by Stone Marshall | Aug 1, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Whenever I need to clear my mind, or try to think of a topic for my next blog post, I usually either go for a run or play video games. Since there’s been a heat wave in my area recently, so I’ve stuck to video games. Most recently it’s been Minecraft.
One of the aspects of Minecraft is finding stuff and putting into your backpack. Punch trees to get blocks of wood, dig for iron, find villages and “borrow” carrots and potatoes, etc. It doesn’t take long for your pack to fill up, and then you have to start choosing what you really need, and what you can toss to free up space. While it always seems limiting, your pack is ridiculously generous. It has 36 available slots, each for a separate type of thing. Some things like swords or shovels completely fill up their own slot, but for raw materials like wood or iron ore, you can put up to 64 items in a single slot. So in principle you can have 36 slots each filled to the top, for a total of 2,304 items. Unlike some games that estimate some kind of weight or volume limit, Minecraft only cares about slots. If there’s a free slot, you can add it to the pack.
It’s easy to see how ridiculous this is. Minecraft is block-based, and each block is supposed to be about a cubic meter in size. A full pack of 2,304 cubic meters would form a cube more than 13 meters on a side, and your avatar is perfectly comfortable lugging all of it on their back. Of course in the game, once something is added to your pack, it’s volume doesn’t matter. Like most video game packs, there must be some magical effect that simply compresses it all into a reasonable size. Maybe those Pym particles used to explain the size changes of Ant-Man.
But what about mass? A couple thousand cubic meters of anything is going to have quite a bit of mass. Even the density of air at sea level is about 1 kilogram per cubic meter. If you filled every possible slot of your Minecraft pack with air, it would literally weigh more than a ton. But how extreme could things get? In Minecraft, the heaviest single block you can make is one of solid gold. Gold has a density of 19,300 kg per cubic meter, so that means you could fit more than 44 million kilograms in the pack. All of that gets shrunk down to some manageable size, say about the size of a baseball.
Of course video games aren’t beholden to the laws of physics. They can make their own rules to keep the game entertaining. But suppose we tried to make a real back of holding. Anything you toss into the bag gets compressed to a small volume. How much could we pack into our bag? Nature has given us a clear answer. There is a maximum amount of mass that can be compressed into a volume before it would collapse into a black hole. For the volume of a baseball, that’s about 20 trillion trillion kilograms, which is far more than the Minecraft limit.
But there’s a more subtle limit related to neutron stars. While a black hole is the ultimate limit, highly compressed objects have so much weight that there is a point where they would collapse under their own weight. This limit is called the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit. Beyond that limit a neutron star will collapse into a black hole. We aren’t exactly sure what that limit is, but it seems to be a bit more than 2 solar masses compressed into a sphere only 20 kilometers wide. At that density, the volume of gold in a minecraft pack would be compressed to a volume of a few cubic centimeters.
In other words, the upper limit of a Minecraft pack is about the same as the upper limit for a neutron star.
by Stone Marshall | Aug 1, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
What’s great about virtual reality is that you can get the full-body building experience in Minecraft given the blocky world consumes your entire field of view. The drawback is that you don’t have visual access to the real world without lifting the headset up enough to peek into reality or completely removing the device altogether. Microsoft has a fix for this problem, at least for Windows Mixed Reality headsets, with the latest Insider Preview builds of Windows 10.
Available in Build 17723 in the Fast Ring and Build 18204 for Skip Ahead participants, Flashlight simply opens a visual portal into the real world, so you can see what’s going on outside the virtual environment without fully breaking the experience. With the press of a button, a voice command or Start menu shortcut, you can see who’s running through your play area or to quickly scan the environment.
Each Windows Mixed Reality headset includes two built-in visible-light low-resolution cameras to determine your location in the physical environment, removing the need for external cameras/sensors as seen with the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. Now when you click an assigned button on a controller, one camera provides a video feed of reality through an oval portal rendered within the virtual world. This view follows the controller as if you were shining a flashlight into reality.
Right now there are six Windows Mixed Reality headsets costing either $200 or $400, depending on the model (motion controllers included). They’re the “third” entry into the VR market with the Microsoft Store serving as the base distribution platform. The HTC Vive is based on Steam whereas the Oculus Rift has its proprietary Oculus Home. SteamVR for Windows Mixed Reality is currently in beta.
Outside the new Flashlight feature, the two new Windows Insider builds retire the XSS filter in Microsoft Edge and introduce new Group Policies and MDM settings for IT management. You will also find 157 new emoji stemming from Unicode 11. Microsoft even made a few tweaks to existing emoji and ninja cats.
