Minecraft Monday: Pistons! 1.7! 1.8?! Adventure Patch?! Crazy Times!

Ahoy hoy!  As EvE is currently dictating most of my life for me right now, and yall seem to just eat up the Misses’s stuffs -_^, I’z just going to do the news around the game and hand it off to madam on what she’s built this week.

Minecraft News

First off, Notch posted on his blog that 1.7 will be arriving ahead of schedule, but for a big cost.  1.8 is going to be the actual Adventure Patch now and will take a lot of time to think up (going to be a huge update), but to tide us over the guys at Mojang are going to give us… Pistons!  (Was it that hard to figure out, honestly?  I mean “pistons 1.7″ is in the title of post ya know )

I found this really helpful video showing what pistons will be capable of thanks to my ol’ Minecraftarian buddy, Ben!

Anyone else think back to Portal once he started moving those brick walls around?  How how about slime balls actually having a use now?  That only took like a year ^_^

Also, the game is officially going to release during the week after 11/11/11.  But no hard dates.  Just that 1.8 is going to be the big adventure patch and it will change how Minecraft plays by quite a bit.  Here’s hoping our current worlds will be compatible!

And now, ladies and gents, skeletons and creepers, empty pumpkins and brightly lit jack-o-lanterns…

The Misses

Hey everyone!  It seems as if space pirates kidnapped the Mr. again. Please don’t harm me, I am only the temp he hired to replace him But I must admit after seeing you guys liking my stuff I have been working hard to give you more. See what happens when u say nice thing to me?  I want to be even better XD

Well lets get started on the first thing I wanted to fix, the interior of the hotel entrance.

In this pic I finally made the main desk. Nothing too fancy, I am afraid.  In the pic above you can see you have to walk out to get to the lobby. But if you remember the last pic of the front, all that was there was a balcony outside. Well I made an adjustment. You see when I first made the front desk I had no clue how to make the entrance. If I made it the way I wanted I would lose more than half of my lobby. And I would not let that happen. So I did this. I know not that pretty, but I likes it.

After I did my best to get the front more functional, I needed to do something even better. Something I needed to make you guys go “Wow!” Or at least to have you pretend to say wow, right But not yet! Saving the best for last. (But remember this is my best, so don’t expect too much lol).

Before we continue is anyone hungry, anyone? Then please let me help you to the dinning hall. Don’t worry, I rented out the place just for you guys. After all I do own the place XD

Yes this dining hall is huge. I wanted tons of tables and a balcony for more tables (not done with that yet. Dang you, sheep. I’ll sheer you yet!)

But Heart, as my friends online call me, why so many tables? Because now my hotel could not possibly hold that many people. Yes that is very true. I don’t have many rooms that will be in my hotel. Alas all i have is…

My first railroad and Nether portal, EVER!

With the help of my Handsome and the fact he has yet to go insane after putting up with me trying to figure out where to place portals once inside the Nether, I made my first railroad track and Nether tele-portal system. So people all around my lovely world can come here to heat. (Zoom out slowly and all you can hear is crickets). Well. When I make the homes that is lol

And finally as I promised, My prized addition. ( Now remember I am still noobish )

My ball room! I am afraid I have no one here to dance in it, but I must say I love it. The chandelier is nothing but fences torches and half stones. (Mind you after we made the Nether I was like AHHH MAN GLOW STONES /cry). But I loves it.

After making my ball room I must admit I have an idea for an even better one. But you’ll have to wait for a long bit, after all I still have a japanese shrine and town to make. As well as an Egyptian town and temple. But I’ll probably bore you out by then.

But until then hope you guys loved the pics and also hope to see ya again! Here is my last pic of the day, and this is the outside of the ball room.

As always happy monday mining and build with all your heart.

-Heart

EvE Online: Mini Planetary Interaction Guide and Scanning/Remote Sensing Tip!

Ahoy hoy, all ye’ space-ly pirates!  As I started to branch out a bit, I wanted to dabble in the Planetary Interaction options that I think the Tyrannis expansion added. I’ll try to keep this short and I’ll even end it with the offical ”How-To” CCP has on their youtube page ‘case anything I says confuzzles ya.

