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So in the news for the Minecraft community is this one very lovely little piece.
A pair of Minecraft players, Dan Maher and Chris Doney, are running a project right now they’ve named Clinic Craft to gain publicity for an appeal Save the Children is currently running; encouraging Minecrafters to be sponsored to build a clinic in-game, so the money can then go to the charity raising money to build real clinics in Liberia for the care of pregnant women and their young children. That is something I think a lot of us can get behind.
If you want to get involved yourself, a clinic blueprint can be downloaded, but isn’t a rigid guideline for what is to be made. Minecraft is a game about creativity after all. The two have also set up a website too that details the idea and links to all the episodes of the build that they’ve currently recorded.
Landmark is a voxel-based building game currently on Steam in Early Access. Graphically it looks quite nice and the chance to build anything you fancy is pretty appealing, it’s one reason why games such as Minecraft are quite popular, besides the whole mod-making scene that is.
Previously the cheapest pack to get Early Access was the Settler Pack, costing about £14.99/$19.99. If this was too much to get your interested but you still really wanted to play Landmark then you might be in luck. For a day all the Landmark packs are discounted by 66%. That is QUITE a hefty discount.
The Trailblazer is the ‘best’ of the packs, having all the gear from previous packs plus some unique gear and 4 extra codes to hand out to your friends, all for £25.83/$33.99 when it’s usually £75.99/$99.99. That does seem like quite the deal if you’ve the money to spend.
Valve has been busily working on their Steam Controller for some time now. Initially, the controller debuted with two touchpads, and a touchscreen.The touchscreen was later dropped in favor of added buttons. Now,SteamDB has uncovered a new design of the pad, this time with an added analogue stick. Its likely this won’t be the last change to Valve’s new controller, and the changes made to date seem to be heading in the direction of more traditional gamepads such as the 360 pad or DualShock controllers. With Valve having pushed the release date of the controller from 2014 to sometime in 2015 theres still plenty of time for tweaks.
Overkill Software plan to celebrate the third anniversary of Payday’s release in style. This coming October they’re going to hold an event they’ve dubbed “Crimefest” with multiple reward milestones that are determined by the number of people in the Payday 2 Steam group. And they’ve just hit 1,050,000 members, which means a freebie.
On October 18th, all members of the Payday 2 Steam group will have a chance to get Payday: The Heist for free. To keep. Forever. That’s a pretty good deal. And there’re more member goals to reach, such as DLC quests, new weapons… it goes on and on.
If you’re interested in getting the game and possibly more, go over to the Payday 2 Steam group and hit join. If you haven’t already gotten the game, now could be a very good opportunity to get it.
If you’re like me, you’ve grown tired of playing the vanilla version of Minecraft. After a few hours it stops offering much new to build or do, unless you’re in it for the endgame. And after that, then what? The answer for many of us is to dip into the large world of Minecraft mods, including the modpacks which are so popular right now.
However, if you’re trying them out for the first time modded Minecraft can be a pain to use, and you need to pay attention especially to the version of Minecraft a mod or modpack uses. This became much easier with the second version of the Minecraft launcher which allowed for the launching of the present and past versions of the game, but matching mods to other mods in a game can be a tricky business, especially if they don’t all run on the same version of Minecraft. So what gives? Why aren’t all mods updated to 1.7.10 already, or 1.7.9 at the very least?
Earlier on the /r/minecraft sub-reddit board user Vazkii tried to explain the process of updating a mod and the reasons why it might take a long time. At the basic level, javacode is often very confusing and messy to our human eyes; difficult to make sense of. A computer though has no problems doing so, which is why the game will still run properly. And hard-to-read code is only the start of a mod-maker’s problems. For one thing, each version of Minecraft will edit the rules of how something might be read by the computer.
“Minecraft code is actively changed, removed, moved, renamed, repurposed, so on. Every version something changes, because if it didn’t change, there’d be no need for a new version right. And of course, every mod that relies on that will break.” they wrote, giving examples such as the time the game updated from reading an ID number to a string to determine what a block was supposed to be made of and its ‘rules’ of behaviour within the game engine such as durability and whether or not you can mine it with a stone pickaxe or need something tougher.
Every time Mojang update their code, so do the mod-makers. And from experience, I can tell you that it’s time-consuming, often tedious work. After all, making sure that a mod is reading information from the right place takes time, as does updating all the relevant strings to read from the right areas of other code you might have once input. Even one mis-spelling could bring all that wonderful coding crashing down to a very frustrating halt.
If you want to read the full thing, the link is here: [x]
