by Stone Marshall | Jan 14, 2015 | Minecraft News |
For the first time ever, Mojang now has the ability to see how many people are playing Minecraft — as it happens — on PC.
And as of 9:20 AM EST, there were one million people playing Minecraft at a single moment. Not impressed? Considering 9:20 AM isn’t the peak time that people play Minecraft, that number will be spiking up at a certain time in the day.
The million morning Minecraft-ers count only looks at individuals playing on PC (Win/OS X/Linux), versions 1.3 and higher. That’s a lot of people not included in the count. Minecraft is available on the PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Vita, Xbox 360 and Xbox One, there are plenty of people with these devices and plenty of them bought Minecraft.
All of this news was obtained from Nathan Adams, a developer at Mojang. While he revealed this news the less thrilled fans questioned whether or not the ability to change names was coming to Minecraft. The answer is, “Very soon, yes.”
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by Stone Marshall | Jan 14, 2015 | Minecraft News |
There was a time not so long ago when Minecraft was actually a game. Now, it’s an insane sandbox where people build all kinds of incredibly complex things… like a word processor… out of blocks.
This crazy contraption is the work of a a third-year robotics student who goes by the name of Koala_Steamed on YouTube. It’s the result of nearly two years of painstaking work inside the Minecraft world. That’s not continuous, mind you. Breaks were obviously taken to do things like attend classes, use the washroom, and interact with people and things that had curves.
In the comments on his video, Koala also clarifies that it was built completely without the use of command blocks. In fact, it’s all running off a single trail of redstone. It has a predictably pixelated display that measures just five characters by ten characters, and it can handle just about any character you can throw at it: letters (bother upper and lower case), numbers, and common symbols are no problem.
Koala’s creation can even save files to and load them from integrated storage. The next step: adding support for keyboard shortcuts like a desktop text editor (control+L to load files, etc.). After that, the plan is to add RAM and turn this thing from a word processor into an actual computer.
It’s fun enough to watch, but you can actually take a closer look at Koala’s word processor if you like. The entire world is available via a Mediafire download so you can fire it up on your own system and see exactly how this amazing creation was put together.
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by Stone Marshall | Jan 10, 2015 | Minecraft News |
What are your kids reading these last few days of winter break?
Chances are, they aren’t likely reading a nonfiction book, according to a recent study of kids’ reading habits by Renaissance Learning.
That’s particularly true for girls, who at every grade level are devoting much less of their reading time to nonfiction than boys, the report found.
While Renaissance Learning’s report looks only at books, and not web articles or other texts that may be assigned in classes, the results are worth noting, given an increasing emphasis on nonfiction texts in the Common Core State Standards.
The Common Core standards recommend a 50-50 balance between informational and fiction reading at the K-5 level; by senior year of high school, the recommendation is that 70 percent of the reading a student does — not just in English class — be nonfiction.
“In order to be successful in their lives in and outside of school, it is imperative that students read a broad array of literature, especially nonfiction, where data shows students are currently lacking,” the Renaissance Learning report said.
Renaissance Learning used its Accelerated Reader program to track students’ reading habits for the report. Students use the Accelerated Reader program to document books read and monitor reading progress through quizzes and other programs.
The study used records for more than 9.8 million students nationwide who read more than 330 million books during the 2013–2014 school year.
It found that students’ interest in nonfiction texts tends to peak around fifth grade. In that grade, about 31 percent of the books boys read are nonfiction, the study found. For fifth-grade girls, 21 percent of the books being read are nonfiction.
It should be noted that girls tend to be more voracious readers than boys, according to the study. On average, girls read 761,000 more words than boys by the time they finish high school, and encounter about 25 percent more words than boys.
For more, Renaissance Learning has a page of interactive charts showing how and what students are reading at different grade levels.
In the meantime, here’s a breakdown of the most popular books being read by Kentucky students in each grade, according to the report:
Grades 1 and 2: Green Eggs and Ham
Grade 3: Because of Winn-Dixie
Grades 4, 5 and 6: Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hard Luck
Grade 7: Divergent
Grade 8: The Outsiders
Grade 9: To Kill a Mockingbird
Grade 10: Divergent
Grade 11: The Crucible
Grade 12: The Hunger Games
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by Stone Marshall | Jan 8, 2015 | Awesome Book News, Minecraft News |
I was browsing Telltale Games’ website this morning (scavenging for deals on Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands), and discovered this:
Well, that’s… definitely not what I expected.
Having recently played The Wolf Among Us, and eagerly starting The Walking Dead: Season Two, I was pretty much psyched to hear about their new project. I don’t know what to think now. This actually feels like a way far gone version of the Tales from the Borderlands’ announcement, where a lot of people, myself included went “Wuh? Does that series need an adventure game”
It’s very strange… and I love it. This pairing oddly enough reminds me of this year’s The Lego Movie. High quality artists working on a super large brand. Could it turn out that well? Maybe. Maybe I’ll eat poop. But you know, I don’t really like to eat poop, so I might not eat it. Poop.
There’s also a nifty little announcement game you can play (that plays Telltale style). Check it out under “Learn More”.
I think this is a sign of what’s to come. There’s a Minecraft movie in development. That paired with this announcement are tell tale (tee hee) signs of where Microsoft intends to take this franchise. They’re going big. Real big.
