Ayyo gang! How is everyone holding up in this the year of Our Pandemic 2020?
Seeing as we’re all stuck home I’ve been slowly ramping up my gaming, and recently discovered I missed streaming games on Twitch. So I started doing that again last week, after performing a long delayed Ritual of Digital Necromancy on my main computer, which had a drive failure last Christmas and had been sitting dormant for 8 months after that. Then I realized I hadn’t updated in here in a dog’s age so I’ve been in here cleaning up some. Going to be adding a few more game categories over the next week, reflecting what I’ve been doing.
But first off – The Tentative Twitch… Schedule. (Is there a T-word that’s a synonym of schedule? All I can think of is ‘Tinerary, which… no.) All streams run from 7-9:30/10pm EDT unless otherwise marked.
Monday – Minecraft Monster Builds. Just me noodling about the realm in Creative mode. Will take requests for what to build. May port in past structures from other versions of the seed with structure blocks.
Thursday – (every other starting August 27th, 2020) Throwback Thursday – I fire up my old, still operational SNES and play a game from my teens. Seeing as it’s leading up to the Halloweentimes, I’m of course starting with Super Castlevania IV.
Sunday – (starting August 30) Spooky Sunday Shenanigans! Again, leading up to Hallowmas, starting with an SNES favorite, Zombies Ate My Neighbors. This ought to be fun – I’ve never played the game all the way through.
Eventually I want to add a stream on Tiara Tuesday (no idea what I’m doing, but I will be wearing a tiara while I’m doing so; maybe Animal Crossing?) and have a weekly stream where I don’t play games but I do beadwork on camera. But I think for someone just ramping up their channel again three scheduled streams is more than enough.
Check me out, follow, subscribe, whatever, if you play Minecraft, come play with me.
As for this blog, I’ll be slowly incorporating more posts about the games I’m playing off-camera as well. Looking to include stuff about Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Super Mario Odyssey (I never finished that… oops). Toying with picking up another PVP shooter game, which seems a little WTF considering some of the brain scars I have left over from Rust, but I’ve been watching my friend Legojer’s weekly streamed game of Hunt: Showdown with his friend FallDownGoBoom and it actually looks like fun? So IDK, if it goes on sale maybe. Depending on how long the pandemic wears on, I may succumb to my baser nature and pick up Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates again. Who knows? Not I.
It’s certainly been a little bit since I’ve written a how-to doc!
I had one of my Reddit kids from the /r/ARBTServer days wanting to visit the server, but they’re exclusively a Mac user. Bedrock Edition is not available for MacOS as of publish time, so I decided to see if I could figure out a way to get them connected while waiting for either Bedrock Edition to become available for MacOS or they get a different compatible system, neither of which is likely in the near future. After a day of playing, googling and tinkering, I think I’ve sorted a workable solution.
Note: The following was tested on a 2015 13″ MacBook Pro with the following specs:
MacOS Mojave 10.14.1
2.7 GHz Intel Core i5
8GB RAM
Naturally, your mileage may vary depending on your system specs.
Also – this is for people for whom bootcamping to Windows 10 or purchasing a different system isn’t an option. Just heading both of those solutions off at the pass.
You Will Need:
At least MacOS Sierra with admin privileges. Bluestacks will not install on earlier versions.
“But ARBT,” you may protest, “I’ve never used/don’t use Android!” Relax. This process is not exactly going to turn you into an Android devotee, please stop clutching your iOS devices like that before you break something. On the other of the coin, Android is not that difficult to use. Besides, I firmly believe that everyone needs to know how to use as many OSes as possible, so if this is your first exposure to Android, use the opportunity to learn! Everything you need to know/use when operating within BlueStacks to play Minecraft is in the My Apps tab.
Install and Configure BlueStacks
Download and install BlueStacks. MacOS may yell at you about Spooky Apps from the Internet and block the process, so make sure you have admin privileges. This will enable you to get into System Preferences and OK the install from there.
