Minecraft launches on the Oculus Rift next week
If you own an Oculus Rift and are eager to play Minecraft on it, we now know roughly when it’s coming. Mojang developer Tommaso Checchi tweeted that it’ll arrive to the Windows 10 Beta edition (version 0.15.6) sometime next week. We tried the highly anticipated VR version in March, and enjoyed exploring the blocky worlds in immersive, 360-degree 3D. Minecraft is one of the most highly-anticipated Oculus Rift titles, though the ultimate version might eventually be on Microsoft’s AR Hololens.
Microsoft-owned developer Mojang currently lets you download the Windows 10 beta version for free, provided you own Minecraft for PC or Mac. You just need to hit the website and enter your credentials to get access. We presume it will remain free for registered owners once Oculus support arrives, though Microsoft hasn’t confirmed that.
PSA: unsurprisingly, promised dates change 🙂
We said that Rift support would be in 0.15.6, but it will be out next week instead!— Tommaso Checchi (@_tomcc) August 11, 2016
Minecraft creator “Notch” Persson first floated the idea of on Oculus Rift version nearly four years ago to the day. However, he canceled the project after Facebook bought Oculus, saying “Facebook creeps me out.” Luckily, Microsoft put the project back on track after it bought Mojang for $2.5 billion. All that turmoil is now in the past, and you’ll be able to grab the title (in beta) by August 19th at the latest.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Tommasso Checchi (Twitter)
Spotify Gaming puts your favorite soundtracks in one place
Video game soundtracks hold a pretty special place in the Engadget Gaming crew’s heart. Whether it’s a collection of painstakingly curated licensed tracks a la Hotline Miami or wholly original compositions from Austin Wintory or Jesper Kyd, the right music can make a good game great and an excellent one even better. Spotify recognizes this too and is launching a new subsection dedicated to gaming music. The new collection brings everything under one category now (finding gaming stuff was a bit messy before), works across pretty much every platform and even includes chiptune stuff from the ’80s.
In addition to original music, Spotify is also featuring curated guest playlists including one put together by Engadget senior reporter Jessica Conditt and yours truly. Jess’ tracks are upbeat indie tunes and K-pop from the likes of Regina Spektor, Janelle Monáe, Lily Allen, Girls’ Generation and Amanda Palmer. Her games of choice for those? League of Legends and Pokemon Go. Walking around the park with “Mr.Mr.” in your ear is going to make chasing the ever-elusive pikachu an awful lot more fun.
My tracks will hopefully get you pumped while playing Overwatch, Rocket League or anything competitive. How’s that? Well, because they’re all metal, all the time, with Slayer, Urfaust, Abbath, High on Fire and Bolt Thrower making appearances. Our picks have been blended together into one 43-song playlist that should get you through at least one session without hearing the same track twice. For even more, head over to Spotify.com/gaming and let us know what you find in the comments below.
Source: Spotify
Riot Games is suing a huge ‘League of Legends’ cheat service
Cheating ruins online games. Full stop. Valve has cracked down on folks running amok in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and League of Legends developer Riot Games is doing the same. Specifically, Riot is suing the owners of “Leaguesharp” (L#) which charges between $15 and $50 a month for services that grant the ability to “see hidden information; ‘automate’ gameplay to perform with enhanced or inhuman accuracy; and accumulate levels, experience and items at a rate this is not possible for a normal human player,” according to the lawsuit papers obtained by Rift Herald.
Riot tried sidestepping litigation by contacting the site’s owners directly, but when those methods proved fruitless, the developer/publisher got the lawyers involved. The company claims that the owners of L# have been destroying incriminating evidence and apparently have set up a Peruvian shell company to hide behind.
“By this Complaint, Riot seeks to put a stop to a commercial enterprise that is dedicated to destroying the LoL player experience, harming the LoL community, and subverting Riot’s game (and its community) for its own profit.”
The defendants have 21 days to respond to Riot’s suit.
Source: Rift Herald
Researchers are developing a soft, stretchy touch screen panel
Gaming with mice and keyboard or controller is one thing, but what about using a soft, stretchy touch panel? Wouldn’t that look and feel pretty bizarre?
Researchers have been hard at work on developing a special, highly stretchable touchpad that can be utilized to play games and write words. It’s very impressive, made of hydrogel and a network of hydrophilic polymers that allow the panel to stretch beyond normal limits. This was achieved using a polyacrylamide hydrogel with lithium chloride salts that help the hydrogel retain water.
