I didn't think one of the biggest stories of the year for TweakTown would be something covering Minecraft with ‘ray tracing' style effects with the SEUS Renewed mod that uses path tracing that provides ray tracing-like effects. First we had screenshots and small videos, but now there's a detailed video of Minecraft with the ray tracing-style effects and it looks awesome. The shader pack provides beautifully realistic lighting, shadow and reflection effects to shiny surfaces, light shafts, and more. The demo video from Digital Foundry was run on an Intel Core i9-7900X, 32GB of RAM and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti. Even with this horsepower running Minecraft with the path tracing effects at 1080p was still struggling to hit 60FPS. The team at Digital Foundry do an amazing job at showing off the different effects that path tracing brings to Minecraft, with one of the best uses seeing light hitting a wall, and then shining light again behind it causing different shadows to be cast. This can't be done with pre-baked lighting, and is only achievable with path tracing or real-time ray tracing effects. It makes for a beautiful experience in something like Minecraft, which has otherwise basic graphics. This makes Minecraft the perfect playground for developers to play around with path tracing to see what real-time ray tracing would be like in a world where you can literally build it from building blocks right in front of you with real-time adjustments to the lighting. If you want to check more out on SEUS Remastered for Minecraft, download the mod, or support the developer – check out the Patreon page.
TechSpot regulars may recall that earlier this month, Minecraft — one of the most popular games of the modern generation — got its very own version of ray tracing in the form of a third-party shader pack. The pack adds “path tracing” rendering to the game, which creates effects that are remarkably similar to what we've seen in Nvidia RTX-powered titles like Metro Exodus and Battlefield V.
The shader pack adds reflections to shiny surfaces, light shafts, and more. To give us a deeper glimpse of the pack in action, Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia and John Linneman have decided to take viewers on a 30-minute in-game ray tracing tour.
Prior to publishing the video, Battaglia constructed a number of rooms, each of which were designed to show off the power of path tracing in a different way. We see specular bounce lighting as light pours into rooms and hits various blocks, and one room even shows the differing levels of reflectivity for various block types – light bounces of metallic blocks more easily than wool blocks, for example.
As Linneman says, this approach to creating ray tracing-like effects is more software-driven than hardware-driven, but it still takes a pretty big bite out of performance. Despite the beefy specs of Linneman's rig — it was powered by an Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti, 32GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i9 7900X — he still struggled to achieve a smooth 60 FPS at 1080p.
Battaglia's system was considerably weaker, with a GTX 1070, AMD's Ryzen 1700X, and 16GB of RAM. As you might expect, his performance was even worse – indeed, he had to knock Minecraft's resolution down to 720p and cap the FPS at 30 to make the game playable.
Apparently, even that level of playability is only possible because of the very nature of Minecraft: the entire world is made up of blocks, which aren't very complex. They're either deleted or existing and remaining still. With very few exceptions (such as sand or gravel, which fall straight down), almost every block in Minecraft is completely static.
Due to these unique qualities, if one were to try to implement this tech in another ordinarily non-performance-intensive game, such as Fortnite, there's a good chance it'd be near-impossible to run on modern rigs without some form of hardware-based optimization.
Still, performance aside, it's interesting to see Minecraft from such a different perspective. If you have a rig that can take full advantage of this mod (created by Sonic Ether), you can download it from the modder's Patreon page right here (https://www.patreon.com/sonicether ) .
Undertaken by 13 members of Team Kyo that were part of the Minecraft Partner Program, they managed to recreate the entirety of Hyrule Castle from Breath of the Wild.
Not only did they manage to build the exteriors of the castle to a wonderful level of detail but also did a great deal of work bringing the interiors to life as well.
You will also notice in the video below, that this version of Hyrule Castle is actually pre-Calamity Ganon and is consequently not the ruined wreck you see in the game.
That said, I found traversing Hyrule Castle in the game to be both fascinating and somewhat haunting, not least due to the amazing musical score.
Anyway, this Minecraft rendition of Hyrule Castle is amazing and with any luck, we will see it become available on the Minecraft Marketplace at some point.
Like many a major media property, Minecraft is set to get its own movie. There have been plans for a Minecraft movie since 2014 — in fact, it was originally set to release next month — but now it seems some progress has been made with Mojang partnering with Warner Bros and a director attached to the project. That director is Peter Sollett, who has directed a variety of film and TV shows and is most known for 2008's Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist.
Aside from the director, it was revealed by Mojang that it will be a live-action film. Not only that, but they revealed a basic — they don't want to spoil everything, after all — storyline for the film:
We’ll tell you the story of a teenage girl and her unlikely group of adventurers. After the malevolent Ender Dragon sets out on a path of destruction, they must save their beautiful, blocky Overworld.Now, given the infamous track record of video game film adaptations, you might want to avoid buying tickets right away. But who knows, I was personally extremely sceptical about what seemed like the equally nonsensical idea The Lego Movie, and that turned out to be pretty great. Whatever the case is, we should find out on March 4, 2022, and of course, we'll bring you other details when we know more.
We've got the full list of Minecraft achievements – check the list for guides to unlocking them.
