by Stone Marshall | Nov 4, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Microsoft is no longer supporting the Apple TV version of Minecraft. The app has has been pulled from the App Store, and an in-game message notes that it won’t receive any further updates, though it’ll continue to be playable. Refunds will be issued for any purchases made up to 90 days before the announcement comes into effect. And it actually went into effect on September 24th, so it’s even more of an indictment of the state of Apple TV gaming that no-one really seemed to notice until this week.
Minecraft is one of the biggest games in history and has managed to find an audience on virtually every console, phone, and computer out there — including the iPhone, from which the Apple TV version was derived. But the Apple TV has been hampered as a games platform ever since Apple bungled the launch by unexpectedly requiring developers to support the Siri Remote. The company backtracked the following year, but the damage was done.
Apple hasn’t entirely given up on Apple TV gaming. Last year’s iPhone keynote saw Sky, the next game from Journey and Flower studio Thatgamecompany, shown off for the first time on the Apple TV 4K. But even that game is yet to see release, and it’s clear that Apple’s focus is elsewhere.
by Stone Marshall | Nov 4, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Updates and support quietly ended for Minecraft on Apple TV back on Sept. 24, but it doesn't mean the game will stop working on Apple's device. You can continue to build your world and use the Marketplace and Minecoins.
Minecraft is one of the widest available games in terms of the platforms it targets. Over the course of its lifetime since 2011, 18 different platforms have seen a Minecraft release. As the hardware ages, support for the game ends and the latest platform to be dropped is the Apple TV.
As MCV reports, Microsoft isn't making a big deal of ending updates and support for Apple's device. Anyone playing Minecraft on the media box will have seen a message pop up explaining what is happening. You can see the message in full in the tweet below:
The 10 year old mentioned it on Sunday. Didn't see the splash screen then but here it is… pic.twitter.com/XYQ2TirzM7
— mac-interactive ???????????? (@macinteractive) October 9, 2018
If you aren't happy about this and made any purchases for the game in the last 90 days, Microsoft is offering to refund your money. That's going to be welcome news if you've recently spent a lot of cash in the game and it should help you move to a different platform and start buying things again on the marketplace.
What the end of support really means is, when something breaks it won't get fixed. That will most likely happen when Apple releases software updates for the box. The game could continue to work for years, but it could just as easily be a few months.
If you're thinking of switching platforms, there's lots of options. I suspect jumping to the Nintendo Switch or New 3DS will prove most popular, but any of the current crop of games consoles have a version of the game available, or you could stick it on a cheap Linux or Windows 10 box under your TV.
by Stone Marshall | Nov 3, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Erik Andersen had never been interested in architecture, but playing Minecraft – a popular 3D video game where users build and navigate their own digital environments – he found himself constructing a brick-by-brick scale model of a temple he’d once seen in Bangkok.
“Suddenly I was actually starting to look at buildings and think about their design features,” said Andersen, assistant professor of computer science. “I’m generally interested in education in games, and I was impressed by how this game got me interested in architecture.”
Seeking to harness that educational potential, Andersen and three other Cornell computer scientists developed a Minecraft modification that uses artificial intelligence to tell players whether their buildings fit into certain architectural styles, and offers ideas for how the structures could be improved. Their modification – which is not yet publicly available – also helped advance the researchers’ work in computer vision and human-robot communication.
The authors will present their paper, “Design Mining for Minecraft Architecture,” at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment, Nov. 13-17, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
“Minecraft, without intending to be an educational tool, has been pulled in so many different directions, where originally it was just for fighting monsters,” said senior author Ross Knepper, assistant professor of computer science. “One of the things that’s important to learn when you’re a kid and throughout life is creativity, abstraction – how to envision what you want and then create it. That’s not an easy skill for anyone. So this is a tool that helps people not get discouraged, maybe if they’re beginning at Minecraft and don’t know how to use their imagination right off the bat.”
“When you’re working with images, it’s really hard to actually get at the essence of what something is. A machine observing how people build can actually learn quite a bit about about what shape is, what structure is, what buildings are.”
Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science
Based on buildings that Minecraft players created and uploaded for others to use, the researchers created a deep neural network – a kind of machine learning trained to predict whether data belongs in a certain category. Through that network, players could learn whether their building is medieval, modern, Asian or classical – four especially popular tags used by Minecraft players. Once the building is classified, another algorithm can show the users similar buildings to inspire them to make improvements to their own.
The program also allows users to import similar buildings into their Minecraft worlds, creating a neighborhood of like styles.
“It’s a way for the users to learn more about the thing they built,” said Irene (Euisun) Yoon ’19, first author on the paper. “People are really interested in having more design spaces in Minecraft, and being able to build certain types of architecture, but there weren’t any design tools as far as we were aware that can teach them.”
Yoon personally curated the data set to make sure the buildings were labeled correctly, since their algorithm was less accurate than they would have liked because it was trained with fewer than 1,000 player-created buildings. Ideally, such an algorithm would be trained with tens or hundreds of thousands of pieces of data.
“If you ask an architect to tell you what a building’s style is, the architect will say, ‘OK, it’s one-and-a-half stories, it has dormers, it’s a Cape Cod.’ Deep learning is doing that but it’s doing it in a black box way (hidden from view). It learns patterns, but not necessarily the same patterns an architect would say are the key things,” Knepper said. For example, if all the modern-style houses in a data set have pools on the roof, the computer could assume that rooftop pools are a requirement for modern houses.
For Knepper, a roboticist by training, the Minecraft project helped answer questions about how a robot might follow a human’s instructions.
