A Minecraft player in Taiwan has attracted the local community of the popular sandbox video game after recreating his high school alma mater because he was missing it badly.
The physical school
The player, a member of Taiwanese online network Dcard, started reproducing New Taipei Municipal Panchiao Senior High School in his first year of university and has now been building it for two years.
The virtual school
The player has recreated the school’s administrative building, library, swimming pool and campus in great detail, Taiwan News reported.
The administrative building
The library’s second floor
The swimming pool
With the help of his friends’ photos and Google Maps, he started with the school’s athletics field and surrounding buildings before constructing the main buildings.
The athletics field
The museum
The library entrance
He also had to visit the school to take photos and build the structures in better detail.
A normal classroom
A computer classroom
A small lecture hall
While the player acknowledged that there are still unfinished classrooms, walls and other areas, he still received praise for the impressive details that captured the actual look of the school, including drinking fountains, CNA noted.
The school facade
He is uncertain about when everything will be finished, but he hopes to incorporate a mystery plot and adventure map within the campus in the future.
Annual gathering of the Minecraft fans has ditched physical interaction for digital.
A child plays Minecraft at the 2015 Minecon in London, England. The game’s creator, Mojang, announced Tuesday that this year’s convention would be a free online event to air November 18. (Reuters)
Fans of the video game Minecraft will only have to travel as far as their computer for this year’s Minecon.
Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, announced Tuesday that its annual convention, Minecon, will not be held in a physical location but rather will be produced and streamed free to fans across the world November 18.
The company is dubbing it Minecon Earth and offered few details of what viewers would see during the 90-minute interactive show.
The reason for the switch was due to accessibility for the game’s huge audience, the company posted on Minecraft.net.
“The Minecraft community is still growing, and there’s only a certain number of players we can host while keeping the friendly, intimate community atmosphere that’s made previous MINECONs so special,” wrote Owen Jones, Mojang’s director of creative communications in an announcement.
The desktop version of the game has been downloaded more than 26.5 million times, according to the website.
Traditionally, annual Minecons have been hosted in various cities for the past seven years with tickets costing an upward of $100 and selling out immediately. The convention would draw thousands of fans to see the best costumes from the game and hear from Minecraft developers and experts.
Kids compete in a Minecraft costume contest at the first Minefaire, held in Philadelphia in October 2016. The event will be held this month at the Dulles Expo Center in Dulles, Virginia. (Minefaire)
As an alternative to the actual convention, Mojang is promoting official community Minecraft events across the country for groups of local fans to gather. One such organizer is Minefaire, which will be hosting its first Northern Virginia event August 19-20 at the Dulles Expo Center in Dulles, Virginia.
The event will feature Minecraft YouTube personalities and events where attendees can play with other Minecrafters.
The second episode of the second season of Minecraft Story Mode will premiere August 15th, developer Telltale announced today. It will be available digitally for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, Mac, iOS and Android.
Titled “Giant Consequences,” episode two will follow main character Jesse to an “icy unknown,” after the events of the first episode introduced them to a foe with the capabilities of ending entire cities. The episode will continue Telltale’s new “Crowd Play” feature, which allows others to help a player make decisions during the game’s narrative.
Alongside the new episode, Telltale announced today that the first season of Minecraft would be coming in its entirety to the Nintendo Switch. The Complete Edition will be available digitally or physically on August 22nd and will have all five regular episodes, as well as three bonus episodes originally only available in the ‘Adventure Pass’ add-on series. A retail version of the first season was released for other consoles last December.
Season two is expected to get a similar full release later this fall.
Minecraft Story Mode is a joint venture between Telltale and Mojang that tells a story within the Minecraft Universe. Since its original launch in 2015, Story Mode has received mixed reviews from critics, who have praised the game’s humor and criticized its technical issues.
Minecraft is adding more community content to the Marketplace with a new batch of content packs.
A whole slew of content is hitting the Minecraft Marketplace today thanks to five new community-created packs. Most notable is the Infinity Dungeon EX map, which generates a new dungeon every time you enter. On top of that, however, players can now get their hands on a bunch of new skins with packs themed after summer fun, sports, medieval kings, and more.
Here’s a quick look at all of the new packs hitting the Marketplace today:
Infinity Dungeon EX – Fight alone or alongside friends through an intense randomly-generated dungeon full of horrible dangers, tricky puzzles and amazing treasure! Discover the secret of the Infinity Core, but make sure to watch your back…
Summer Festival Skin Pack – Throw on your summer gear and hop down to the beach! Live life like a turtle or a mermaid, and show off those summer colors with this seasonal skin pack!
Survivors Skin Pack – The world has gone to ruins, but these characters manage to survive against all odds. This skin pack is all about the rough-and-tough adventurers who use their strength and ingenuity to survive yet another day.
