‘Terraria’ Outshines ‘Minecraft’ With Wii U Gamepad Features
Terrariaon Wii Uis taking its time to launch, but already out-doesMinecraftin terms of Wii-U Gamepad features. It looks like the wait will be worth it.
AlthoughMinecrafthas been out on the Wii U for some time, it still doesn’t make very much use of the systems killer feature – the Gamepad second screen.
Getting hands on withTerrariaWii U it is immediately clear how much time and effort has been spent tailoring the game to fitNintendo’sconsole. Of course you can use the stylus and touchscreen combo for more accurate building and fighting, this much I expected.
However, you can also use theGamepadscreen for a second player — leaving the other player free to use the whole of the TV screen. This is a nice innovation and not one I’ve encountered very often on the Wii U. In a family where you have more players sharing a console this additional screen real-estate will be welcomed.
Unfortunately this doesn’t enable five players to compete on a single system as we saw inSonic All Stars Racing. Dean Scott, Producer from 505Games,said that “Rendering five differentTerrariaworlds was too much for Wii U, it was important to keep the frame rate. But we do have up to eight players online.”
Terraria on Wii U
That eight player online mode also has a hidden gem. If you are a family with four children playing on a single system, you can go online with your Wii U and play with another family of four. Eight players with just two Wii U’s is certainly the sort of value for money that parents will appreciate.
There has also been thought put into which of the other Wii U controllers to support. “We made sure we supported the original Wii-Remote for split screen. There’s more likely hood of families having these lying around and they can use them for split screen as well as gamepads and pro-controllers.”
First details about that Warner Bros. live-action Minecraft movie emerge
It’s now been two years sinceit was announced that Warner Bros. was developing a live-action movie adaptation of the highly popular video gameMinecraft. Since then, nothing much has been heard about the project. Until now.
In an interview withColliderat DICE 2016, The LEGO Movieproducer Roy Lee — who’ll be spearheading theMinecraftmovie project — offered the first updates on the movie, saying, “We are currently in the scripting stages. And also doing visual designs to show the studio what the world will look like.”
The live-action film, which Lee is expecting to go into production later this year, is being penned byIt’s Always Sunny in Philadelphiastar Rob McElhenney, who’ll also helm the movie. Lee says they’re going for “the same target audience asJurassic World,” which, as Collider points out, *could* mean that they may go for a PG-13 target as opposed to a PG one likeThe LEGO Movie (not sure about the reasoning behind that, but I guess we’ll have to wait and see).
Here’s the movie’s first logline as revealed by Roy Lee:
“Minecraft would be part of a multiverse where humans can enter that has the feel of what the live action version of a Minecraft experience.”
Lee also revealed that the game’s Swedish indie developer Mojang will be involved in bringing the game to life on the big screen, which can certainly help reassure fans about the whole movie project on the whole.
“The company, Mojang, is very involved in the development. So they know everything is going to be in the movie that can give us insight into future updates so we can put things into the movie around the same time they relaunch newer versions of the game and at the same time, potentially taking ideas from the movie and putting them into the game. So I don’t know exactly what things are going into the game, but they know exactly what’s going into the movie.”
What do you think? Are you intrigued by what Roy Lee revealed about the upcomingMinecraftmovie?
Children get stuck into video game Minecraft which has created a digital version of Jupiter Artland. Picture: Jupiter Artland
A vast private sculpture park showcasing work by some of Britain’s leading artists on a country estate near Edinburgh Airport is set to be turned into a new virtual reality experience.
An entire “digital world” inspired by the dozens of works at Jupiter Artland will be available to explore via the hugely-popular video game Minecraft within months.
Painstaking work has been carried out over recent months to digitally map the private collection of Robert and Nicky Wilson, who opened their award-winning attraction on their 100-acre estate seven years ago.
Their Jupiter Artland Foundation charity has joined forces with design experts at Edinburgh Napier University to launch the “digital Lego” version of the attraction.
Maps, photographs, geological studies, a GoPro camera and even a drone were deployed by final-year design student Agnieszka Banach to produce an “immersive digital experience,” which will be launched at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.