At this point, I’d recommend running BlueStacks once to test that the installation was successful. You may also log into Play Store via the provided app and purchase/download/install Minecraft for Android. Don’t try running it yet, however.
Starting Bluestacks…
Configuration tweak
When you install Bluestacks, it only allocates itself 1GB of RAM. Minecraft will run, but the frame rate will be awful nigh unto unplayable, even with all the fancy video settings disabled or scaled all the way back. Unless you’ve got the teensiest flimsiest MacBook Air on the market, I’m going to assume you have more than 1GB to play with, so we will need to tweak that particular setting.
Make sure you quit fully out of BlueStacks if you have it running. After that, go to Finder and hide/close the rest of your running applications.
While in Finder, click the Go menu, and then hold down the “option/alt” key. This will reveal a couple of hidden menu items. We want Library.
BlueStacks has its own folder in Library, so open it, then open the Android folder. From there either option-click or two-finger click Android.vbox, and then select “Open With”. I’d select TextEdit, but you can do this with any kind of code editor if you happen to have one.
Open with TextEdit if possible
Android.vbox is an xml document with a bunch of configuration settings and a friendly looking “DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE” warning at the top. (Obviously, we’re gonna ignore that.) Scroll down until you see a line that says <Memory RAMSize=&rquot;1024&lquot;$gt; Go ahead and change this to half your total RAM in MB. (So if you have 4GB total, you want to use 2GB, which is 2 x 1024 = 2048. I went up to 4GB, or 4096. You can certainly experiment with this number as needed, but half your total RAM is a good starting point.) Save the document, exit out of TextEdit or whatever you’re using, and close up any Finder windows you have open. This is also a good time to close any extraneous applications you have running as well, if you haven’t already.
The line of code you want to change
A hat tip to Youtuber Dubstep_FX for instructions on how to do this.
Run Minecraft!
Windowed BlueStacks, displaying My Apps tab with Minecraft installed.
Start up BlueStacks again. If you haven’t previously, click on Play Store and download/install Minecraft. It should appear in the My Apps tab once it’s all done. (No, you can’t close the App Center tab. Just do your best to ignore it.) Fullscreen BlueStacks, click on Minecraft, log into XBox Live, and have fun!
Behold, a MacBook Pro running Minecraft. (Pardon the mess…)
Notes
I’d recommend turning everything down that you can initially to reduce lag.
This setup clearly isn’t perfect or ideal, but thankfully Minecraft has some native settings within it that make configuring the mobile app into something useable with a keyboard/mouse or controller. Also even with quadrupling the allocated RAM there is still some perceivable lag, especially when connecting to an outside server/friend’s game as opposed to playing a local world. (it’s most noticeable in that there’s a delay in action triggering sound effects. Not too much of an issue for me since I generally play with sound off, but it would probably bother others.) Definitely tinker with your video settings to alleviate this, and if need be, close out of everything and repeat the instructions above to bump up your RAM allocation. Obviously, if you’re a Mac user, the ideal situation would be for Mojang/Microsoft to release Bedrock for Mac, so go to the feedback site, login with your XBox Live credentials and upvote/comment in the Bedrock engine on Mac & Linux thread. However in the meantime, I hope this post provides an acceptable stopgap measure.
yeah, we’ll just ignore the fact that it’s been like… six months since I posted last in here. 2018 has been made of fail and large life crises.
I do have much to catch up on, such as the construction of The Behemoth in the picture, some additions to the V4 server and What Else I’ve Been Doing all this time, but I want to make an announcement, namely that I now have the classic creative map (ARBTServer V1) running on Bedrock Dedicated Server as well as the regular game in Minecraft proper. Same address (play777.arbtserver.net) but port 19137 instead of 19132.
Apologies to console players, since you have to enter it as a server rather than joining a friend’s pre-existing game, you will not be able to access this. I have been known to switch stuff around on occasion, so definitely pay attention to the Discord for news on that front.
I hope to have more catch-up type news in the near future. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving in the meantime.
