"Self-propelling machines" officially come to Minecraft via modder-made sticky slime block
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Sticky pistons are the building blocks of redstone construction in Minecraft - the glue that holds together secret entrances and deadly trapdoors alike. Their possibilities and limitations have been well-documented by the game’s community - until now. The addition of new sticky slime blocks yesterday enables the movement of large connected structures - including “self-propelling” contraptions for the particularly inventive.
Riot on League of Legends' cancelled Magma Chamber: one does not simply create a map
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About a year ago, Riot debuted a new map for between two and four players at their 2013 All-Star game; in January, they cancelled it for good. The studio weighed the workload of optimising Magma Chamber for public consumption against public interest, and decided to walk away.
As one Riot staffer now points out: “there’s more to creating a map than simply, well, creating a map”.
Murdered: Soul Suspect trailer tackles the man doing the murdering: the Bell Killer
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As the recently deceased detective Ronan O’Connor, you’re responsible for a good half of the haunting going on in the once-sleepy streets of Salem. The other half is well-covered by the Bell Killer - so named because... well, we don’t know. In a move considered deeply unhelpful by local newswriters, this serial killer’s never killed the same way twice.
Perhaps in a Silent Hilly twist, that pointed hood will drop to reveal a church bell in the place of a head. Hopefully not. Rather, this trailer has a relatively grounded Black Dahlia vibe to it.
Dragon Age: Inquisition now at the stage where the "big cuts happen", says Gaider
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Dragon Age: Inquisition is a huge game, we’ve been told. Ginormous. But inevitably, it’s about to get a bit smaller. Six months out from a finally-confirmed release date, it’s about to hit alpha - and then the topiary begins.
“This is a pretty stressful time for everyone,” writes BioWare Edmonton chief writerman David Gaider on his blog. “Every cut feels like it’s reducing the overall quality of the game, until there are so many of them you feel like you’re producing a piece of crap - until you remind yourself that every game goes through this, and the alternative is shipping late or not at all.
“It’s not a process that any fan will truly understand.”
40 studios have signed up to work with AMD's performance-boosting Mantle API
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Somewhere at AMD there’s a list with 40 game developers on it. We don’t know any of their names, but they’re all dead keen on the idea of bypassing DirectX using an API that whispers directly to your graphics card, for muchos performance gain.
AMD are running a private beta program beginning tomorrow for their Mantle SDK. You’re not invited, but developers of all budgets and sizes are.
ZeniMax Online says sorry with five days of game time for The Elder Scrolls Online players
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The Elder Scrolls Online has had a rocky start. Broken quests, a plethora of bugs, gold spammers and black market shenanigans, it’s a bit off-putting. “The Elder Scrolls Online is frustrating. It has moments of sheer class, but they’re consistently tainted by bugs,” said Nick in his review a couple of weeks ago.
ZeniMax Online says it’s dealing with the problems and that far fewer players are complaining about bugs, though that might just be because a lot of players have fled. The developer wants to thank those that have put up with all this guff by offering five days of extra game time.
Wolfenstein: The New Order system requirements revealed - can you run it?
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Bethesda has revealed the system requirements you’ll need to match if you fancy shooting robodogs and 1960s Nazis in Wolfenstein: The New Order.
It’s an unusual list, with rather low GPU and RAM requirements, but an i7 CPU. Take a gander below to find out if you’ll be able to run the alternate universe shooter.
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