Microsoft improved the update experience as well that uses a trained predictive model to determine the right time to restart your Windows 10 PC. According to the company, “we will not only check if you are currently using your device before we restart, but we will also try to predict if you had just left the device to grab a cup of coffee and return shortly after.”
Finally, the latest builds throw the Game bar into the Start menu while keeping the Win + G keyboard shortcut intact. If you’re running a kiosk, Microsoft improved the setup experience via a simplified assigned access configuration page. Additional improvements to time accuracy and traceability include Leap Second support, software timestamping, and a new precision time protocol.
by Stone Marshall | Jul 31, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Adventure Time and Minecraft have a long history. The heroes of the popular Cartoon Network animated show made appearances in Mojang’s building game in 2017, and now the favor is being returned with tonight’s episode of Adventure Time where the show’s cast is drawn in a block-y, Minecraft-like style.
The episode, titled “Diamonds and Lemons,” is airing tonight at 7pm ET and you can see favorite characters like Finn, Jake, Marceline, and Princess Bubblegum in all their brick glory. Like in Minecraft, the group can be seen building things in the Land of Ooo borrowing the core gameplay of Minecraft. The first clip for the episode was released last month.
Cartoon Network is also collaborating with Funko to make Adventure Time x Minecraft figures, so that’s an extra collaboration thrown into the mix. Funko recently announced a partnership with Epic Games to make figures based on Fortnite, so they’re well-versed in toys based on games.
Adventure Time meets Minecraft meets Funko Pops.
Adventure Time is a popular, long-running animated series on Cartoon Network starring the human Finn and his dog friend Jake as they explore the Land of Ooo and take on quests. It’s a very strange, fantasy series with a devout following thanks to the show’s mature storytelling and imaginative creations. There have been several video games based on Adventure Time, including a new Adventure Time game slated for 2018.
“Diamonds and Lemons” doesn’t have an official synopsis beyond the fact that it’s a Minecraft crossover, but you can see the episode in full when Adventure Time airs tonight at 7 pm ET. The episode will also be available on the Cartoon Network mobile app after airing.
by Stone Marshall | Jul 31, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Minecraft is a game loved by millions of people all around the world, but how is Microsoft’s nascent Minecraft server subscription service doing?
Minecraft is an unprecedented title in various ways, most recently pioneering some of the most pervasive cross-play systems in the industry. This is Minecraft Realms.
Minecraft Realms is an unprecedented feature in gaming that doesn’t really get enough praise. Through Realms, Minecraft can connect players from Windows 10 PC, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, VR platforms, Android, and iOS (and hey, even Windows 10 Mobile).
For a small fee, you and up to ten friends can play together on a shared dedicated world, crafting, adventuring, and building together. No other game has achieved anything this pervasive as of writing, although many are moving in that direction, most notably Fortnite, which allows Xbox, Nintendo Switch, PC, and mobile cross-play. Of course, Minecraft is, of course, a completely different sort of game, which revolves around co-operative play in infinitely random worlds. The rentable Realms feature is still relatively new, however, and is missing a frustrating amount of features.
Minecraft Realms: What you’ll love
Minecraft Realms is a true game-changer for the legendary title, which Microsoft purchased for over 2 billion dollars. It allows friends across virtually every major gaming platform to connect together, sharing a persistent world that never goes away.
Minecraft Realms allows you to set up and administrate private worlds for a relatively low cost. The maximum cost is $7.99 per month, supporting up to 11 concurrent players per world. The amount of players that can be given access to a Realm is far higher, but only up to 11 players can be online at any one time. You can also pay $3.99 per month for up to three players, which might be better value for families or small groups of friends who want to play together.
Only the server owner needs to pay, and the others can connect for free, providing they own a compatible version of the game. There are two separate Realms versions, one for the classic PC edition, and one for the cross-platform Bedrock version.
The Bedrock edition allows players from iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, Windows 10 PC, VR, and Xbox One to connect and play together, and it all just works. This is how gaming should be.
Minecraft Realms can be modified offline, and then uploaded for the rest of the members to enjoy. You can add unique skins, behavior modifiers, and all sorts of other features using Minecraft’s Add-Ons platform. Setting up a Realm with the skins and other Add-Ons you want is as easy as double clicking a few files on Windows 10, and you can customize your own skins using tools as simple as Microsoft Paint. All of those skins and mods live in the cloud too, and work across any device that can connect to the Bedrock edition.