I’d say the first step is to find out what ya wanna make!  There’s a whole list of things to choose from, and every planet is viable for profit.  Glorious, unwavering profit.  Just glancing at the planetary resources in the market, you’ll notice Raw Materials sell for a little, Processed Materials sell for a heck lot more, and so on, and so on as you go up the chain of quality and reprocessing.  (You might just note, that the items scale nearly perfectly in cost, too -_^ I’ll get to that in a second.)

There are a few slightly rare things you can try selling, but don’t forget everyone will be looking for those too!  Just to get started, I’d suggest looking at the list of things for sale and seeing if anything just looks ‘right’.  Hit the info button on that item to see where you can harvest it, and get the Command Center for it (if you need a temperate planet, get the Temperate Command Center, etc.)

Note: Those suckers are heavy, so bring something that can hold 1,000 cubed meters.  And ya might wanna purchase and train Remote Sensing and not required but still beneficial: Planetology.  Makes the next bit easier/possible.

Scouting your planet

This part can take ages if you worry about the details looking for the ‘perfect’ planet.  I say scratch that on your first attempt and just dive in as I spent a far-too-long while searching myself.  Scout out a few systems and see what they have of the planet you need.  Take a gander at how there levels rate on the item you wish to harvest, and glance at the Scan option to see just where those hotspots lie.  If you find an abundant planet with close-by hotspots, click the Build option and place your Command Center in the middle of em!

Harvesting

Next you’ll need an Extractor, so build one of those.  Try to keep it close to the command center, but at the same time mind the big white circle as you place it.  That’s the range you’ll have that you can mine, so make sure you get as much of the soil-rich area encased while still being close to the Command Center.  After it’s placed, click it and start messing with the mining options.  You can say how many sites you wish to extract from at once, how long they extract, and what you want to extract.  Select the proper item you wish to harvest, and use three or four mining sites to get your started.

Placing them is as simple as finding the brightest dot of color on the scan page for the particular item you wish to get.  Cover up as much as that area as you can with your Extractors mining nodes and hit the Submit button.  (You’ll need to press that a lot with Planetary Interaction.  Think of it as a fancy “Okay?” button.)  Finally, you’ll need those items to go somewhere, so for now you can Route them back to your Command Center.

Routing

Click on your Extractor, then click Products.  Select the product your are currently harvesting and click the Set Route button that appears.  Then click on the Command Center, and Submit if it pops up.  That’s it!

Brand new Command Centers are kinda weak and you won’t really be able to do much else at first.  You might barely be able to squeeze in a simple Factory though!  Those guys convert the item you are harvesting and process it into something far more valuable, yet at a cost itself.  See, you need 3,000 of any Raw Material to make twenty Processed Materials.  And as I said above, you’ll notice that Processed items tend to cost the same, based on math, as simple Raw Materials.  In order to start making the big bucks you need to use the Advanced Factory and start double-dippin’ two or more Processed Materials, but that will also take a higher quality Command Center which is reliant on your skill level in Command Center Upgrades.

Note: Storage buildings help immensely when harvesting goods as they hold ten times more than the Command Center, but don’t forget to link and Route to them, and that it will cost you in terms of taxing your Command Center with more to maintain.  This is why it’s best to keep your stuff ‘snug’ around the Command Center, less waste on links and routes on the CPU and whatnots.

Scanning Tip

One really weird thing that I noticed, which actually spawned this post and mini Planetary Interaction guide in the first place was the fact that I could barely even see anything to scan for on any planet when I first tried.  It was quite odd, as like a massive glare was ‘covering up’ what I could see on the planet’s surface, yet I could fairly easily see the hotspots on the darker bottom and sides of the planet away from that ‘glare’.  If you guys run into the same problem, I’d suggest turning all of your graphical options to Disabled or Low.  Not quite sure what triggered the problem, but seeing the thermo-maps of the planet was a heck of a lot easier after I turned all my settings down.  (I turned em back up after everything was placed, of course.  Mo’ pretties!)