Kings and Paupers Skin Pack – From the heights of the castle down to the streets of the city, this pack will immerse you in the European medieval era. Serve as a virtuous queen, live as a beggar, bake bread, or handle the axe as an executioner in service of the crown!
Sports Skin Pack – Transform into an athlete with the Sports Skin Pack! Team player? Pick up a ball as a volleyball or soccer player. In the mood for gracefully sliding around? Become a figure skater or hockey player. Choose from 15 different sports and get your game on.
As far as cost is concerned, each pack runs 310 coins each. The exception is the Infinity Dungeon EX map, which is slightly more expensive at 830 coins.
This comes after the initial introduction of the Minecraft Marketplace in May, which is a place for Minecraft community creator partners to sell their work to players. Anyone on the Bedrock Engine, which currently includes Minecraft on Windows 10 and Mobile platforms, can pick up the new Marketplace content now. Minecraft on Xbox One and Nintendo Switch are expected to join the Bedrock ecosystem soon.
Stunning footage shows how thousands of Game of Thrones fanatics have painstakingly recreated the fantasy world of Westeros using Minecraft .
A video of the model, entitled WesterosCraft , includes some of the most iconic settings in the HBO hit show that have been built using the game.
Featured areas include Kings Landing, High Hermitage, Misty Isle, Castamere and Oldstones in the latest glimpse into the virtual world – where the first brick was laid in 2011.
Thousands of gamers have contributed their efforts free of charge to help construct WesterosCraft since the launch.
Iconic settings in the HBO show have been built in block form (Image: Westeroscraft)
Minecraft players starting building WesterosCraft in 2011 (Image: Westeroscraft)
The model is about 65 per cent completed (Image: Westeroscraft)
It is believed thousands of players have contributed to WesterosCraft (Image: Westeroscraft)
Eventually, the world will serve as the setting for a game to allow players to take part in their own Game of Thrones-style adventures.
Minecraft for the Nintendo Switch is about to look dramatically better when connected to televisions, and it’s thanks to the cautionary diligence of its console handlers that we’re seeing it now, a few months after release. The game shipped on May 11 locked in both handheld and TV mode at 720p, pushing on the order of about a million pixels. After the update, it’ll run at 1080p in TV mode, and push over twice as many pixels.
How’d they do it? Microsofttold TIME in May that the reason for the lower resolution involved “issues currently experienced shifting from one resolution to the other when docking/undocking.” The company passed along speculation from 4J Studios that 1080p might be attainable, but it couldn’t promise anything.
I just spoke with 4J Studios CTO Richard Reavy, and it turns out the issue of getting Minecraft for the Switch to 1080p involved double and triple checking the interface — and a bit of performance optimization. (4J develops all console versions of Minecraft.)
Reavy tells me the game needed further optimization to handle 1080p comfortably, but that the studio was confident it could make that happen given sufficient time.
“We did spend some time analyzing our GPU usage and optimizing things before we did this move as well,” he says. “We needed to spend some time looking at the fill rate and being more careful with that, just because of the number of pixels in 1080p. We kind of knew we could do the optimization and we would get there with the performance. But yeah, ultimately, the fundamental problem was switching resolution.”
More specifically, switching the user interface at different resolutions. Reavy tells me the user interface on each of the console versions — besides the Switch, they include the PlayStation 3 and 4, PS Vita, Xbox 360 and One, and the Wii U — have custom user interfaces. “Every interface seam is handcrafted by our art team to suit the exact resolution of the console it’s on,” says Reavy. Everything through May ran at a fixed resolution. But when the Switch arrived, 4J Studios had to grapple with its signature feature: transitioning dynamically between different resolutions without hiccups or pauses.
“We wanted to make sure the transition was really slick, and that the user wouldn’t notice anything, like it taking seconds unloading one user interface system for another,” he says. “And also because you can dock and undock your console at any point, it can be quite problematic that the user could switch the console at a really inopportune moment.” This explains Microsoft’s delay in rolling out the feature between May and now: 4J Studios simply wanted the time to thoroughly vet the user interface while changing resolution at any point while playing the game.
For now, 1080p is the biggest technical revision. The draw distance is still a bit lower than on PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, you’re limited to “Medium” world sizes (3,072-by-3,072 blocks versus “Large,” which supports 5,120-by-5,120 blocks) and you don’t get the checkbox to create “Amplified” terrain. “Everything else is unchanged at present,” says Reavy. “We really just wanted to make sure jumping up the resolution wouldn’t cause any problems.”
Those differences may fade when, later this fall, Minecraft for the Switch transitions to the much more versatile and scalable “bedrock engine” that currently runs on Windows 10, iOS and Android devices. And it’s at that point things get really interesting, because Microsoft and Nintendo will be doing something that has no industry precedent, allowing Xbox One, iPhone, Windows PC and Nintendo Switch owners to play together in a single, seamlessly backend-unified ecosystem.
