationally intensive. (comparison)
- Animated textures which are not visible in the world are not updated, speeding up texture updating on most hardware (especially AMD cards.)
The SMP Liberty Server Pack Team