It shouldn’t be too much longer until the final Village and Pillage update is out to players. In the meantime, the Microsoft Marketplace is running a Spring Sale today, featuring “up to 75% off” in-game items such as world, skins, textures, and other content.View image on Twitter
Spring is here, and with it – the Minecraft Marketplace Spring sale! Between April 19-21, get up to 75% off worlds, skins, texture packs and more. One of our biggest sales ever has new discounts every day, so spring into action and check it out!
The sales will run this weekend between April 19 and the 21, and each of the three promotional days will see a different set of sales. So, if you (or a friend or child) have been looking to spice up the game with a new texture or map to explore, now is the perfect time to try something new.
At least for now you’ll have something to do while you patiently wait for the rest of the Village & Pillage update—which will add raiding, Illager patrols, and many additional blocks such as the Campfire, Carrel, Smoker, and Stonecutter (which are all available though expirimental gameplay.
If you don’t yet have Minecraft, you can download it using one of the links below. And if you do, you can check out the Minecraft Marketplace from here to see what peaks your interest.
While we still have plenty of questions about each strategy — except for the Switch, which is a relatively known quantity these days — it’s worth looking at the details that each company first chooses to share about their next-generation plans. Nintendo wanted you to play the Switch everywhere, Google doesn’t care about selling you hardware, and Microsoft is betting on a subscription model that can be used across multiple devices. Each of these approaches is a drastic shift from what came before.
Now we have Sony sharing details of the “PlayStation 5,” the as-yet-unnamed sequel to the PlayStation 4. And based on what the company has chosen as the first details to share, it sounds like the PlayStation 5 is going to be … a pretty traditional console with some speed and power upgrades.
This is a very smart strategy for a next-generation console.
THE POWER OF THE KNOWN
Nintendo hasn’t competed directly against Microsoft and Sony for years, although you could argue that each company’s consoles and games are fighting for your limited video gaming dollar. But Microsoft and Sony have long been in direct competition, both offering roughly analogous hardware that sits near your television and plays games.
So how did that play out during this current generation of consoles? Microsoft tried to sell a console that would let you wave your arms around and yell at it until you were watching cable TV — a console with an aggressive digital strategy that would have all but eliminated the market for used games. It was an ambitious, and expensive, mess.
The digital strategy was eliminated before the system launched. The Kinect hardware lasted a bit longer, but there is no longer any version of the Xbox One that includes the Kinect. The motion-sensing accessory is dead.
Sony dominated this generation by ignoring Microsoft’s strategy in order to create a traditional gaming console that played used games, allowed you to lend games to friends, and cost $100 less than the Xbox One. There were very few gimmicks: just a lower price, powerful hardware, and a great selection of exclusive games. It was a back-to-basics approach that players appreciated after trying to wrap their heads around all the new ideas that Microsoft tried to sell.
“Our focus is on bringing console quality games that you see on TV or PC to any device,” Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told the Guardian last year. “I want to see the creators that I have relationships with reach all two billion people who play games, and not have to turn their studio into something that makes match-3 games rather than story-driven single-player games. Because that’s the only way to reach a bigger platform. That is our goal: to bring high-quality games to every device possible on the planet.”
Compare all this rhetoric to how Sony introduced the ideas behind its upcoming system on Tuesday: Sony said that it’s powerful — the system is capable of 8K graphics and ray tracing — and it will use a specifically engineered solid-state drive to keep data flowing between the hard drive and the rest of the system as quickly as possible. The console will include a drive for physical discs, and it will support current PlayStation VR hardware. Backward compatibility for PS4 games will also be included, a welcome addition for fans who like returning to the their favorite games — and something of an about-face from Sony on the topic.
These details make the PlayStation 5, or whatever it will ultimately be called, sound like a strong but expected update to the PlayStation 4. Sony may be holding back details of a possible cloud gaming service or other, bigger updates to the PlayStation formula, but so far there is nothing here that’s very surprising.
I’m not criticizing Sony, just to be clear. Making a console with new architecture that gets the most out of an SSD and a new CPU and GPU isn’t easy, especially when you know you’re going to have to sell it at a mass-market price. But Sony is playing it pretty safe with the news it’s releasing so far, and that sounds like a smarter plan than what Microsoft has been hinting at.SONY DOMINATED THIS GENERATION BY IGNORING MICROSOFT’S STRATEGY
Is there any evidence that players want to stream their console-style games on multiple devices? Are players begging for subscription services that replace the per-purchase cost of games? Does anyone want the basic console formula to change? Is the mass market ready for a console that can also be used as a portable device?
I’d argue that you can only definitively answer “yes” to one of those questions, and Nintendo already owns that market with the Nintendo Switch.
Based on what we know today, Sony is playing it very safe with its latest console, but that strategy has done wonders for Sony’s hardware. Sony is used to giving players what they want rather than selling them on something completely new, and we don’t have a lot of evidence that suggests players want to rethink the basic ideas behind game consoles.
So while the competition may have a hard time convincing players that device-agnostic streaming options or first-party subscriptions for major games is the way to go, Sony just has to remind them that they’ve always liked fast, capable boxes that plug into a television to play $60 video games.
In a world where everything is changing, maybe the best approach is to offer players what they already know they like. Sony, so far, doesn’t have to sell you on anything new or hard to explain: The next system in the PlayStation line will take discs, will make games look better, and will allow those games to load much faster. It will sit close to your TV and play video games.
And, at least for now, that might be all players want out of their next console purchase.