Minecraft Realms has great uptime compared to some other multiplayer platforms I’ve had experience with, powered by Microsoft Azure, and server latency is generally quite low. When it comes collaborative, creative fun that respects the devices you have access to, there are few platforms out there that offer equal value, compatibility, and fun. Still, Realms has a long way to go before it’s as robust and feature-rich as some of the other platforms out there.
Minecraft Realms: What you’ll hate
If you’re setting up a small server for a group of trusted friends of family Minecraft Realms’ Bedrock edition tools for administration will be more than adequate. However, if you want to run a larger Realm, incorporating friends of friends, perhaps followers from your Mixer or Twitch community, Realms really isn’t up to even a basic standard of administrative customizability.
Moderating trolls quickly and easily is needlessly difficult with Realms’ current implementation.
When you first create your Realm, you’re able to set build permissions either to “Member” or “Visitor.” Visitors can, as the name suggest, simply explore your realm. They’re unable to break blocks and actually, well, play the game however, which would be fine if you could promote individual visitors’ permissions. But, you can’t. Minecraft Realms only supports the ability for everyone to be a member, or everyone to be a visitor, which sucks if you’re planning to advertise your Realm publicly using the invite link. Any random friend-of-a-friend can jump in and screw up your builds, unless you’re carefully micromanaging access to your Realm. Moderating trolls quickly and easily is needlessly difficult with Realms’ current implementation, further compounded by the fact text chat logs don’t persist outside of the game.
Thankfully, the game does now support backups and rollbacks automatically, allowing you to reset your Realm status to an earlier time if someone does jump in and screw things up. There is no way to set a server message or inform people of what’s changed in-game, however. Instead, Realms creates an Xbox Club automatically which becomes a shared space to post clips, screenshots, or status updates. The problem is, almost nobody uses Clubs, because they’re clunky and slow to access across every Xbox app. The Clubs API is implemented within Minecraft itself, but it doesn’t work very well, and is frankly hard to read when it comes to simple text updates with yellow text on a green background (why oh why?).
It’s annoying that any server tweaks you might want to make have to be made by exporting your Realm, modifying files directly, and then re-uploading it. Other games with rentable servers, such as Conan Exiles, allow you to make server tweaks, issue bans, and that sort of thing from within the game using an admin password.
Considering that Realms runs on Microsoft Azure, often touted as the world’s greatest cloud platform, the 11-player concurrency limit seems a bit restrictive. Presumeably it’s a matter of cost, but it seems odd that Redmond doesn’t even offer the option of a higher-paid tier. Additionally, we’ve found that Realms can get laggy as player worlds get larger and more complex, particularly when you start throwing in redstone machine automation and beyond, but the majority of players probably won’t run into these sorts of problems.
Final Thoughts
Minecraft Realms is a vision of gaming on Microsoft’s “intelligent edge,” where the system you choose to play on no longer matters, thanks to the cloud. Microsoft’s experiments with Minecraft across mobile, consoles, and other systems will almost certainly extend to other games in the future, as Microsoft seeks to engage not millions of gamers, but billions.
The fact me and friends can play together in Minecraft using our phones, our portable Nintendo Switch consoles, high-powered Windows 10 PC gaming rigs, or our Xbox consoles, is truly wonderful. However, some of Xbox Live’s more neglected features, such as Xbox Clubs, and Xbox apps across different devices used to connect and communicate do a fair bit to hold Minecraft’s cross-platform aspirations back.
4 out of 5
Additionally, Realms suffers from a lack of moderation and administrative tools for Realm owners, which shows a startling lack of foresight from Mojang and Microsoft’s Realms team. Still, for small groups of trusted friends, Minecraft Realms represents awesome value, infinite amounts of fun, and rewarding creativity. It’ll be interesting to see how the platform grows in the future.
by Stone Marshall | Jul 30, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Role playing games (RPGs) are already known for requiring large amounts of time to complete them. Usually, most people wouldn’t give an RPG the time of day if it doesn’t exceed 20+ hours. But once in a millennium, gamers are graced with a game that exceeds all expectations by completely dominating their every moment. One such game was released in 2011 under the title The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.
Skyrim has managed to become one of those games people just can’t put down. It’s open ended structure, and non-stop flow of quests enthralled almost everyone who took the time to play it. To make matters even more dire, mods happen to be a thing on PC. If you look at Skyrim now with a few mods in effect, it becomes a totally different game. New areas, races, abilities and so much more have been created to expand upon the game Bethesda built all those moons ago.
