Mojang have just released a brand new beta build of Minecraft: Pocket Edition, version 0.11.0 beta 6.
The news was announced Johan Bernhardsson, a game developer at Mojang, who has been working on Minecraft: Pocket Edition. Speaking on the social networking website Twitter, Bernhardsson simply revealed that “Beta 6 released” followed by “still no skin packs but we are working on them.”
Despite skin packs not being included the team is one step closer, as a new feature that has been added is the “skin selection player model rotation”. The only other new feature is that players are now able to swap the items then have equipped on the selection bar.
According to Tommaso Checchi Mojang hasn’t managed to fix as many this as they had hoped; commenting “MCPE build 6 is out! We’ve all been part of those ‘large team’ talks so it doesn’t fix too many things, though”. The meetings Checchi is speaking of are synchronization talks between the Mojang team and those based in Redmond who are also working on Minecraft: Pocket Edition.
Here’s a complete list of bug fixes that are included in Build 0.11.0 beta 6:
Fixed items in chest not saving when quitting
Creative/survival mode change works again
Always Day switch works again
Edited world names are now saved
Corrected entity duplication in multiplayer
Spawned players will now have the correct rotation without interpolation
Creative list was incorrect sometimes after connecting to a server
Fixed a cause of lag on the world list under slow networks
Fixed possible attacks by servers on server list
Fixed crash after death and respawning multiple times
Fixed crash when disconnecting from server
Riding non-existent entities on multiplayer could crash the game
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Microsoft on Thursday reported earnings for the quarter ended March 31, announcing that the company shipped (i.e. sold to retailers) 1.6 million Xbox consoles, which includes Xbox 360 and Xbox One, during the period. This compares to a combined shipment tally of 2 million consoles during the same period last year.
Total Xbox shipments have now fallen for a second straight quarter, as Microsoft moved 6.6 million combined Xbox consoles during the all-important holiday season this year, compared to 7.4 million during the same quarter the year prior.
Microsoft’s Computer and Gaming Hardware division, which houses the Xbox business, saw its revenue fall $72 million, or 4 percent.
The company attributed the downturn primarily to “lower revenue from Xbox Platform,” but offset by higher revenue from Microsoft’s Surface line.
Xbox Platform revenue itself decreased $306 million or 24 percent; as mentioned above, total console volume fell by 20 percent. Microsoft also noted that the lower price of the Xbox One in the quarter compared to the same period a year prior further led to the decline.
Cost of revenue for Microsoft’s Computer and Gaming decision decreased, led by a $265 million (27 percent) decline in Xbox Platform cost of revenue. This was driven by a lower volume of units shipped and a lower cost per console sold, Microsoft said.
It wasn’t all bad news for Microsoft this quarter, however. Microsoft reports that Xbox Live and other store revenue increased by $144 million, or 32 percent, compared to last year. This was driven by an increase in Xbox Live users and revenue per user, the company said.
For Microsoft overall, the company posted $21.7 billion in revenue, up from $20.4 billion during the same quarter last year. Meanwhile, profit for the quarter was $4.9 billion, down from $5.6 billion last year.
Microsoft will hold an earnings call later today to discuss these results and answer analyst questions. Check back later for more.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a rant about how Paramount was reportedly planning on creating a shared cinematic universe for the Transformers films under the creative control of Batman & Robin screenwriter Akiva Goldsman. It was still just rumored at that point, but according to a shareholder call from Hasbro that took place earlier today, it’s now been confirmed as their strategy moving forward.
“Our plan right now with the studio and filmmakers, you may have read something about some writers being hired,” Brian Goldner, President and CEO of Hasbro, says. “We have in fact brought in [Akiva Goldsman] to lead a group of writers to really create a strategic plan around Transformers – we think there’s any number of stories to be told. It’s a brand that’s been around for 30 years with amazing canon and mythology. We would expect the sequel to the Transformers movie to happen in 2017.”