Work by the likes of Antony Gormley, Charles Jencks, Andy Goldsworthy, Nathan Coley, Jim Lambie and Cornelia Parker are being recreated for the venture, expected to help promote the sculpture park around the world.
Minecraft players will also be able to create their own worlds inspired by the real-life art trail which has been created amid the woodland and meadows at the estate.
Pupils from nearby Ratho Primary School, who are among the 10,000 youngsters to visit the attraction every year, have been testing out the “3D facsimile” version of Jupiter Artland in recent months.
It has been developed following previous Jupiter Artland projects with the university’s Centre for Interactive Design to develop an audio guide then an interactive mobile app for visitors to help navigate them around the grounds.
Helena Barrett, education officer at Jupiter Artland, said: “We’re really interested in the digital development side of things here. It can really help to engage with a wider audience, especially younger people who can be harder to reach. Minecraft is hugely popular among children under the age of ten.
“It basically allows them to create their own world from scratch. The children who come here are always asking us if they can use it to build Jupiter Artland, so this is a very exciting project for us.
“When we launch the project it will be able to used in two ways. People can either just go around Jupiter Artland using Minecraft, but there will also be a way to build and continue the work. We will also be creating a video so that people who don’t have Minecraft will be able to get a feel for what Jupiter Artland is all about before they come here.”
Tom Flint, programme leader of the interactive media design course at the university, said: “Jupiter Artland has a mission that every child in Scotland should be able to experience it. The next stage of this project will be to find out whether a Minecraft version of Jupiter Artland is enough of an experience for them to get as much out of as I know they do when they visit.”
Ms Banach said: “The project is about 95 per cent finished at the moment. It’s been endless work to try to recreate the whole feel of Jupiter Artland and being immersed in the countryside there.”
Minecraft’s1.9 patch—known as the Combat Update—has been in development at Mojang for well over year, and it’sarriving on PC today. So what exactly does it bring to the table? Let’s take a look.
Once you start playing, the first new thing you’ll notice will likely be the off-hand slot. This is a new inventory slot which you can use todual wielditems, like a sword and a shield, as in the GIF above, or a pickaxe and a stack of torches, so you can light up your mineshafts without constantly switching between items.
Of course, you can use your main hand and off hand items independently of each other.
You can also use the off-hand slot to choose what type of arrow you’ll use when firing the bow (yes, courtesy of the update, there are nowmultiple new arrow types). Otherwise, the game just randomly picks arrows from your inventory.
The patch changes the way combat works, too (hence the name). The damage you inflict is now determined by cooldowns: the faster you swing, the less damage you do. How quickly a tool returns to its full damage potential is decided by a new attack speed stat, which is different for each tool type and material. In practical terms, this means that generally, spamming left click no longer works all that well in a fight.
Tool types have been rebalanced around the cooldown mechanic, meaning you’ve got good all-rounder swords, slow but strong axes, and very fast but weak hoes.
Minecraft’sendgame dimension,The End, is getting a revamp as well. TheEnder Dragon, fittingly for the final boss of the game, got new breath and explosive attacks, which should make the fight—or fights, since it can now be infinitely respawned—a lot more interesting. There’s also a new type of dungeon calledEnd city, found on infinitely generating floating islands around the central island. Here you can findthe flight cape Patricia wrote about a few months back(they’re actually calledElytra), among other types of rare loot.
Those are the big ones, but it’s far from everything. Consult the full change log below,via Mojang’s blog, for a summary of what’s new in 1.9. A more detailed list isavailable at theMinecraftwiki.
Added shields
Attacking now has a “cool-down” delay, making it more important to time your attacks
You can now hold items in both hands (default quick key to swap items is ‘F’)
Swords have a special sweep attack
Axes have a special crushing blow attack
Added the elytra
New mob: Shulker
Expanded The End
Added Chorus plants
New Purpur blocks
New End Rod block
Added dragon head block
Ender Dragon can be resummoned
Added beetroot and beetroot soup (from MC:PE)
Added grass path block
Added igloos
Armor protection values have been lowered
Added tipped arrows
Added spectral arrows
Added Frost Walker enchantment and frosted ice block
Added a whole bunch of new sound effects
Added sound effect subtitles
Brewing Stand now requires Blaze Powder to activate
Added skeleton riders
We believe we’ve fixed MC-10 and a whole bunch of other issues
Removed Herobrine
Questions? Comments? Contact the author of this post at andras-AT-kotaku-DOT-com.