The Vid!

In case I lost ya up there, here’s a vid directly from CCP telling you how to do it with a poshy and British accent I simply cannot replicate in text.  Might even help what I said above ‘stick’.  Plus it’s like a slow and one-sided game of Command and Conquer ^_^

EvE Online: Incarna – Captain’s Quarters Brewhaha

This was quite the oddness.  The Misses got me EvE just a few days ago.  (Many, many thanks, by the way, Babe.)  I’ve been scoping the game out for easily a year now, just never thought the rigs we got would work with it.  Only part that actually did was the character creation.  …Only now you have to see that every time you dock.

Or do ya?

There was one monster of a post on the EvE forums and easily half were people requesting that the dock and 3d avatar business be made an option.  The other half were people saying “shutup, get a new pc.  It’ll cost like 50 bux for a new graphics card, rofflerofflelozer”

Luckily, I can say that you *can* turn off that Captains Quarters stuff!  Wanna know how to turn it off?  Do ya?!  It’s in the options, silly!  (I easily missed it like five times, so don’t worry about your vision if you passed it up too ^_^) You just gotta uncheck the box.  It’s in the video options, which should be the default screen when you hit Escape, and just above the boxes that you can change the settings from High to Low or whatever.  Heck, even if your rig can run that bit, many are saying it will get old fast.

So there ya go!  Uncheck it, and game on.  I’m quite happy that we can so easily side-step that stuffs as the game is great and not being able to turn it off would have probably ended my run with the game right thar’.  (Mind you, if I had a PC that could load that stuff without lag it would be *awesome*.  But till then, I’m happy I have the option to turn it off ^_^)

Minecraft Monday: The Misses’sses World (I Always Get Those Confused! XD)

Hey everyone! “The Misses” here.  I am delivering the Minecraft Monday this week. Due to the fact I got him a game and he… we’ll he’s trapped in it’s grasp and here I am. (I’ll wait for you guys to run away before I continue:)

As most of you know, we have been doing a lot of server-hopping from RL buddy’s closing down theirs and nether towns randomly disappearing On an off I have been working on my own world offline for kicks, fun, and never having to worry about my lovely things leaving me like the socks in the dryer.

Before we go into this wonderful world of the “Misses,” I figured I’d fill ya in on my basic info about this place. First no scaries are on unless I needs the mats. (Scaries are mean, kill production time, and create an unsafe work place).  Yes I play nice with them, but not when I am on this world .  Second, it is still kinda new with random things all over at the moment. ( I take breaks from one to the next lol).  Third, when I’m done it will be so filled with towns I may have to make zip codes /cry. But lets start with what I got before you leave from boredom.

When I first started my main world I was  in a nice place filled with trees and a cool looking flat faced mountain.  My first intention was a really cool tree house mansion. But that changed when I found lava at the base of the mountain…  So I made a hotel.

my hotel

This is my hotel! It’s not finished yet, but one day. From the pic above you can see the huge fountain (don’t worry I called security on mr. piggy) and on the other side there are three water slides ( not finished, sorry!) This next pic is of the current entrance of the hotel.

From this shot you can see were the lava was when I first arrived as well as the waterfall and tree. Was kinda cool how that happened really. I made the waterfall and tree into a cool little pool with a glass room in the back.  The wooden balcony starts at the first floor where the reception desk is. As for the inside not much is done. Lots of clearing and floor plan working going on. Planning to have a dining hall, ball room, work out room, kitchen for the faculty ect. ect.

These next few pics are from the top of the hotel.

Stop at the Garden.

When you first head up you can go to a look out over the area or take the stairs. When you first go up the stairs you find a small park. Nothing too big, but when u just wanna relax not a bad place. When you turn to your left you find a place filled with chairs and tables for family picnics and BBQ.

BBQ anyone?

This picture is where the cooking goes on for the family BBQ’s and in case of rain more tables.  I went crazy tree hunting for this thing.   The fences and the trap doors were driving me crazy placing them.