It’s unclear whether Goldner means that production will begin in 2017 or that the film will be released in 2017, but either way, this is confirmation of Goldsman’s writer’s room concept and confirmation that Paramount is indeed putting infrastructure in place for this franchise to continue to expand over the new few years. Like I said in my initial rant, it’s hard to fault them from a business perspective since these movies make serious money, but creatively, you’d be hard-pressed to find a worse movie than Transformers: Age of Extinction when looking at high-budget films of that ilk. We can only hope that the new brain trust has enough time to come up with a decent script before moving into production on this new movie. Mark Wahlberg has signed on for multiple sequels to Age of Extinction, and Michael Bay is expected to return behind the camera.
Now that GTA 5 has made it to PC at long (long, long) last, many players are finding that the port was worth the wait. The game runs fantastically well and seems to be the culmination of everything Rockstar has learned since the original launch of the title back on last-gen consoles and the new-gen re-release since.
What’s really happened, however, is that Grand Theft Auto has given players their biggest, most fleshed-out open world playground since The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim, which remains a PC favorite to this day.
Obviously, the two settings couldn’t be more disparate. One is a fantasy landscape of swords, sorcery and dragons, the other is a modern day parody of southern California focused on crime, corruption and shootouts with gang members and cops alike. But both share a common achievement, as each has arguably the most in-depth open world of their era.
But one thing could be standing in GTA’s way, something that could prevent it from having the kind of longevity as Skyrim. The seeming reluctance of Rockstar to support mods.
Skyrim, as a vanilla game, already comes baked in with potentially hundreds of hours of exploration. But the game has really thrived throughout the past few years because of an enormous modding community that has refined, tweaked or outright broken the game in every way imaginable. There are mods to allow you to see the individual fibers of fabric on a tunic, and there are mods that allow you to replace all dragons in the game with Thomas the Tank engine. The spectrum is wide, and it is true definition of a sandbox where anything is possible.
GTA 5 certainly allows players to explore the countryside, but you won’t stumble into the sort of bottomless dungeons you can encounter in Skyrim, nor will you create a dozen different characters with different specialties. Rather, Rockstar wants to herd players into an alternate sort of endgame, GTA Online.
It’s been around since the launch on consoles, but after a rocky start involving a number of exploits, followed by nearly eternal silence about online heists, it finally seems ready for primetime as a mini-MMO with reach on PCs the world over now.
It’s not just Rockstar’s goal to keep players engaged until the inevitable release of GTA 6 a few years down the line, but they want it to be a persistent moneymaking vehicle for them, as the mode allows players to purchase game cash for real cash, and blow it on everything from weapons to clothes to real estate. It’s a little like The Sims, with a lot more death and destruction.
That’s well and good, but the focus on GTA Online seems to be dissuading Rockstar from being supportive of mods. Here’s Gamespot asking Rockstar North about mods:
Modding took off for GTA IV PC. What are you doing to support modding for V? Is there anything within the game that supports it?
“Since GTA Online has such a massive and vibrant community, our primary focus is making sure that nothing detracts from that experience or has a negative impact on the overall community of players.”
And…that’s it. It’s a rather brusque response to arguably the thing the community is most interested in when it comes to the PC release of the game. GTA IV had some truly incredible mods, and again, huge sandbox games like Skyrim achieve utter immortality through mods, and in that case Bethesda handed players the tools to get started.
Rockstar wants you to play in its sandbox, but first and foremost using their rigid set of rules. I understand the impulse to protect players from online-invading mods that make GTA Online unplayable, but down the line, once things get settled, hopefully Rockstar comes around and offers the game the full mod support it deserves.
It’s not as if mods won’t exist for the game regardless of what Rockstar does. The technically talented are already crafting simple mods for the game like FOV sliders and infinite ammo/no death cheats. But so far, response from a few figures in the dedicated modding community has been somewhat pessimistic, as Kotaku reports.
Hopefully there’s a middleground here. One where players who want everything on the level can play GTA Online as it was intended. And another where there’s an “anything goes” zone where players can go as crazy as they want to modifying Los Santos and its surrounding countryside. Hopefully someone is drafting a mod as we speak that replaces all police cars with Thomas the Tank engine.
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