....actually I misspoke.

She had/has an HD TV.

The issue was she does not have the HD Cable Box. (she still uses the old non HD box, so this impacted how we set up the wires to get it running)

Hopefully, the split screen multi player will work when we try just turning on the second controller.

I guess it should work

if she has an hd tv, does it not have a separate input available for an HDMI connection from the xbox?

yes, it did have hdmi, and we were able to connect it. i remember when bringing it over to her house tho, having to connect it a bit differently in some way vs how i connected here at my house on hd box and hdtv when i was installing all their games so they could play on xmas morning.

something about the connection between the old cable box and the xbox had to be changed because of no hdmi into/outof the cable box. i got it set up tho, and the graphics and everything else were just fine. so im hopeful this will work as described below. going to make a trip over during the week and try it out.

you can connect it directly to the TV, no cable box necessary

in fact, thats probably preferred if the cable box can't handle hdmi/HD

The Minecraft MMO

https://kotaku.com/a-giant-mmo-made-...aft-1795419945

I got very bored today and figured out an optimal sugar cane farm design. It's basically a rotation based around how a knight moves in chess

So you start with water in the middle, place four sugar canes around it, then make four more water plots such that each sugar cane is touching only one point of water. Essentially:

The bolded S show how you get four sugar in a straight line with each sugar only touching one water. The underlined W is sort of the starting point. The patten is: up up left, right right up, down down right, left left down.

Just keep repeating that pattern and you'll need a lot less water (and Lilly pads if you're using them) than if you just alternated water and sugar cane.

I just make rows... Easier to pick and plant stuff.

Is space ever an issue?

Some people are nuts for optimization. And if you use Lilly pads on each water spot you can just run straight to get a whole row.

Alternating would use five water spots for every ten sugar cane. This uses two. Quite an improvement in terms of yield.

Yeah, my 8 and 10 year olds are insane with Minecraft. My oldest has built all sorts of cool **** and watches videos to learn how to program/code in the game.

They are totally into 2-3 Minecraft YouTubers, too. We even went to see Dan TDM's live show and I splurged for the VIP tickets so they could meet him. Basically the best day of their lives.

It's kind of interesting watching my various family members play minecraft. This is all in survival mode:

My daughter is into building really fancy complex houses and other cool works.

My son is into the power-leveling side with experience farms, rail lines, tons of mining and elite weapons/armor.

My wife got hooked on it earlier this year. She a very casual player with flowers planted around her house, a community sidewalk and a church at the end of the block. She has a farm with a half dozen of each type of animal and cringes when she has to kill a cow for food.

I'm more of the explorer adventuring type that is perfectly happy with a basic house that slowly gets expanded as I get further in the game.

The styles don't really mix well when my kids started building in my wife's world (She initially said it was okay). After my son started outlining plans for a railway through the neighborhood, she threw down new HOA rules. hehe

First, put your wife on a survival island. She'll be frothing at the mouth to kill animals in no time.

Second, checked the minecraft wiki and sure enough, my sugar cane design was already there.

I'm always impressed with those automated harvesting farms. Just walk to the end and pick up a chest full of crops.

BTW, by wife WAS frothing at the mouth after she saw the nether portal my son put along side my wife's main avenue.

Son: "It's was for easy access and a location everyone can use"
Wife: "It ruins the look of the walking and grass areas that I built!"
Son: "Oops. Well I guess I need to find some diamonds then to take it down..."

How did he get the obsidian to build the portal without a diamond pick axe? Ten buckets of lava?

yeah. A bucket of water and lava and dirt for the mold.

Tomorrow (Saturday) at noon est is the Minecon Earth event! Anyone going to their local Microsoft store for the festivities?

You can watch it over the internet here:
Minecon Earth (12:00pm-3pm EST)

My kids want to show up at 7:30am 1 1/2 hours early at our local mall. Ugh.

Part of the fun is that people will get to vote on a new mob to get added to the game. Also, Jeb will present the new features planned for the next version of the game.

Sweet ****ing Jesus get will arnett off the ****ing stage

I don't understand why Mojang even bothers.

Well, I do. They make money.

But why on earth do they keep "developing" minecraft when they remain years behind what the mod-scene has put out? Nobody in their right mind plays vanilla minecraft when there are mods that are years ahead of what they can come even close to producing?

What other games/companies are there that keep developing their game for years and years to produce a way inferior product to what the mod-scene delivers?

I mean - I guess it's admirable. They'd make just as much by doing nothing since Minecraft is such an awesome product and sells itself, especially thanks to mods, but I just can't understand why they keep going like this instead of trying to do something actually worthwhile. It seems like such a pointless exercise at this point.

They can keep stabilizing things and making things nicer for the modders. Hopefully they understand where their money comes from and won't start actively breaking things to piss off the modders.

Absolutely - and that's what they should do and focus 100% on imo.

All this 'we added a mob'-stuff is just pointless though.

Maybe they should open up the console versions to modding. Like, some people play on tablets and consoles, ya know?

Well, that's the point isn't it - without mods - no, they don't.

I mean... they probably think they do and technically you could probably make a case for how they do, but... they really do not.

I guess I always kind of assumed most of their user base was vanilla playing kids. Like, I understand theres a huge community of modders, but I think assuming there isnt a huge community of vanilla players is probably off. No idea how to get data on that...

I'm not saying there isn't a huge playerbase that only play vanilla - quite the contrary, I'm sure they outnumber the people playing with mods by a huge amount, especially with ms/mojang pushing the W10/console/PE versions so hard.

It's just they could expand the game so much more by focusing on making mods easily available to this segment as well instead of keeping adding bits and pieces of stuff that is decades behind the mods that already are out there.

Old article, possibly before ps4 came out, but they take a stab at estimating sales by platform

https://www.polygon.com/2014/9/15/61...android-pc-mac