I’ve been playing quite a bit since server reboot. Happily, I’ve had a few guests and a couple of brand new folks pop on and carve themselves a little piece of the server as well, which makes me happy. I’ve missed my server babies. <3
The server is mostly survival. I say mostly because I’ve been happily tooling about in creative mode building stuff. It is still surreal flying around the map and thinking to myself “ah yes, here is about where the Crystal Palace is” or “this is where the Four Guardians would be” and so on and so forth as I traverse the bare ground. Ghosts of Minecraft builds past. But I’m excited for what sort of structures may appear in Minecraftverse 2.0.
View of a lake to the west of Center. In the distance the top of a build is visible. This is about where the Crystal Palace would be on the other map.
Spawn House and World Center
Obligatory first builds being obligatory, I built a nice little public house near spawn with some starter crops growing by the door and supplies in chests nearby. Due west of this at 0,0 is the first Tower. I like marking the center of my maps for some reason. Plus it’s a good landmark for folks to navigate by, depending on how far their render distance is. (Mine is cranked out to 64 chunks for the pictures, though I tend to play at maybe a quarter of that.)
The eastern side of the Tower, viewed from ground level.a view of the West Side of the Tower.
Subway 2.0
Because of COURSE I’m going to have one. Not really much to say about this, as it’s built in the same style as the old one, though between fill commands, setblock commands and a little typing/repeating help from autohotkey scripts, building them out takes a fraction of the time it used to. So far there’s only one length of track completed stretching from 0,0 to -1024,0) with a station at the midway point; hopefully soon I will have a bisected square of subway line built with a corresponding express track in the Nether.
An unfinished station shell at -1024, 0.Station at -512, 0 at track levelStation at ~ -512,0 at entrance level, interiorStation at ~ -512,0 at entrance level
There isn’t a station built out at -1024,0 yet because I haven’t quite worked out how it’s gonna work with the build I’ve started directly above it.
Huge Unnamed Build #1
So last week poking around Tumblr I ran across the below image. Further poking on the internet led me to more illustrations from a 1929 architecture book called The Metropolis of Tomorrow and an artist named Hugh Ferriss and oh my, talk about jabbing me directly in the Art Deco totalitarian dystopia feels.
A drawing from Hugh Ferriss’ The Metropolis of Tomorrow
I feel like it would be hard to grow up in New York with an interest in architecture without loving some Art Deco style; goodness knows I did. Anyway I kept circling back to this particular image and thinking “I’m gonna Minecraft that building.” Started to do that yesterday.
A view of the floating top floors of Ferris tower from about -512, 0The top four stories and the roof of Ferriss Tower take shape.
It made sense to me to start from the top and build it out from there, after a couple of hours with graph paper planning out the number of stories between building transitions. I’m excited as it’s going to be my first build that will cap out at the 255 block building limit, even if I’m vastly annoyed that Mojang still hasn’t raised the cloud level accordingly. I’ve tentatively named it Ferriss Tower after the artist, we’ll see if that name sticks.
Nether House
Not too much to say about this, as it’s just a tiny house in the Nether at the 0,0 mark. Mostly built it as a safe haven from the passing mobs and so that the nether portal in the Center Tower had a safe destination.
Front of the Nether House at Nether 0,0. Pretty much a standard ARBT house in red brickAn aerial shot of Nether House, with the two bridges leading to it from two of the netherrack masses around it.
It feels good to be playing and building again, even if I’m neglecting some necessary life things to do so. >.> Hell, maybe I’ll start streaming myself again, considering this build is gonna take me a while to finish.
Typical Andee syndrome – I have so many things going on and projects in the fire that often things get neglected. Like my games for one thing. I’ve barely had time to deal with real life let alone play games!