During tests, the touchpad was able to operate normally when stretched to more than 1000% its normal area, though after 100 cycles resistance was increased only slightly. This is an extremely impressive breakthrough, and the applications are obvious, especially when it comes to medical devices and even improving portable gameplay in the future.
You can see the device in action here.
Via: Phys.org
Crafting the algorithmic soundtrack of ‘No Man’s Sky’
While you’ve no doubt heard of No Man’s Sky, the game, chances are you can’t say the same of the band that scored its soundtrack. That’s fair. UK noise/drone rock group 65Daysofstatic (65DOS) has quietly been releasing records since 2001. Its songs regularly stretch past seven minutes, and if they feature vocals, the singing is buried so deep in the mix that it’s almost indistinguishable from the maelstrom surrounding it. All that is to say, the band doesn’t write the type of music that gets stuck in your head. Which makes multi-instrumentalist Paul Wolinski’s hopes for the score all the more surprising. “We wanted it to be hummable,” he told Engadget.
A good video game soundtrack isn’t just a handful of licensed songs thrown into a playlist — it has to ebb and flow with what’s happening onscreen. That means a lot of looped phrases and effects for a particular area, which may change at a moment’s notice if you jump into your starship and leave a planet.
To accomplish this, the band built its own logic system for the Ableton Live and Max for Live recording software. More than that, 65DOS created custom applications for software development tools like the Unity game engine and FMOD for sound effects. It was all part of an effort to approximate the algorithms No Man’s Sky uses to assemble not only the environments you’ll explore but the music accompanying those as well. Handing songwriting duties over to a piece of software and letting it assemble a soundscape from a bank of audio files is virgin territory for the band and, quite possibly, the industry in general.
No Man’s Sky’s creative mastermind Sean Murray is intimately familiar with the band’s work, which is why he contacted Wolinski and his bandmates in 2013 to license their song “Debutante” for the game’s debut trailer. The initial pitch was for 65DOS to make a new album and, from there, the development team would tear the songs down to their base pieces, remixing and rearranging them in-house.
The band wanted to be involved with the deconstruction part of the process too. “I think [Hello Games] kind of underestimated how geeky we are in terms of the computer side of things,” Wolinsky said. At its outset, the custom software was more humble than you might think — especially compared with how the game itself randomly assembles the 18 quintillion planets in its galaxy.
“On one level, it’s a glorified random audio file player,” Wolinski admitted. “It’s just pulling from different things. But we slowly re-created the logic that can make rules, so it would approximate what would, in theory, be happening in the final game.”
It was a long process that made songwriting into a sort of assembly line procedure. “We might need to record 50 guitar drones in E minor, but because of the kind of band we are, it wasn’t just hitting ‘render’ 50 times in some software. It was us in a room with lots of mics pointing at amps (below) turned up as loud as they could go, and wearing ear defenders eight hours a day.”
That might sound unpleasant, but not for Wolinski. “It was so much fun!” he said.
During previous writing sessions for other records, there were snippets of songs that’d be thrown out because of how a track evolved over time. Those would typically be scrapped — not because the band didn’t like them, but because what might have started as a piano ballad ended up being a “big kind of mess of beats and layers.” With the No Man’s Sky project, what ended up on the cutting room floor still had a purpose.
“Usually all the stuff that gets left out disappears forever,” he noted. Because the band was writing with an eye toward logic-assembled soundscapes, that wasn’t the case here: Everything had a use. “That all kind of came from working with [Hello Games audio lead] Paul Weir, and Hello Games being so supportive of us just getting more involved.”
The amps used to record all those drones.
The band then sent Weir a bunch of audio files and “reams of text” with notes on how to re-pitch and arrange certain musical phrases. But the ultimate goal for 65DOS was to not overstep their boundaries as musicians; they couldn’t tell Weir how to do his job. While the band handled the vast majority of the arrangement and deconstruction, Weir and Hello Games put the finishing touches on everything. Toward the end of the writing process, Weir had “friendly suggestions” for more music, but it was things like additional synthesizer arpeggios for when you’re flying around — not wholesale changes to songs.
No Man’s Sky had a profound impact on the band, not just for this album but for its plans to write music going forward. Prior to this, 65DOS created music for a sound installation that had 20 speakers in a room that could each play a specific sound at a given time. “That was really exciting for us, because, as a band, we’d been wanting to push into new forms. Not just albums, not just touring, but different ways of presenting music.”
Instead of simply writing another record and then going on the road to promote it, 65DOS was able to do something completely different. “The sound installation was more about writing for a specific place, rather than just chunks of time,” Wolinski said.