Wait 30 mins before entering, please!

This is a picture of the adult pool, you can kinda see the kiddie pool next to it.  Due to the fact this is right by the eating place I had to post signs about waiting.  As for the tanning spot I hope my umbrellas aren’t that hideous   Kinda hard to do, but at least it gives shade right.  …Right??.

Now for this last picture…

Konichi wa!

This is a Kagura-den, or a japanese shinto shrine theater.  It is uncompleted at the moment.  I am hoping to finish it soon. I am still figuring out if I am keeping the mountains in the back or taking them down because I am needing to make two main buildings.  Amaterasu would be for the fist building and the second for her brother Susano-o and his sweet heart Kushinada-hime. (For all you anime fans, I am planning to put a Blueseed on the floor of the second lol)

Anyway that’s all I can post at the moment!  I am sure you all are getting bored by me rambling. Don’t worry though, think of this as a reason to be happy when the “Mr.” comes back. Hopefully you didn’t get too bored.  Anyway, have a great week guys and happy mining.  /bows

-The Misses

Chicago’s Patio Theater Rennovations Complete!

Back in Chicago my family and I used to go to “The Patio.” It was quite authentic to its initial creation back in the twenties and sorta had a circus-y look to its ornate features.  The prices for things was quite good, I remember that if you saw a matinee screening it was only two bucks.  I honestly do not recall the price of food, but I’m sure they were very lenient as well.

Sadly it is probably no surprise that the poor girl was closed back in 2001.  I didn’t find out about it for a few years later as we moved out of the immediate area.  The only hints at its fate were these pictures someone took for a post about three famous and ancient theaters that were closed in the city.

The "Renovation" on the side really tugs on the heartstrings.

So that was that.  Found the pics after some searching, but also found out the idea of it actually getting finished and re-opened was virtually dead in it’s tracks.

Till about five in the morning last night when I caught the local Chicago news.  (In case you are wondering why five in the morning, the Misses brought me EvE Online back from her trip.  It’s space-y sci-fi hooks are pleasantly deep at the moment.)

Turns out the son of the owner just got a business licence and talked his old man into bringing it back to life after all!  The place is up and running with utmost care to keep it just as it was in it’s hay-day back in the 20′s.  For ten bucks you can get a ticket to a movie, popcorn, and snacks/drink for under ten dollars including tax!

More shots of the interior here: http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.171436626216157.46550.129959440363876

WoW 4.2: June 28th Official Release and Stealing from Minecraft, Already?

MMO-Champion tells me that due to a late patch update this week, the release has been pushed back, meaning patch 4.2 should be arriving on June 28th.  (MMO added that an official WoW blog post to cite that information.)  This is actually a bit beneficial to me, as it might just give me that extra week to get a pvp weapon before they might just disappear like what friggin’ happened in Wrath >.>

Something else that made me giggle was the sudden addition to the game that seems very out of nowhere; something very similar to what Notch added just about the same time: Maps.  To be more specific, you know how when you hold a map and your arms are outstretched in Minecraft? In 4.2, when you are looking at a map your character will play an animation to let others know what you are doing. 

There will be another one for checking mail, but no footage of that just yet.

I know that a smart company is one that adapts to new markets, and some might even defend Blizz (as, admittedly, it is cool to see).  I still find it funny how something like this was never in WoW for the years and years of its existence, yet it was added just a handful of weeks after another game with a massive following did.  (Then again, I read that people not being able to play Rift when they did their first world event was a good thing as it ‘showed just how successful their advertising campaign’ went, so it shows that there’s always someone out there able to spin anything in any direction.  Or maybe denial is just fun!)

Finally, the 1.5 second cast time on the DK aoe lockdown is actually making it into the game while the ranged and persistent mage version remains unchanged.  Amazing.  Might as well make the ability spring up some iced tea as well so I can at least get something refreshing as I am constantly slowed, snared, rooted, blinded, disarmed, silenced….

