Welcome to the Game Replay, the thrice-weekly look back at the wider world of gaming by the staff of MacNN. In today's edition, Microsoft prepares to ship its Educational Edition of popular world-building game Minecraft, engineers arrive in Elite Dangerous: Horizons, and a project to get Oculus-exclusive VR games working on the HTC Vive has been declared a "hack" by the Facebook-owned VR company.
Project to make Oculus Rift-exclusive games work on other headsets declared a "hack"
Owners of virtual reality headsets have discovered ways to play content restricted to one type of hardware on another. Oculus Dreamdeck and
Lucky's Tale, titles meant to be exclusive to owners of the
Oculus Rift, have been made to be playable on the
HTC Vive, the Rift's main competitor, via a community-driven project.
LibreVR's Revive, posted to Github, is an early-stage project to make the games work across multiple platforms,
reports Eurogamer. For each game, there are bits of code to download and run to make them work on the Vive. The project explains that it is "reimplementing functions from the Oculus Runtime and translating them over to OpenVR calls." The patches are required for the games as "Oculus has implemented a Code Signing check on the Runtime DLLs."
"This is a hack, and we don't condone it," claims Oculus in a statement. "Users should expect that hacked games won't work indefinitely, as regular software updates to games, apps, and our platform are likely to break hacked software."
Project creator
CrossVR said on Reddit "Seems like a perfectly fine reaction to me," advising condoning Revive would mean Oculus would have to actively support the project. "They're worried people may buy games expecting them to work on the Vive and they may get disappointed."
Minecraft: Educational Edition launching in free early access this June
Microsoft is launching a version of
Minecraft aimed at schools this June. Originally announced in
January,
Minecraft: Educational Edition will be a version of the original game made specifically with teaching in mind, with the
release scheduled to allow educators time to try out the game and work it into their curriculum.
Based on
MinecraftEdu, the program will include tools to help teachers manage construction work by students, as well as an enhanced map for going to specific locations in the game world to show off pre-built items. Capable of supporting up to 40 students at a time, there will also be student portfolios, allowing for individual student creations to be saved and the progression of construction noted over time.
Microsoft is also attempting to give teachers time to create lesson plans using the game, which can be shared with other educators in the community. These lesson plans will include learning activities that the students can perform, and also re-usable projects that can be used repeatedly for lesson demonstrations.
Usable in Windows 10 and Mac OS X El Capitan, the program will in fact be launched in beta in May, with over 100 schools around the world trying out the software. The June release will be a free early-access period for teachers to try it out and to provide feedback, as well as to build out lesson plans. Once the early access program concludes, licenses will be available to educational establishments to purchase. Pricing has yet to be advised.
Elite Dangerous: Horizons
An expansion for
Elite: Dangerous will be going live at the start of next month, with another addition on top of the content released in season two of the game as part of Horizons. Starting from May 8, players of the space game will be able to try out The Engineers in version 2.1 of the game, as part of a beta, with the promise of potential upgrades to player's ships.
"The Engineers are individuals that are mavericks in some way," a note on the
official site reads, with
Shacknews reporting each engineer will have their own expertise from work they have performed for the military or clandestine operations. Able to tune "all sorts of aspects" of a ship "using exotic and often hard-to-find components," the titular characters will not be immediately available, with players needing to be granted an introduction, be it as a reward from a mission or a referral from other engineers. "There is progression with each Engineer too, as you build up your relationship with them by doing missions and earning their trust, advises the studio.
As part of the update, players will see new loot and crafting options, among other new gameplay elements. Engineers will be able to upgrade every ship module with new statistics, as well as adding "experimental modifications" to a craft's weapons.
The Engineers content will be available as a free update to players who upgraded to Horizons. At the same time, players still using season one content will see other changes, including a reworked mission system.
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