“If I say, ‘Build a house,’ today a robot is going to say, ‘I don’t know what that means.’ ‘Which brick should I put where?’ is the level at which robots need instruction,” Knepper said. “We’d like humans to be able to interface with robots more like we interface with each other. So if I tell it to build a medieval house or an ancient house and give some of the high-level details, it would know at that point how to turn it into a plausible thing that does everything you want. We’re not there yet, but this is the first step towards that goal.”
Co-author Bharath Hariharan, assistant professor of computer science, approached the research from the perspective of his own work in computer vision. In trying to interpret an image, a computer can be trained to pick up cues such as shape and solidity, but may have trouble processing perspective or scale. Using people’s intelligence through their Minecraft structures and tags can help computers learn to solve those problems.
“When you’re working with images, it’s really hard to actually get at the essence of what something is,” Hariharan said. “A machine observing how people build can actually learn quite a bit about about what shape is, what structure is, what buildings are.”
The paper is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation.
by Stone Marshall | Nov 3, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
Think that the headline-grabbing Fortnite is the world’s most popular video game right now? Think again. Publisher Microsoft has revealed that Minecraft, the voxel-based building and survival game, has over 91 million active monthly players.
That’s a significant 13 million advance on the record 78.3 million players that Fortnite posted in August this year. Minecraft is the second highest selling video game of all time, behind classic puzzler Tetris, with 154 million copies sold worldwide.
In addition to these sales, the game is available for free in China, published by Chinese tech giant NetEase in collaboration with Microsoft, and has over 100 million registered users, giving Minecraft a pool of over 250 million potential players that continues to grow. The amount of monthly players has increased by 20 million in 2018 alone.
This vast player count means that Microsoft, who bought Minecraft and its development studio Mojang for $2.5bn in 2014, are unlikely to develop a Minecraft 2 any time soon as they do not want to split the enormous, active user base.
“I don’t think that makes sense for Minecraft, given the community,” Minecraft Head Helen Chiang told Business Insider. “It’s something that always fractures the community.”
“We don't want to ask players to move from ‘Minecraft 1' to ‘Minecraft 2.' We want them to just enjoy ‘Minecraft,” said Chiang. “And there's other ways that we can expand that are more meaningful and authentic to what we want to be, rather than just releasing another iteration in the way that most other franchises do.””
Instead, Microsoft are looking to expand Minecraft’s popularity with spin-offs such as the recently announced Minecraft: Dungeons. This is a combat-based dungeon-crawler crafted in the style of Minecraft and will not feature the traditional building and survival elements.
This isn’t the first time that Minecraft has expanded beyond its core conceit, which has groups of players building incredibly detailed worlds, with Telltale Games’ narrative game Minecraft: Story Mode proving such a success it was commissioned as an interactive show for Netflix before Telltale faced a majority studio closure last month.
While Minecraft hit the heights of its mainstream media attention just ahead of the 2014 sale, Microsoft have continued to grow the franchise to its current high. Often dubbed ‘digital Lego’ the main Minecraft game has expanded across multiple platforms, including Nintendo Switch, while continuous free updates has kept the game thriving.
by Stone Marshall | Nov 2, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
On Nov. 1, Microsoft will be releasing its newest Minecraft Hour of Code tutorial, which, according to a recent announcement, could be “possibly the most adventurous tutorial yet.” The company has teamed up with Code.org for the release of “Voyage Aquatic,” in which students “explore aquatic worlds and uncover hidden treasure” by writing code to instruct agents to execute commands. The lesson specifically covers two programming concepts: loops and conditional statements.
Code.org runs the annual “Hour of Code” campaign, a global effort to help students learn how to code in an hour with free tutorials.
The Minecraft tutorials are interactive and use the same characters and concepts from the Minecraft video game, but it's not the game itself. For Hour of Code, Minecraft developers work with educators and Code.org to create a Minecraft game-inspired lesson that introduces players to basic coding concepts. (Minecraft Education Edition is a separate game that schools need to purchase to play.)
Typically, the Minecraft tutorials come with free teacher resources, such as facilitator “quick start guides” and PowerPoint presentations for use in presenting the unit to students.
The new tutorial will be available through Code.org's website starting next month.
by Stone Marshall | Nov 2, 2018 | Awesome Book News, Free, Intro, Minecraft News, Minecraft questions, news, parent-news, State of Stone, Stone Marshall Book News, Stone Marshall Books, Stone Marshall Club, Stone Marshall Minecraft Adventures, Uncategorized |
The big news from Minecon Earth 2018 was that of spin-off co-op game Minecraft: Dungeons, but it wasn't the only announcement to come out of the convention. Mojang also detailed the next Minecraft update, Village and Pillage, which adds new NPCs like the librarian and the butcher, as well as new enemies called Pillagers and Beasts. Pillagers carry crossbows, and players will be able to craft their own to use against them.
Big changes to the way add-ons work have been announced too: “Previously, add-ons only allowed you to modify existing mobs in the game, but with New Entities you can add more mobs. You can use Data Driven Spawning to control which mobs spawn in your worlds. Animations will give you more customisation options, so you’ll be able to craft the horrifying eight-legged mob of your dreams/our nightmares. Particles will let you pretty up your mobs with cool effects. All of these features are on the way and you can try them in the Minecraft beta on October 3rd.”
Scripting API is also close, and when it arrives it will be another step in Mojang embracing mods. As their blog post puts it, “We’ve never officially supported modding in Minecraft, but the Add-Ons system combined with the Scripting API is the beginning of the era where we do.”
Panda bears are coming too, as are more cats, a floating theme park called Inspiration Island, and biome updates beginning with Taiga.
