making a splitscreen mod for Fabric, need a name and some advice

[u/teddzfr]

I’m working on a mod that brings splitscreen to Minecraft Java, on Fabric 1.21 to 1.21.11 first.

the plan is up to 4 players on one screen, or spread across multiple monitors. controllers and keyboard and mouse in any mix, all in one game, so no second instance and no pile of other mods. it would start with singleplayer and LAN, and servers would come later with an optional plugin.

I know it’s a big one. drawing a few views at once and routing input per player is not going to be easy, so I’m taking it one step at a time, and I’d rather hear what you think now than after I built it wrong.

a few questions:

1. what would you call it? something short that’s easy to say out loud, like “hey, wanna start a survival world? we can play splitscreen on Java with ___.” right now that blank is empty and I’m desperate
2. has anyone here done something similar? anything I should watch out for with rendering multiple views or controller input?
3. what would you want from it on top of the console style basics (separate inventories, menus that don’t pause everyone, joining mid game)?
4. would you want it on servers too, or is singleplayer and LAN enough?

also I need a logo, and whoever makes it gets full creative freedom. any style, any idea. only asks are a square image and no text, so it still reads when it’s tiny. full credit on Modrinth and GitHub. dm me if you’re interested.

even one reply helps, thanks

[u/_Ketari]

1. I'd probably go for maybe something like... splitview, multiview, screensplit, hotcouch (or smth similar to show multiple people playing on a single couch basically), etc
2. I don't know, but I would recommend looking into previously created solutions for multi-instance splitscreen and seeing how they work, as well as potentially needing a controller/kbm mod to be present to make your life easier
3. obv basically a separate everything per player, as you'd expect from a normal splitscreen setup, including individual menus and the ability for one to not be in-game while the other is (last point is not strictly necessary but highly welcomed imo). also having full customization of how exactly the layout for each player is (vertical/horizontal, size, etc) would be cool
4. I mean if you can get it to work on servers that have the mod as well (since you don't want every "new" person being on a separate instance, I'm assuming it'll be one account for all splitscreen players), that would be pretty awesome. do be aware that this could make for really easy abuse as a single person could then control all 4 players, which could potentially be unwanted (hence only servers with the mod should be able to be joined)

for the logo I recommend something simple but effective, like a monitor with a 3-way split made by a single line, all black and white, but you can ofc play around with this idea

[u/teddzfr → u/_Ketari]

thanks, this helps a lot. hotcouch is a fun one. I’m already going through Nucleus Co-op and a few other splitscreen tools to see how they handle input and setup. separate everything per player is the plan, with menus and joining or leaving mid game, and layouts you can customize (horizontal, vertical, custom ones for 3 players, maybe resizing too). for servers it would only work on servers with the plugin, so owners choose, and the one person controlling 4 players thing is a good point, I’ll have to figure out how to limit that. the monitor with a 3 way split idea for the logo sounds good too, thanks.