Maybe if it continues casting while I move, then it won’t be and total waste of a talent.  But I’m not holding my breath ^_^

Also, just throwin’ in out there, but I’m gonna go ahead and ‘predict’ that when account bound items can actually be mailed cross-server, they will be via an item shop.

“Want that helm and cloak on a new server a bud of yours happened to make a toon on?  For a paltry five dollars we’ll get Speedy Delivery all over it!”

To end the post on a less wise-crackin’ note, did you see the new staff that makes feral dps druids all hawt?  Heck, I’ll throw the youtube video on so you can see it in action.

 

-Update- 

Just found out that if you login repeatedly at the same location, your authenticator will know and not ask for you to type it in every time you logon.  I just freaked the heck out but a quick search told me this is a new, and welcomed, change.

If ya don’t got an authenticator yet, why not?!  Extra protection and a mini core hound.  Get one, ya big sillies!

The Daily Blink – Lament of the Ex-Mage (Or any dps, for that matter…)

I always appreciate it when people throw support classes a bone.  Surprised was I still when I caught this image off of MMO-Champion who in turn got it from the Daily Blink.

The comment section is particularly good, too.

“As a Mage, I was always bitter toward tanks for their insta-queue times in random dungeons and their constant rage-quitting (at least in my experience) when our group would wipe for the first time because of an innocent mistake.
Then, I played a Prot Paladin…

And I am bitter no longer.”

-Dan

“Don’t I know this! Haha. My main is an arcane mage, and I decided to roll a prot pally. I feel so horrible now knowing what I put those people through..Love this strip ;d”

-Surmise

“I’ve only ever healed, really, never actually DPSed properly, but I do have a tank. I think every DPS out there should be forced to play a tank at some point, so that they can finally understand!”

-Dagny

“Thiiiis, thiiiis so god damn much. Worse when you’re tanking and the dps are full heirloom twinks. It’s like LOL TANK DO UR JOB. And I’m like >_<

Not even 1 second to get aggro and I get bitched at for losing it and having to blow taunts repeatedly just to try and stay on it for one person, then the rest of the dps pulls the threat.

I only tank with guildies now. There’s less abuse ;-;”

-Random

It won’t make the mindless morons in pugs go away by any means, but to know some of them have at least reformed is nice. ^_^

Minecraft Monday: E3, Notch, and 2.5 Million Sales!

E3 keep everyone busy this week?  News all over the place!  Twitter, blogs, G4, Spike TV, the whole gambit.  But what about Minecraft?  Considering the flurry of excitement that E3 causes on developers, Notch was still able to  tweet out a few nifty hints of things to come that caught me by surprise. 

Minecraft News

First off, his tumblr blog post!

• It looks like we need to change the release date for Minecraft to be able to get a good venue for MinecraftCon. 11/11/11 is fully booked. One week later, perhaps? I’ll post more details as soon as we’ve decided and booked a venue.
• We are working on Minecraft Beta 1.7, which I’m referring to as the “adventure update”. We’re keeping the details secret so people can get surprises. The idea with this update is to flesh out the game a bit, making it reward exploration and combat more. Assuming we like them in play testing, pistons are coming in 1.7.
• We’re starting the modding support on a small scale with 1.7. We’ll be giving the source code out to a very VERY small group of people before the release of 1.7. We’ll use those experiences to work out the final details, then we’ll get the modding api out as soon as possible after 1.7 has been released. (source)

He also mentioned some other little things that E3 all covered, like xbox360 Minecraft and it works with Kinnect and all that jazz.  As for his twitter, he mentioned that there will no longer be massive chunk updates during the day/night cycle.  All of this will be handled via textures alone. source (I’m hoping this means less lag and not more in the long run.)