Colossi: giant statues in the real world, gargantuan creatures in fiction. They terrify and inspire awe, even (especially) when they’re painstakingly built by hand inMinecraft.
and the second one called the Supremacy Giant, which has giant turrets attached to it and is missing its horns. It’s also found on a winter map, frozen in the same pose as the Harmony Giant, which makes me think it’s the corpse of the Harmony Giant, but converted into a fortress of some kind. Sad.
It is the sense of scale that hits you. Despite intentionally blocky visuals, the open-world building gameMinecrafthas always produced landscapes of great diversity and beauty. To stand on a hillside and see the plains extend out for miles in all directions remains a great pleasure, even four years after its release.
But visiting the game in virtual reality, actually standing among the craggy chasms, being able to look up at the looming mountains, seeing them extend into the sky far above you … this is a new, rather breathtaking experience.
In September Oculus founderPalmer Luckeyannounced a new version of Minecraft would support his company’s VR headset, the Oculus Rift. The original Java version of the game has been unofficially running on the hardware for over a year thanks to the efforts of the fan community, but the results have been mixed. This one is being co-developed by teams at Mojang (the game’s original developer), Oculus and at Microsoft’s Redmond campus, using the new Windows 10 iteration of the game, which will be the default going forward.
The sense of height and scale is accentuated in Minecraft Oculus. Tall mountains and buildings are a lot more daunting. Photograph: Microsoft
“Just getting it on to the headset seemed hard to begin with, but that was just the start of the challenge,” says Mojang’s Tommaso Checchi. “We got it running in 2014, but then we had to go through and make the game actually work VR. It’s hard to hit a balance where the game is comfortable but still feels perfectly like Minecraft, and you can still play with other people on the same server. VR has one problem – it’s hard to pull off an experience where you can move and rotate freely in a vast open world.”
At the Xbox spring showcase in San Francisco, Microsoft is showing off a demo map, prepared especially to show off the potential of VR Minecraft. The first thing you see when you put on the consumer headset, is a Minecraft-esque room with a large TV screen showing the map you’ve just opened. You can actually sit down and play the game like this – on a 2D virtual display within the VR environment, as though you’re playing it on a normal TV. The development team sees this as a crucial part of the VR ‘on ramp’. “It’s overwhelming at the start,” says Microsoft’s Saxs Persson, who has also been working on theHololens version of the game. “That’s why we start it in a living room, with a screen which is showing you Minecraft – because throwing you in there freezes people. This way, you get a chance to situate yourself, and it calms down the sensory systems, otherwise being fully immersed and moving around … it can be uncomfortable.”
What works in VR – and what doesn’t
A big part of the conversion process has been learning what works and what really doesn’t in a virtual reality experience. The VR development community is starting to establish a few basic rules, and one of them is that there can be no screen movement that isn’t instigated by the player – it’s a one way trip to nausea. “We’ve done a ton of user testing,” says Persson. “At first we just ported it over and put people in the world, and while it was technically Minecraft it wasn’t a good experience. I lasted about five seconds and then I was sick. It just isn’t made for VR: the controls, and simple things like screen shake when something his you – it throws you off kilter.”
According to Persson, the team went through and systematically tweaked how Minecraft works: “We changed the movement: how you jump and turn, how swimming feels and how hit reactions affect the screen. And we had to change the way boats and mine carts worked too.”
In the the Oculus version of Minecraft, the development team has had to remove the screen shake that usually accompanies being hit by a sword or arrow. Photograph: Microsoft
Some problems have been less expected though. “One thing we found out recently is that dimly lit caves can make you sick,” says Checchi. “We think it’s because people try to really focus on details, but things shift and blur in the darkness as you move. We’ve tried to fix that.”
