Vistacor

Vistacor

A cinema for Minecraft (NeoForge 26.1.2). Put a projector on its tripod, point it at a wall, and it throws a real web page across whatever is actually in front of the lens - not a picture stuck to a block, but light that spreads with distance, wraps over a staircase, and is stopped by anything standing in the way. Walk through the beam and it lands on you. And the light carries the film: the cone is one ribbon per ray, each ray the colour of the pixel it is carrying, so a blue-lit scene fills the room with blue and an explosion turns the whole cinema orange for a second.

Requires the mod on the server (and on every client), and Rinku on the client, which is the browser it borrows.

What you build

• Projector - aim it with pan, tilt, zoom and lens shift without ever moving the block. Lamp warm-up, a remote, and a desk you can sit at and drive it from with a keyboard.
• Projection screen, booth window, holo pane - a surface the beam lands on cleanly; glass the light passes straight through, so a wall of them is one window; and a pane the picture hangs in front of, so the screen appears to float.
• Speakers - real stereo, placed by which side of the picture the sound came from. Stand at the far left and you mostly hear the left; stand in the middle and it is the best seat in the house.
• Subwoofer and amplifier - the bottom end from one box in a corner, and a knob that sets the level for the whole room. Logarithmic, because hearing is.
• House lights and a dimmer - lights that fade together over a few seconds instead of snapping, plus aisle strips that never go out so you can find your way in the dark.
• Bias lighting - strips behind the screen that glow whatever colour the picture is.
• Curtains on a rail - a run of rail is one curtain however long it is, and it draws to the middle when you pull it.
• Marquee - a three-block screen for the foyer showing the live picture and a scrolling ticker of what is playing.
• Head-end - starts the same show on every projector in the world at once.
• Seats, which you sit in, and 3D glasses, for a side-by-side picture.

Connections, not radii

Nothing here works by being nearby. A speaker wired to a projector serves that projector however far away it is - which is the entire point, and the one thing a radius can never say.

Hold V to see every connection drawn as a line: solid for one somebody made, faint for one the mod is guessing. Press to connect.

For server operators

A projector is a twelve-block screen that one player loads and everybody in the room has to look at. config/vistacor-server.toml decides what may go on it, and the check runs on the server, so it holds against a modified client.

Allow the whole web or only a list of sites, block individual ones, and optionally let only operators change what is showing. Two rules cannot be switched off, because an admin should not have to know to ask for them: only http and https addresses ever load, and sites match on label boundaries, so youtube.com covers www.youtube.com and refuses youtube.com.example.net. Addresses on the local network are refused by default - a projector is loaded by every client that can see it, on that client's own machine. Downloads are always refused.

Before you install

• The browser runs on each player's own machine, so a busy cinema costs everyone in it.
• Shader packs may fight the projection. What a surface looks like is decided by the pipeline it is drawn with, and a shader pack replaces that pipeline.
• The sound sits about a third of a second behind the picture. The buffers have to be deep enough to survive a frame hitch, and that depth is the delay. It will not show on a trailer; it may show on faces talking. Being worked on.

The icon

Drawn by code, not by an image generator. It is a render of the projector's own model file and its own texture atlas - the same geometry the game loads - lit, posed and snapshotted by a script. Running it again produces the same image, and it can be made afresh whenever the model changes.