ST. GEORGE — Student engineers who built a virtual version of the New York Wheel on the online game Minecraft will be among the first to ride the real thing when it opens next year.
The 10 students built the New York Wheel on the popular computer game during a summer STEM program. Wheel CEO Rich Marin gave the digital engineers free VIP tickets to ride the attraction on the first week it opens to highlight their work.
“When we came over we saw that there were 10 who had, of their own volition, included the wheel as part of their vision of sort of the ideal community. We thought that was noteworthy,” said Marin.
“To give that sort of pride to Staten Island children where they can say, ‘Yeah we got the Ferry, we got the wheel, we got some neat stuff here on Staten Island,’ that meant a lot to us because to us building a wheel is about building an icon and building pride.”
The Department of Education “STEM Summer in the City 2016” program involved second to 10th graders around the city doing weekly challenges like coding and game design, field trips and Minecraft.
The students who decided to build the wheel for the program were all in the 7th to 11th grade Staten Island program.
Fatin Iftekhar, 14, of West Brighton, said it took him hours, and a lot of math, to create the wheel in the game, but it was worth it to be one of the first to try out the ride.
“It’s amazing,” said Iftekhar, who attends Brooklyn Technical High School and only found out he was getting a ticket a few days ago. “I want to show off at home too. I got a ticket playing a video game.”
Iftekhar built a sculpture park and theme park in the game for his summer project and chose to add the wheel to help bring more recognition to the borough and give his friends a chance to — digitally — ride the attraction.
“It would bring more recognition to Staten Island and the wheel project itself,” he said about his idea to make it in the game.
“Other people would get to see it, hear about it, and it all comes out to something great in the end.”
He said the hardest part of the project was trying to create the round wheel itself because Minecraft only uses square blocks. Marin said a lot of the problems the student designers worked through were the same ones his team dealt with.
“It’s causing them to think through issues that we have to think through in building this huge wheel,” said Marin.
The 620-foot observational wheel — expected to be one of the tallest in the world — is expected to open next year.
Aside from the tickets given to children in the STEM program, all students in the city will get a free ride on the wheel during its first year in operation, Marin said.
Author Danica Davidson is at it again. She’s expanded her list of ‘Unofficial Overworld’ adventures, with an exciting new installment to the series. This marks the sixth story she’s written in the world of Minecraft She also discusses her work outside the Minecraft realm.
LOS ANGELES, CA – JUNE 15: Mojang’s ‘Director of Fun’ Lydia Winters speaks about ‘Minecraft’ during the Microsoft Xbox E3 press conference at the Galen Center on June 15, 2015 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
William Wilson: What brings you back to the Books for Minecrafters series as a writer?
Danica Davidson: I’ve been writing different types of stories as far back as I can remember, but what I really appreciate about the Minecraft game is its creativity and the mythos it’s made for itself. When I was a kid, I liked writing adventure stories and bringing them in to share with my classmates, and this just feels like a continuation of that. Writing books for Minecrafters allows me to write about a world full of detailed monsters and extravagant settings and it really lets the imagination be limitless.
Wilson: What inspires you when you write these stories?
Davidson: A sense of fun and adventure. I try to end most my chapters with a cliffhanger, to keep things exciting. The books are written from the point-of-view of eleven-year-old Stevie, so I always go back and read stories I wrote when I was eleven to make sure I get the right voice.
Wilson: Please tell our audience about your new books. What can new readers and current ones expect?
Minecraft snapshot 16w32a is out today, and it mostly has under the hood changes, with the big ones being unveiled at Minecon later this year. However, that doesn’t mean snapshots will be too weak until then – changes will trickle in over the next few weeks. You can check out some of the notable changes below, and the full changelog here.
Some mobs are now more afraid to get wet in the water
There are now more spawn eggs for many different mobs and this time they are working properly, so we’ll keep them
Mob types are now separated like this:
Guardian and Elder Guardian
Skeleton, Stray and Wither Skeleton
Zombie, Zombie Villager and Husk
Horse, Skeleton Horse, Zombie Horse, Mule and Donkey
Changed the duration of hunger and saturation effects
Broke some bugs so they should not happen anymore
Resource pack format changed slightly, it’s now using version 3
Version 3 resource packs have to use lowercase filenames for everything
Most commands can now use blockstate definitions instead of a numerical metadata value
Snowmen are now 10% less derpy
More robust handling of invalid items and hopefully less duping bugs due to this change
Lightning storm will now attract less skeleton horses
How much of a phenomenon is Pokémon Go? Enough so that it’s started something of a civil war between members of the team behind the video game sensation Minecraft.