I hope it’s a gritty retelling of the game. I love gritty retellings!
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by Stone Marshall | Jan 2, 2015 | Minecraft News |
There is going to be a new way for gamers to explore the world of Minecraft soon as Mojang have revealed a Minecraft: Story Mode is in development. The adventure series is being created by TellTale Games and the first of the episodes will make its way out in 2015 for he Xbox, PlayStation and the PC.
The Minecraft Story Mode is going to be an original and new story that will depend on the choice of the player. The game isn’t going to have Steve as the lead character. Mojang said that the game is going to be cool. It won’t rely on players owning Minecraft and the Minecraft community is helping, though how we are not sure about.
Along with the Minecraft Story mode game, there is also going to be a movie based around Minecraft. More details are to be released early 2015.
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by Stone Marshall | Dec 30, 2014 | Minecraft News |
Not too long ago, this game made headlines due to its developer Mojang’s recent $2.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. That’s way more than the price of recent acquisitions like Facebook’s Instagram takeover ($1 billion) and Yahoo’s Tumblr ($1.1 billion). For many over here, it came as a shock because a lot of people in Bangladesh are actually almost completely unaware of Minecraft.
WHAT IS MINECRAFT?
It’s a sandbox game. And it’s just that. You get to do and create whatever you want. Ever wanted to make a replica of your own house but with a 24/7 supply of electricity? Now you can with Minecraft. It’s like Lego for adults who can’t afford Lego. A bunch of survival elements can be thrown in. These involve Creepers which creep up on you and explode. There’s an abundance of spiders, skeletons and fish which try to kill you. Except you kill them and harvest their bones and string to build your castle on their dead bodies. Minecraft is what would happen if you were thrown in the middle of Rangpur with nothing except your bare hands to build civilisation. And if you had the work ethic of 10,000 Egyptian slaves to go with it. Unlike Terraria, which is Minecraft’s 2D action-adventure cousin of the same genre, Minecraft does not have any quests.
WHY IT’S WORTH THE PRICE TAG
According to Satya Nadella, “If you talk about STEM* education, the best way to introduce anyone to STEM or get their curiosity going on, it’s Minecraft.” But there are more factors at work over here. All over the world, kids love Minecraft. A few weeks back, I saw a post in DSD about a woman asking what platform (Xbone, PS4, PC) would be best for her eight-year-old daughter’s requests for a console to play Minecraft. This was after the kid wanted to move out of the Android version of Minecraft on her tablet. When I was eight, the maximum creativity I could express on a computer was on MS Paint and now we have kids everywhere building houses with Minecraft. For Microsoft, owning Minecraft is a statement—it’s about owning the childhood of a
generation.
THE EXTENT OF MINECRAFT’S CREATIVITY
A group of players made a computer inside Minecraft. So to speak, you can create a computer inside a world inside a computer. Although, the Minecraft computer is very basic and can only load 16 lines of code into its RAM, it’s still a feat. Now, for all the Game of Thrones fans out there, a group made an exact replica of King’s Landing. The amount of detail put into the map is insane. A lot of gamers will think that with enough people, an exact replica of Dhaka is very much possible or maybe something less ambitious like your school classroom just as you remember it. It’ll be even more fun if you can get your friends to do it along with you. For some, recreating places from memories can be an extremely rewarding pastime.
MINECRAFT IN BANGLADESH
It took me quite some to actually figure out where the Bangladeshi players are. After doing several searches on Facebook, I finally found the 50 member Facebook group “Minecrafters BD” where I was welcomed quite warmly. Here is a community that has been struggling to play together the video game they love. Their dedication is one to admire and it’s just the thing that often breeds great gaming communities. Every now and then, one of the members host private servers on their PCs but that just doesn’t cut it when you’re aiming for a large community. According to one of the members, Istiak Al Nur Niloy, “It’s nearly impossible to set up a server for 24/7 uptime let alone moderate the server to keep everything in check. We as the hosts have no admin power and no one can keep their PC running 24/7. The servers that we are hosting irregularly at the moment are enough for the community but if a time comes that when we need a 24/7 server we can always rent servers from providers like Atrinos. For now the dream of a 24/7 dedicated server sounds a bit far-fetched.”
GRAPHICS?
There’s another problem when it comes to attracting newer players who’re into flashy games to Minecraft: the graphics of the game are pretty blocky and old-school. But to that, Siam Shafiq, who hosted a Minecrafters BD server at the time, said “Overall with some time and dedication I believe Minecraft can take off in Bangladesh but only if the people judge the game by its gameplay, not its graphics. Based in a 3D world of cubes it’s only normal to have that sort of retro graphics but that’s the entire point.” But then again, if you treat each block like pixels are on a screen, a lot of detail CAN be added to the game if one is patient with the amount of blocks taken.
While Minecraft is taking off globally, very little is done over here in Bangladesh. Some of the players urge the ISPs to host a dedicated server like they do for CoD and Counter-Strike but until the community grows enough to turn the extremely stiff heads of Bangladeshi ISPs, there’s little that can be done; unless you are like Ayaan Manzur from Minecrafters BD and his friends who rent a server for Tk. 400 every month from Singapore.
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