This info lead to another tweet, stating that “this means that skylight and blocklight can have different colors now. Nights are brighter, but tinted blue now. Blocklights are warm.” (source)

An odd tweet brought up the ‘dreaded’ lanterns again, stating that he’d like to make them cast the brighter/different toned Skylight to make them stand out, but coding will not permit it. (source)

Finally, and probably the biggest news of the last nine or so hours is that Minecraft officially hit 2.5 million sales just today.  He hit a million back in January, and was at like 100,000 to 300,000 in October, and I know for sure that on December 22nd he was at 855,263 copies sold.  Notch gave an update to the game in celebration of 1 million sold.  The Misses and I have something in the works that’ll time out nicely for this milestone… soon, my friends.  Soon…

While looking up old posts o’ mine to check how many people bought the game when, I noticed my very first Minecraft related post was November 9th last year.  Ironically, that post is related to some Bleh News this week.

Bleh News

In my first Minecraft post I put up a sneak peek at a Twisted Metal level I was working on, and planned on finishing.  That server got reset before I did complete it, though I did get awful far.  I rebuilt that very same megabuild on a new server a friend from the first server made himself.  (The completed Cloud Cutter, the buying and selling mods, the spawn town ‘mall’ and that, all on the same new server.)

So, two days ago I loaded up that server to chip away more at the project o’ mine.  Oddly my location was not where I logged out at, but a quick /spawn or /warp will do the trick.  Those mods are not installed.  Not the first time, new patches always killed the mods for what seemed like an eternity. No bother. 

Except my bud tagging along with me also appeared on the same spot as I.  That’s when we noticed a new guy working on carving out a mountain nearby and he told us several other people have popped onto his server, saying they were looking for another place as well.

‘New’ server is dead.  Project lost.  Again. Teh Sighz!

Well, now this puts me in quite the pickle.  Funny enough, I’m not really mad at all that it’s lost as I’ve been busy jumping around working on other projects all over the place and the server population was dwindling pretty quick.  My only real annoyance is that I didn’t get a recent screen shot, so all work since May 6th is undocumented >.<  (“Can’t wait” to tell the Misses all her stuff is gone as well.  She’s more of a builder than I :X)

This leads to another conundrum.  Do I re-rebuild it?  More than likely.  Though next time I’ll be accepting help to speed it along.  I did it almost entirely solo, (thought it made the build sound more epic), but even with admin powers to spawn items in my inventory it got quite taxing once the majority was in place.  I started looking forward to building it when the Misses helped out earlier in the month.  In a way, I’m glad we didn’t finish it as it would have gotten wiped off anyway ^_^

But where to rebuild?  After tinkerin’ on a buddy’s server I got the idea to possibly build it in the Nether, as it requires a great deal of lava.  The only issues I can think of is that the top of it would need to be encased in glass to prevent getting constantly ruined by Ghast attacks, and I just found out sometimes the Nether’s world gets randomly restarted anew.  At least online. Till that gets fixed, odds are low I’ll dive right back into it.  Furthermore, I don’t wanna post a pic of it not complete, as it ruins the whole reveal in the end.  So not only am I stuck with a pickle, I’m stuck with a pickle that I can’t even eat.  How annoying is that XD

New Superman Costume: They Took Off His Underwear

Was scanning things this morning as I was eatsin’ my cereal when I came upon this news on Yahoo.  My bud told me they are revamping all the old costumes and characters of the DC superhero line, and today I happened to see what they are going to do with Superman.  And the title of my post says it all.

via Yahoo via DC Comics

So, for this “new” Superman costume all they did was remove his undies and replaced their color with the color of his belt.

 

/facepalm

 

Good to see both the CEOs of DC and their extensive art department are going all out on these changes >.>

WoW 4.2 Release Date

According to MMO-Champion, the devs have stated that the current Arena season will end on the 21st, likely the same time as the next big patch.  Again, this is according to Blizzard Time which is never exact nor accurate, but at least there’s a decent ballpark to aim for.  The 4.2 patch will unlock the new Firelands raiding content, a new daily quest hub in Mount Hyjal, and possibly the most awesome feature: Balloons!

• The new raiding content will obviously include the new raiding gear, specifically Tier 12.
• In order to access the Mount Hyjal daily quest hub, you might just have to complete the original Mount Hyjal quest lines.  Might wanna get those out of the way now during the wait ^_^
• And the balloons are just awesome.