No Man’s Sky was the way to bring those ambitions for presentation and performance under one banner. Combined with the algorithmic approach to song-crafting, the game fundamentally altered how the band thinks about music. “Games are such a ripe vehicle to hang that kind of creativity on, so FMOD and Unity — us getting to grips with that — I think is going to be really useful in whatever we do next.”
Images: Amplifiers by Joe Balloons; Screenshots courtesy of Hello Games
Yes, ‘No Man’s Sky’ has a few issues
No Man’s Sky landed on PlayStation 4 this week and it wasn’t perfect. Cue a rash of backlash on Twitter, a few dozen angry Reddit threads and a handful of YouTube videos calling creator Sean Murray a liar and a fraud. Ah, the internet. Let’s break down a few of the high-profile glitches that people have found so far:
Those who pre-ordered the game receive a few perks, one of which is a ship that has a hyperdrive pre-installed, negating the need to find a hyperdrive blueprint like the rest of the plebeian galaxy. These cool cosmonauts then rush across the universe and eventually find a new ship to buy — but new ships don’t come with hyperdrives pre-installed. And without the hyperdrive blueprint, these players are out of luck in building a new one. This isn’t a bug, per se, but it is a major problem and a pretty large oversight from the developers at Hello Games.
There are a few workarounds for this issue, until Hello can roll out a fix. If you’re a pre-order superstar, don’t claim your bonus ship until after you’ve finished the hyperdrive tutorial and acquired the blueprint. If it’s too late for that, make sure to transfer your hyperdrive from your current ship to any new ships that you purchase by manually storing it in your exosuit or using the option that moves all upgrades to the new craft.
The second big issue feels like something we’d find in the Destiny forums: a resource exploit. Atlas Stones are one of the most valuable items in the game, since players need 10 of them to reach the center of the galaxy and experience the closest thing the game has to an “ending.” They’re tough to craft, but one glitch outlined by Eurogamer allows players to double their inventories, Atlas Stones and all, simply by reloading a previous save. Once you die in your ship, the game allows you to collect all previous inventory from your grave marker. But, reload a previous save and you’ll have that inventory plus the ability to reclaim the same items from your point of death. If you have an Atlas Stone or another valuable item in your bag, that number is suddenly doubled.
This is a simple glitch to avoid. If you don’t want to cheat, don’t cheat.
And then there’s a question of the game’s “multiplayer” elements. Two players discovered they were near each other (an unexpected feat in a universe of 18 quintillion planets) and staged a meet-up, but their paths never crossed. They streamed the entire thing, and though they encountered the same space stations and landmarks on the same planet, they never saw each other. Even stranger, one player saw a daytime landscape and the other saw night.
Hello Games hasn’t explained why these players didn’t see each other. Murray has said that players would be able to cross paths, theoretically, but it would be highly unlikely to see another player in such a vast game universe. On Twitter yesterday, Murray wrote, “Two players finding each other on a stream in the first day — that has blown my mind,” and, “We want people to be aware they are in a shared universe. We added online features and some Easter Eggs to create cool moments.”
It’s unclear why these two players couldn’t actually find each other during this particular livestream. The players may have been on the same planet, but perhaps they weren’t on the same server (also known as: a cooler version of The Lake House).
These are the biggest issues facing No Man’s Sky in its first week on the PS4. For a game as vast as the universe itself and filled with all manner of neon-stained, Frankenstein planets, creatures and plants, this isn’t a bad starting point. As we’ve discussed at length, the internet has changed how video games exist in the public eye. Players expect games, even boxed console titles, to be updated, patched and improved over their lifetimes. No Man’s Sky is no different — in fact, it’s remarkable.
No Man’s Sky is a massive, unprecedented game created by a small team of developers, and it’s been sold to the public as a AAA experience. This doesn’t excuse any issues with the game, but it does explain them. No game should launch as a completely busted, unplayable experience, but sometimes this happens — and these titles deserve to be called out, especially if they cost $60 and come from AAA studios with budgets of millions.
Despite the marketing hype, No Man’s Sky is not a AAA game. And, more importantly, it’s not busted. The pre-order ship problem is its largest issue and hopefully Hello Games figures out a fix soon. However, by and large, the game works. Not only does it work, but it’s gorgeous, technically astounding, innovative and engaging. And it’s only going to get better.
Microsoft acquires Beam livestreaming service
Microsoft has just announced its acquisition of the livestreaming service Beam, a platform that allows viewers to interact with streamers during broadcasts.
Beam allows for real-time communication between streamers and their fans rather than focusing on passive viewing like Twitch. For instance, viewers can choose the next weapon you use to dispatch enemies, select a game mode or even fly a drone around your room.
