AI Developer Port Calls of Duty Map Into Minecraft

An artificial intelligence and games development enthusiast has demonstrated the Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Hijacked map running natively in Minecraft. In a post on X/Twitter, Luckey Faraday explains that a browser-based port of Black Ops 2 they previously created was first inserted into Minecraft and ran “on a PC screen inside” the game. Then, GPT Astra was used to rebuild the project so that the Hijacked map ran “directly on Minecraft’s own OpenGL context.” Video footage shows the 2012 Call of Duty map running full-screen pretty fluidly at around 45 fps.

“The map, collision, bots, navmesh, weapons and rendering are all running inside Minecraft as a Fabric mod,” explains Faraday. Fabric is a lightweight, open-source mod loader and development API for Minecraft. Thus, the Black Ops 2 content and Hijacked map are injected directly into Minecraft through this modding framework.

Faraday runs an AI builders’ community where they invite fellow enthusiasts to collaboratively build demos and share logs and code. The way this port was made and rebuilt is a prime example of their process. Specifically, the dev began by making Hijacked playable in a browser. Subsequently, this effort was shoehorned into Minecraft but would exist only as a playable game on 'a PC' inside the sandbox. Then, Faraday decided to task GPT Astra with rebuilding the whole thing in Java. With this new code, they were able to run the iconic FPS directly in Minecraft’s OpenGL context.

Faraday says that there’s “still a lot left to do,” but this compact yacht-based map looks playable enough running in Minecraft, rather than just being displayed in the game. Next up, if the project continues, we might expect additional maps, more weapons, and multiplayer modes.

Many will know Minecraft as the best-selling video game in history. While it appeals to youngsters for its adventure gaming, creative building, and social aspects, the openness and extensibility of the sandbox mean it also attracts some highly technical minds. This is why it has been behind some spellbinding computer science feats. Examples that immediately spring to mind are the working 5 million parameter ChatGPT model, dubbed CraftGPT, wedged into the game.

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.