Camcorder HUD

Minecraft as found footage, shot on a camcorder that's been dropped a few times.

Client side. Works on any server, vanilla included. Nobody else sees it, it touches no world data.

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Warning

The camera moves a lot and the picture is filtered a lot. If you get motion sick, this will probably do it. Nausea, dizziness, eye strain, all on the table.

There's a warning screen once per launch. Every effect has its own toggle and its own slider, so you can strip it back to whatever you can stand. Camera off, tape on is a perfectly good way to play it.

The camera

Someone is holding it. That's the whole idea.

It sways with your gait, tied to your actual footfalls rather than a random shake function. Each step is a small bump. Landing from a fall is not a small bump. Set off walking and it leans back, stop and it pitches forward. Turn and it banks. Strafe and it banks the other way. Flick the mouse fast and the view lags behind, overruns, then settles.

Crouch and it steadies up, like you're bracing.

Sprint FOV stretch is gone. The camera does that job now.

The lens

Cheap glass doesn't land red, green and blue at quite the same size, so the colours pull apart toward the corners. Centre of frame stays clean — that's the part that sells it. Get it wrong and it just looks like a filter dragged over your screen.

Slider runs from barely-there to visibly broken.

The tape

Real composite video simulation, not scanlines drawn over a colour grade. So the artefacts turn up on their own, for the same reasons they used to: rainbow shimmer on fine detail, colour crawl along hard edges, chroma that smears and can't keep up with the picture.

• NES preset for loud false colour. SNES / Mega Drive for something you can look at all evening.
• Saturation, brightness.
• Tape noise that smears along the scanline. Not pixel static.

Cheap to run. I leave it on.

The OSD

What a consumer deck would burn into the recording:

• Blinking dot and REC, top left
• Battery bars, tape counter, SP, top right
• Date over time, bottom left, where Sony and Panasonic put it

VCR OSD Mono, bundled. White with a hard black outline. Battery drains over a session. Clock reads your system time by default, in-game time if you'd rather.

It's burned in, so the tape filters and noises it along with everything else. Hotbar, inventory and chat are drawn after, and stay sharp.

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Config

Mods → Camcorder HUD → Config. Ordinary settings screen. Sliders update the world live behind the menu, so tune it by eye. Reset to Defaults if you wreck it. Or edit the config file by hand.

Four groups (camera, lens, tape, OSD), each with a master switch, each individual effect with its own slider.

Still too much movement? It's almost never the shake. It's the turn banking and the extra view bob. Pull those two down first.

Known caveats

Untested with other camera mods and shaders. Anything that takes over the first person camera or the post processing chain will fight it.

Credits

• NTSC-Adaptive by Hyllian, built on Themaister's shader, from the RetroArch slang collection
• Handheld camera started life as a port from the Fabric mod MinecraftFoundFootage / spb-revamped
• VCR OSD Mono by Riciery Leal

Made by TraoX. All rights reserved.