Once you’re ready, you can select to enter the Minecraft map, and then you find yourself immersed in the blocky environment, able to look around in all directions, as though it’s a real place. The game works with anXboxcontroller, which you use to move around and interact with objects in the usual way – it’s just that the very slick head tracking replaces the need to look around with the analogue stick. It takes a little while to get used to directing the cursor with your head, especially when trying to open a chest or use a crafting table, but you do eventually acclimatise.
The demo starts in a small field beneath a large mountain range. When you look up, you see a distant castle right at the top of a vast peak. For a second it seems almost impossibly distant and imposing – it feels like an epic journey away; when you play Minecraft on a 2D screen, the scale of the worlds, the heights, depths and lateral distances that the environment contains, are just numbers, but being inside the world, suddenly the distances are palpable.
Chris Smith, aMicrosoftdeveloper who spent a week designing this map, is an enthusiastic guide. He directs me to a minecart and when I clamber aboard the vehicle powers up and takes me very quickly up a steep incline along the mountainside. It feels like being on a rollercoaster simulator, and this was the only point where I began to feel a little bit of motion sickness (other journalists reported mild nausea at different stages in the demo). As you reach the top, you can look round in all directions and get this rather unsettling feeling of height – it’s something Smith plays with later, by featuring a high bridge created out of glass blocks: you look down as you walk and see the valley surface seemingly hundreds of metres below.
Smith also shows off some impressive red stone machines he’s made; one fires TNT crates into an enormous target which explodes and reveals a massive sculpture of an enderman modelled out of obsidian. We walk for a while among the trees while chickens flutter about around us, looking ridiculously cute and tangible in their new virtual forms.
Inside the castle though, the mood is darker. I very quickly run into a skeleton, which is often a slight shock in the 2D version of the game, but in the virtual world, with those dead eyes staring at you as it fires arrow after arrow, it’s actually pretty scary. Later, I’m rescued by some of the game’s giant Iron Golems, which tower above my character. Again, it’s a whole new feeling of scale and immersion – you get a sense of yourself as a rather puny physical presence in the world rather than a demigod-like figure.
‘You can look each other in the eye’
That sense of embodiment is also going to make this game interesting from a social standpoint. Players will be able to access any Minecraft server and play against people using standard 2D screens onPCand smartphone. But it’ll be fascinating when groups of friends are using Oculus and meeting together in VR Minecraft.
“One thing we’ve seen when playing with multiple people in VR is the heads are so expressive now, you can look each other in the eye – and that has certain connotations,” says Persson. “Some competitive multiplayer mini-games are just more fun now. Digging out underneath your buddy and then watching them looking up at you as they fall with these pleading eyes. It’s so different. And acting out, doing choreographed moves together, it’s super fun. It feels like you’re there, so the sort of things you want to do are slightly different.”
The world’s inhabitants feel a lot more tangible in virtual reality. While enemy mobs are more threatening, chickens increase in cuteness. Photograph: Microsoft
One problem with VR Minecraft as a social platform is that it doesn’t support keyboard input so it’ll be hard for people to communicate via text chat. The team doesn’t see this as a barrier though. “It’ll be interesting to trying new ways to communicate,” says Checchi. “For example, streaming your voice out of the character’s mouth. It’s technically pretty hard, but the Oculus has a microphone in it, so I guess they’re looking at that.”
As this VR experience runs in Windows 10 – like the Pocket, Desktop and Education iterations – it means most of the thousands of fan-made mods currently available won’t work. This makes it all the more important for Microsoft to start nurturing a refreshed creative community around its new Minecraft era. There are amazing possibilities here for completely innovative mini-games and adventures, but these will mostly come from amateur teams rather than Microsoft or Mojang – and most of those teams are still working on Java.
But for Persson, this is still early days for Minecraft VR and for virtual reality games in general. “There’s still so much to learn about how to make a good VR experience,” he says. “You have to unlearn a whole bunch of the simple things that you used to just take for granted. Then it’s one step at a time – that’s the fun part of it.
“With VR you can give people a new way to experience a world – which is what we set out to do. Very few developers have attempted open-world navigation in a VR space like this, but we’ve been forced to with this game. It’s exciting to be blazing trails. I’m not sure we have the answers to anything, but we’re further along the path than most.
“Just getting people immersed in Minecraft is the big step. We’ll see what happens after that.”
