Supergiant Games’ roguelike dungeon crawler Hades will soon be available on Steam (as well as the Epic Games Store) when it hits early access on Valve’s platform on 10th December.
The developer made the announcement as part of the celebration of its 10th birthday, also revealing the entire catalogue of Supergiant Games are up to 80 per cent off in its anniversary sale on Steam.
(1/6) Guess what? Supergiant Games is turning 10 years old!! It’s like we’re a Kid again. Here’s a brief thread with FOUR exciting announcements to mark the occasion!
The latest Minecraft Java edition update is chock full of bugs – bees!
Bees are a brand new neutral mob that will quite happily bumble around, gathering pollen from their favourite flowers and flying back home to their nests to make honey.
They won’t hurt you unless you hurt them – but if you do hurt the bees and provoke them into stinging you they’ll leave their stinger behind and die, and won’t even drop any items for your trouble. You monster.
Bee Nests naturally spawn in Flower Forests, Plains and Sunflower Plains biomes. They have favourite flowers (aww) and like sharing the location of their favourites with other bees (AWW). Do not just whack a bee nest to try and collect the block though! You’ll need to use a tool with silk touch to safely get the block with the bees stored inside, otherwise the nest will be destroyed.
During the nighttime or if it’s raining, your bee pals will chill in their nests. If you want to keep them in chill-mode during the day, you can place a campfire under the nest or hive.
These new mobs will help with your farming by pollinating your crops when they’re on the way back to their nests. You’ll also be able to build a beehive to have your very own colony right on your doorstep, allowing you to harvest their honey and keep them nice and close to your farm.
There are five levels of honey (the amount contained in the nest), and once it reaches level five you’re able to harvest it using an empty glass bottle. You can also harvest honeycomb by shearing a full-honey hive or nest, and you’ll need the honeycomb if you want to create an artificial hive to house your bee friends.
You can check out all the details for the latest update on the Minecraft website. There’s no word just yet when bees will migrate over to the game’s cross-platform Bedrock edition.
It turns out that Minecraft is getting a visual update after all, just not the one that was originally promised. Overnight, graphics card makers Nvidia announced a new update for the game that will add Minecraft to the growing list of PC games that support real-time ray tracing.
“Ray tracing is one of the key innovations that we think is next for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, the game’s creative director, in a video announcing Nvidia’s update. “In normal Minecraft a block of gold just appears yellow but with ray tracing turned on you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it.”
In a brief trailer, you can see how much more vibrant and organic Minecraft’s world feels. Lava glows against nearby blocks, streams of water shimmer and show reflections of what’s nearby, and sunlight filters through a series of vines to create a soft, warm glow on the ground. Of course, players will need Nvidia RTX graphics card if they want to see any of this in their own version of the game.
While Nvidia has also announced that ray tracing support is coming to a bunch of upcoming games including Control and Watch Dogs: Legion, Minecraft is interesting because the game was originally due for a much broader graphical update called the Super Duper Graphics Pack. Announced at E3 2017, the pack was supposed to add much more detailed and realistic lighting effects to the game, as well as other enhancements, including support for 4K.
The update improves the way light bounces around game scenes to make Minecraft environments look more “realistic”.
However, the graphics patch will only be available to people with an Nvidia RTX graphics card.
Microsoft said it would be released in 2020 but gave no firm date.
Hefty price
The RTX graphics cards use a technique called “ray tracing” to do a much better job of working out how light bounces around the virtual scenes in games.
It can make on-screen visuals look more realistic as shadows, colours and the play of light in game environments will look more like the real thing.
“Ray tracing sits at the centre of what we think is next for Minecraft,” said Saxs Persson, creative director of Minecraft at Microsoft, in a statement.
“In normal Minecraft, a block of gold just appears yellow, but with ray tracing turned on, you really get to see the specular highlight, you get to see the reflection, you can even see a mob reflected in it,” he said.
The prices of Nvidia cards vary widely across online retailers, but low-end cards typically cost more than £300, The most expensive in the range can cost thousands. The update will also only be available on Windows 10.
As the update is being developed, Minecraft-maker Mojang said it would be added as an option on the settings screen so players could test it out.
It also added that it was working on a more general overhaul of Minecraft’s graphics engine. This, it said, should bring some visual improvements to people who do not possess an RTX card or who do not run the game on a PC.
“Not all devices will support ray tracing, but we will have some graphics enhancements on most devices,” said Mojang. No date has been given for when this general update will be available.
Both announcements were made on the eve of the Gamescom gaming show, which runs this week in Cologne.
News about the RTX release came less than a week after Microsoft announced it was cancelling what it called the “Super Duper Graphics” update for Minecraft.
Announced in 2017, this promised to improve the look of the game on every gadget on which the game was available.
The update was cancelled after two years of development, because the “technical challenges” of producing it had proved insurmountable.