This game still manages to draw hours of playtime out of fans with every new addition. Bethesda managed to build a beautiful huge world with a magnificent lore that has managed to create a truly amazing time sink. After trying it out for yourself, you may find out first-hand just why this game steals your hours, but you can be rest assured that you won’t regret it.
Minecraft
Minecraft is one of those games that exploded into popularity seemingly out of nowhere. This game that allows you to build almost anything you can imagine in a magical world has accrued millions of fans. It’s hard to look on YouTube and not trip over 100 videos of individuals playing this game. There is just something about the game that causes people to sink hours upon hours into its blocky goodness.
Maybe it’s the randomly generated open world that draws people in. Perhaps it’s the feeling of figuring out how to build that one thing that nobody else can build that keeps gamers coming back to scratch that itch. Or maybe it’s the fact that Minecraft can be played on almost every platform available. You have a PC, home console, handheld, or smart phone? Chances are if you do you have the ability to play this time consuming game.
Whether you’re sitting at your desk or on the porcelain throne, you can pour hours into building your castle for no real reason other than pure fun.
MOBAs
Multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBAs) are those games a large group of gamers just can’t quite put their finger on. It’s not that the fun component of the game is confusing, after all, everyone knows that competition is fun. And it’s not the characters that puzzle people. Some use heroes while others place you into the sandals of ancient deities in order to wreak havoc upon your opponents. It just might be that each match can be relatively short and the games are pretty repetitious.
But, since when did repetition mean that something can’t be fun and devour all of your precious hours? MOBAs may have a pretty set-in-stone formula but they can be highly addictive once you get the hang of them. Heck, even the Twinfinite team has found itself in the clutches of Smite as each match leads to the desire of more god vs. god mayhem. The game just grabs all of your attention with its simple to learn but difficult to master mechanics.
While many are still trying to figure just why MOBAs became such a time sink millions of others are currently devoting large portions of their days to this game phenomenon.
Simulations
Simulations are an odd bunch. That’s not to say that the games are bad in any way, mind you. They are often very detailed and provide realistic mechanics that you just can’t help but marvel at. The thing is that most popular simulations are pretty mundane things that you could possibly do in your real life, but that has never stopped anyone from pursuing one of the many sims available to gamers.
For instance, take a look at Euro Truck Simulator. You will spend tons of hours in this game just following the laws of the road. The beautiful farm land and architecture you may pass during your travels are just an added bonus to the endless driving you will do. If you take a look at The Sims you will notice a similar situation, all you do is live… literally. You get a job, you develop relationships, eat, sleep, and many other everyday activities.
There is just something about watching simple things unfold in the virtual world that creates one of the ultimate time sinks. Will you live to 100 years old in The Sims? Will you make it to your destination in Euro Truck Simulator? The only way to ever know is to pay in hours of your time.
MMOs
The massively multiplayer online game (MMO) is one of the original time sinks in gaming. Create your avatar, choose your path, and set off in huge worlds with tons of monsters to defeat. Join a clan to make new friends, or even make one yourself. Choose to become the strongest in the world or max out your level without ever harming a single soul. These games throw you into entirely new worlds where you can make a name for yourself.
Being able to accomplish amazing feats with friends and strangers alike is an amazing thing. Whether it’s slaying a powerful dragon, or just gathering tons of people to do silly things it’s easy to see the appeal of MMOs. Losing hours of time playing a game with people from all over the world is one of the best things gaming has to offer. MMOs might be a time sink, but they are definitely one that’s well worth the sacrifice.
Grand Theft Auto IV on PC
You may have looked at the title of this section and wondered why only the PC version of this huge franchise was singled out. Everyone knows that Grand Theft Auto is one of the best selling franchises in gaming and gamers on all platforms sink tons of time into any game in the series. And you’d be 100% correct in saying that Grand Theft Auto IV could be considered a time sink on any of the other platforms it was made available on. But none of the other versions have the replay value that the PC release has.
One thing this game has on PC that puts it above the rest is mod support. You can put almost anything into Grand Theft Auto IV on PC. Wanna play as a horse driving a Mercedes Benz? Go right ahead. How about as one of your favorite superheroes so you can fly around Liberty City ruining the lives of it’s many citizens? You can do it all at the expense of your productive hours.
Grand Theft Auto IV manages to transcend the addiction that surrounds the game on consoles by become an even greater time sink on PC. If you need someone to thank just look to the individuals who spend lots of time making super creative mods.
Are there any games that you find yourself spending tons of time playing? Feel free to share.