Beam’s SDK allows for interactive experiences that go beyond simple chatting and viewing streams. In addition to directly interfacing with streamers and getting involved in-game, you can also earn XP points, boosters and emoticons based on how much you watch and how often you tune in.
By joining Microsoft’s cadre of services it’s obvious Beam will be able to grow larger together than it would have by itself, a sentiment echoed by Beam CEO Matt Salsamendi: “As part of the Xbox team, we’ll be able to scale faster than we’ve ever been able to before.”
It appears from Microsoft’s announcement that the upcoming Sea of Thieves and Minecraft may be big parts of Beam going forward, as they’re both titles that largely draw from social interaction. Sea of Thieves is an interesting amalgam of first-person gameplay and user-generated content that allows players to create their own stories by playing cooperatively.
They’re the kind of games that seem perfect for the type of interaction Beam can bring to the table, especially when the lines of communication are opened from two or three players in-game to viewers across the world, and as Microsoft has mentioned them expressly during its acquisition announcement, it’s clear what direction Beam integration is meant to go in.
Gaming is always becoming more social, and Beam is an interesting chance to blur the lines between spectating and actually getting involved.
Source: Major Nelson
Xbox One S converted into a road-ready laptop
Do-it-yourself Xbox laptops have been around since Ben Heck cobbled one together from an Xbox 360, but “laptop” is a misnomer — most are more like small desktops with screens hinged on. Modder Edward Zarick, the creator of the “Xbook One,” is trying to change that (a bit), though. The “Xbook One S” is a smaller and slimmer thanks to the Xbox One S guts and a Samsung 19-inch screen. Unlike the 22-inch Vizio model used on the original, the new display has 720p rather than a 1080p resolution, unfortunately.
He built the new model for users who might want console gaming on the go or in a plane, assuming there’s a power outlet and they’d let you on with one. (It’s easy to imagine one in the back of a band’s tour bus, as a colleague notes.) The case is made from laser-cut acrylic and 3D printed parts that Zarick describes as “sturdy,” though not rugged.
Inside, it’s a stock Xbox One S that “has not been altered in any way,” he says, adding that the original warranty is nonetheless void because of his modding. If you’re crazy enough about console gaming to want one of these, it’s available in black or white and costs $1,495 for the 500GB model, and $1,545 with 1TB (plus shipping).
‘Quantum Break’ reaches Steam on September 14th
When Microsoft vowed that it would resume releasing games on Steam, it wasn’t making an idle promise. Microsoft and Remedy have announced that Quantum Break will reach Steam on September 14th for $40. You won’t get anything special for your patience (just all the updates released since launch), but that’s not the point — the big deal is that you won’t have to shop at the Windows Store to get a PC copy. If you were worried that Microsoft would use Windows Store exclusives as part of a bid to dictate the future of PC gaming, you can relax.
If you are looking for something special that day, you’re in luck. Remedy will also be launching a Timeless Collector’s Edition of the game in retail stores that includes a physical copy as well as a making-of Blu-ray disc, a making-of book, the soundtrack on CD and two posters. The odds are that you bought the game months ago if you’re a big Quantum Break fan, but hey — this is a good way to either show your appreciation or avoid a massive download.
Source: Xbox Wire, Remedy Entertainment
The ‘Final Fantasy XV’ season pass includes six DLC packs
Final Fantasy XV is hurtling toward a finalized release date of September 30th for both Xbox One and PlayStation 4, so there’s still plenty of time left to decide what console you want to play on and which edition you’re going to purchase.
If you’ve yet to put any money down on the release, you might want to consider going digital going forward, as Square Enix has announced the Digital Premium Edition and Season Pass upgrade available for preorder today, which contains access to six additional packs of digital content.
The Digital Premium Edition of Final Fantasy XV will come with the six different DLC packages: the Booster Pack, Episode Gladio, Holiday Pack, Episode Ignis, Episode Prompto and a less interestingly-named Expansion Pack. All of these, Square Enix notes, are working titles at present, so they’re subject to change.
Additionally, there are different items available for players depending on the console chosen for preorder. For instance, Xbox One buys will receive a Noctis male and female costume for avatars as well as a Carbuncle pet prop. In addition, PlayStation 4 buyers will get a Final Fantasy XV “Big Bang” theme in addition to a Digital Mini Sound Track and a Digital Premium Edition Original Theme.
If you’re looking to pick up the Final Fantasy XV Digital Premium Edition, the entire package will cost you $84.99. If all you need to do is upgrade, you can do so for $24.99 to grab those six additional DLC packs.
Via: Gamasutra
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