A friend of mine was raving about the Minecraft Update Aquatic this week (it’s been out for at least three weeks now, shows you how out of the loop I’ve been) and so I decided to check it out, and oh my, is it pretty. This got me back into wanting to build things and tinker around with the new stuff I hadn’t really played around with, and I got to thinking about the main ARBTServer map and how I’ve exposed so much of it in the last few years that I’d have to hike quite a ways through the Nether to find any new ground to generate new stuff on. That and we have only occasional outside traffic these days… So I made the difficult decision to archive it. That map, which I’ll probably forever think of as the Main Map, I’m renaming V.2. The old survival map will be version 3, and the newly rebooted map, which is now live, is v.4.
Speaking of which, yes, the server’s back up, and I’ve completely rebooted the map. I played around with Mineatlas for a little while after deciding I wanted to start fresh, looking at other seeds to try, and after awhile I was just like… you know what… same seed. Just start from scratch. What with all the new stuff since the last time I’ve generated a new map with this seed I figured there’d be a few slight differences in the terrain, and there are, but it still looks familiar, if not quite the same. I’ve already put in a new Spawn House, and there’s a beacon tower already at World Center (0,0) that will eventually become the center of a new rail system, because you can take the woman out of the subway but you can’t take the subway out of the woman apparently.
I’ll miss the old map, but the beauty of archives is that there isn’t anything preventing me from bringing it back one day.
In other game news, I am not sure when I’ll be back to Twitch or just regular game playing, as again… too many irons in the fire. Hopefully sometime soon.
Allo and Happy new year, beautiful game related people!
Server Mama has had a January. Eaten by projects, work, Animal Crossing Pocket Camp (no, really) and 50 ft anxiety hamsters. As a result, game stuff went a bit by the wayside.
Rust and Minecraft (Bedrock) are open for play again! Definitely feel free to drop in for a visit in either place.
I have not gone back to Twitch streaming just yet. Still trying to figure out what I want to DO with it really, and with the recent merger of OBS and Stream Labs I still need to sit down and figure out the new software.
In addition to that I haven’t really had much time to sit down and you know. Play video games. Too many irons in the fire per usual.
Reorganizing my life a little bit, and then I aim to come roaring back better than ever in February. Keep on Playing!
So I finally FINALLY had a few minutes of uninterrupted downtime today to play Super Mario Odyssey on the Switch. I hadn’t gotten out of the Sand Kingdom yet and both the Beasts are WAY ahead of me so putting in some catch up time was overdue. So I finished up with the boss (That is an awesome boss battle, btw!) and played a couple of the little minigames that unlock when you do… and then I ran into The Puppy.
So there’s a dog wearing a little pork-pie hat in the town just wandering around. If you follow him and try to play with him (translation, bonk him with Cappy a few times) he’ll lead you a little ways into the desert to a beam of light emitting from the sand. If you ground pound the beam, you get a Moon. Standard side quest stuff. What I was not ready for was for the dog to become your BFF for the rest of the time you stay in the Sand Kingdom, loyally trotting around after you wherever you go. You can even play fetch with him if you toss Cappy for him to chase, and it is the Cutest. Thing. EVER.
Go get it, boy!Who’s the best boy in all the Kingdoms? It’s you.
And then this happens.
Noooooo, puppy. 🙁
He can’t get on the Odyssey with you. He’ll look distressed and then do this thing where he’ll stand up to follow you, and then sit, and then stand up again. And you’re like… nooo new puppy friend, I want to take you with me! But the game won’t let me!
Not gonna lie, I was a little bit heartbroken to have to take off for the Lake Kingdom without my hat wearing buddy. I guess in this game there can only be one faithful companion on this adventure. Damn you, Cappy!
So the RCA to USB thingie arrived on Saturday. Installed and test ran it, and pleased to say that while the picture feed isn’t the sharpest, it does work pretty well after you tinker with OBS a bit. So for my Monday night stream, I’m going to be doing a nostalgia run of Super Castlevania IV, which is, oh, only my FAVORITE game ever for various reasons.
I’m hoping this’ll be my first “oh hey you can see my face!” stream too, provided I can work around some latency issues with my cam/phone/mic. So you’ll get to see each annoyed face I make when I mess up, in living color as well as in stereo (where available).