See, when the game first launched, Mojang — the Sweden-based game studio that created Minecraft, acquired by Microsoft for $2.5 billion in 2014 — tried to get all employees to unify and join up with Team Mystic, Pokémon Go’s blue team.
But here in America, the Bellevue, Washington-based Minecraft team was more split. Some of them were willing to go along with the Swedes, while others wanted to go with the red Team Valor or the yellow Team Instinct.
Amid the chaos, though, came inspiration: Spencer Kern, an artist with the Minecraft team in Washington, found himself getting very into Pokémon Go.
In the original Pokémon games that Pokémon Go is based on, players can run to a handy Pokémon Center in each city to heal up their pocket monsters and get ready for the next battle. In Pokémon Go, the thing that gets hurt more than anything in your smartphone’s battery, as the game chews up power like nothing else.
“I thought it would be fun to re-create a Pokémon Center from the main games and use it as a charging station for trainers to hang out and heal their power drained phones,” Kern writes.
And so he did, building an awesome project that doubles as something of a social hub for Pokémon trainers in real life. Here’s how.
Xbox games may one day support interactive streaming, in case your Twitch chat is not nightmarish enough already.
Microsoft has signed up to acquire Beam, “an innovative and interactive livestreaming service that gives viewers the ability to watch and play along with their favorite game streamers in real-time”, for Team Xbox.
What does that mean? It means that livestream viewers will be able to interact with the stream in both subtle and meaningful ways. The examples Microsoft gave were switching between player perspectives in Sea of Thieves (sure, whatever) or spawning items and setting challenges in Minecraft (a bit more dramatic).
“Impossible!” You splutter. “Surely if such technology existed everyone would put it in their games and Telltale’s Crowd Play would work with Twitch and other streaming services I definitely remember right now because the market is not utterly dominated by one brand at all!”
Nah though – it’s not science fiction. Both Rise of the Tomb Raider and indie horror Daylight had interesting Twitch chat interaction, so it’s clearly possible.
I’m too old to enjoy streaming (get off my lawn, etc) but it’s clearly one of the most important realms in modern gaming, so this is exciting news for Microsoft. It’s nice to see Team Xbox climbing aboard the social bandwagon Sony and the PS4 ran away with this generation (dat Share button); let’s see how badly it gets messed up by Microsoft’s obsession with OneDrive and gatekeeping
You can step into your Minecraft creations starting next week — if you own an Oculus Rift.
Mojang employee Tommaso Checchi confirmed on Twitter that an update for the Windows 10 version of Minecraft will add Rift support, and that the update is coming next week, according to WinBeta. This means gamers will be able to put on the Rift headset and walk around the world of Minecraft using an Xbox One controller.
The new feature will only be added to the Windows 10 version of Minecraft, but don’t worry about not having that version. If you already purchased Minecraft, you can get the Windows 10 version for free by logging on to the Mojang website and redeeming your copy in the Windows Store.
Microsoft acquired Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, in 2014. By making Rift support exclusive to the Windows 10 version of Minecraft, Microsoft is giving gamers a reason to try out the Windows Store, which might help that struggling platform gain traction.
But the business angle on this story isn’t nearly as interesting as the opportunity to fully immerse yourself into the pixelated world of Minecraft. The first-person building game seems like a perfect fit for virtual reality, especially when you consider all the crazy creations people have made in the game over the years. There’s certainly a whole lot to explore.
Of course, Minecraft is far from realistic: Its famously blocky graphics looked nostalgic even back in 2011, when it was first released. But simple graphics don’t make this game any less immersive, and the creativity of its users is no small part of that. We look forward to what VR can bring to this game on the Rift.
But if you can’t wait a week for VR Minecraft, the Pocket version of the game already works with Minecraft Gear VR. These are exciting times for brick builders everywhere! Also watch: Oculus Shows Off Oculus Medium 3D Sculptures
