A few weeks ago I felt a sudden urge to play some
Minecraft with my brother. We both have accounts on
minecraft.net, but my PC is the only one in our household capable of running it smoothly. Besides, we prefer the same-room multiplayer, preferably hot-seat (like in
Worms) or split screen (so many hours lost on
Left 4 Dead), so regular Minecraft multiplayer was out of the question.
I started looking into available options. Minecraft didn't have a split screen option, unlike the upcoming XBox 360 version. Searching for mods that added the functionality revealed no results. Then I remembered of a method of playing another game,
Borderlands, in semi-splitscreen. It was based on running two instances of a game in a window, and connecting to each other in LAN. Add a bunch of scripts, boarder-less (no pun intended) windows, and you have yourself a playable game.
So, if I could run and control two instances of Minecraft, after connecting to the same server I would have some real world, first class, same room multiplayer fun. I could even connect a second monitor and play it really comfortably.
The quest was on finding a way to control both instances separately. Minecraft didn't support joypad input, and I haven't found a mod that does that neither. Other possible solutions included programs like
Joy2Key and
xpadder to map the joypad buttons and axes into keyboard and mouse input. But doing so would not resolve the problem because only one window can receive keyboard and mouse input at a time, and having two windows open, only one would be focused. Having found no available solution to the problem, I decided to try and develop one myself.