So after a few weeks of streaming some of my current PC games, I’ve been trying to think of what sort of overall theme I want my Twitch/YouTube presence to have. I could keep mostly streaming Minecraft * but really there are a million MC streamers out there. Really there are about a millionty-one PC game and current console streamers already out there, and I feel like if I keep doing what I’m doing, even keeping the “my kids** and their friends are watching lol look at how bad I am at this okay self try not to cuss too much” angle, it’ll keep feeling a bit too much like a retread of what literally everyone else is doing.
This week I’ve been bopping around on Amazon staring lustfully at the ElGato HD60 because I was thinking about streaming my hilari-bad attempts at playing Splatoon 2 and Super Mario Odyssey*** but I can’t quite justify the cost of an HDMI capture card, not at this point in my fledgling streaming… experiment? Sure, let’s call it that. And then, poking around the cheaper options, I stumbled across RCA to USB converters and something in my brain said “Aha!” and immediately the theme from Zombies Ate My Neighbors started playing in my head.
Look, y’all know I’m an Old. Full disclosure, I’m staring down the barrel of 40. Not quite Pong old, or even quite Atari/NES old, but old enough to remember needing a box or a stool at the arcade because I was too tiny to reach the controls at five or six, old enough that having a personal computer (moment of silence for my Apple IIGS) was still a revolutionary thing to have, especially for a kid, and definitely old enough to remember the sheer unadulterated joy of finding Super Nintendo games under the Christmas tree in 1991, knowing that the console itself was under there somewhere (and my dad muttering something about “someone put the cart before the horse” but enjoying my moment anyway). I still have that exact console, which still works and get played with regularly in my house. I also still have a working Game Boy**** as well as all but one (two?) of my own games. So yeah. Old.
A while back, in a conversation I had about reissued game consoles that tend to hit the market every Christmas season, a friend of mine said something about not understanding the idea of spending money on retro-gaming. As far as games were concerned they didn’t want to keep wallowing in the past, but wanted to embrace the now or the future in terms of game consoles. This person has also previously stated a similar viewpoint on keeping/rereading books, because “what’s the point if you know how the story ends already?” Needless to say I respectfully but vehemently disagree, as my home library can attest. While I admittedly should go through and cull the books I am definitely never reading again, my library contains volumes I have acquired over the years – dusty hardbacks, Scholastic Book Club paperbacks I have meticulously repaired with scotch tape, gifts from friends – that I return to repeatedly to the point of almost considering the books themselves old friends.
Unsurprisingly, I have the same attitude towards games. While I had both Game Boy and SNES growing up, I only had a handful of games because I was 13, games were expensive and my parents, being Olds even at the time they were raising me, really didn’t see the point of constantly buying me new ones. I think I had less than 5 total for the SNES, only a couple more for the Game Boy and borrowed the rest from friends. Then high school started really kicking my ass and I didn’t have time for video games again until after college. As a result, I’ve played the ever loving crap out of my handful of games, and occasionally going back and revisiting them has the same feel as picking up a well-loved book. Sure, I’m older and wiser and not as blind to various flaws in the game (Example: that rampant Princess as Macguffin trope as well as other problematic gender stereotypes in Mario games – shoutout to Black Girl Gaming, btw) but picking up an old controller and executing a series of jumps that are still in your muscle memory a quarter century later is its own kind of weirdly comforting.
Anyway. I bought a cheap ass analog to USB converter dongle, and this weekend I’m going to see if I can get it to work. If I can, I’ll take y’all on my latest trip down Nostalgia Lane with me. Possibly with less cussing.
* I know, I know, I need to make a post about the Contemporary build eventually. lol I am bad at game blogging.
** by “kids” I also mean my former Minecraft server kids, they didn’t call me Server Mama for nothing.
*** insert pout about how much farther Husbeast and Wee Beast are than me – I’m still in what is essentially Mario Mexico because I’ve barely had time to play.
**** Not my original; my nephew drowned that one in a bucket of water in, like, 1997. I’m still bitter.
