Minecrafting with OS OpenData | Hacker News Reader

Minecrafting with OS OpenData

ordnancesurvey.co.uk

158 pointsroom27138 comments

sigh

This is a little bittersweet for me as I once worked on Realtime World's project MyWorld which was rebuilding the world (starting with the UK) to play games in.

http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/project-myworl...

Which has now found a new home here:

http://www.mapply.com

I realised after playing GTA 3 that I knew the streets of Liberty City - it was a real location in my head that I could visualise and navigate. I suspected that playing games in real world locations was going to be a big thing in the future.

So I blogged about it http://lifebeyondfife.com/81-real-games-html/ (I'm not a game developer and had other things to work on). Excited to see others are getting closer.

This sort of landscape memory has happened extensively with entirely unrealistic, fabricated worlds too, though (cf. MMORPGs (World of Warcraft) and even games such as DOOM).

Surely the fact that there are people out in the real world conversing with one another about places in your fabricated one is a selling point rather than something to be discouraged?

Oh agreed. Perhaps though because Liberty City wasn't a true fantasy land but a large scale imagining of, essentially, a city made to look like New York, it got me thinking about playing a game in a location I already knew in real life.

I could talk about how I love the land of Hyrule, but I'd also like to play a game based in the city streets and countryside of my own country too.

Mm I see what you mean. The Assassin's Creed series might be a step in that direction (they carefully mimicked very old cities rather than modern ones). :)

Forgive me if I repeat your blog post - I've only yet skimmed it (due to time).

I once had the most crazy and surreal feeling of deja-vu when I visited a weird tourist area behind my hotel in San Fran the first time I had ever been to the US. The place was called "Fisherman's Wharf" (or something like that) and I had avoided it during my stay because of the crowds.

Finally I wandered down there to see what the fuss was about and had this crazy feeling of having been there before. I knew EVERYTHING about the place: where steps and shops were - where Alcatraz was... and as I walked to the edge I said out loud "...Sea lions?". And walked around the corner and there they were. Scores of them!

I was starting to freak out, when I turned around and noticed a red hand-rail that lead up to the second floor and realised... Tony Hawk Pro Skater IV.

Similarly the Santa Monica Pier from Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines — although it's not a perfect recreation.

I'm honestly surprised we haven't more open-world games set in Manhattan - it's probably the most recognizable geography in the world. Of course, there would probably be licensing issues out the wazoo... I wouldn't be surprised if there was a copyright on the likeness of Time Square.

We built lower Manhattan as part of the demo data used to wow investors and test the rendering tech.

We were hoping that most of the licensing fees would pour the other way: Macdonalds, Gas Stations etc. Our artists mocked loads of those up to show how pretty we could make them.

(and we were sure loads of kids would enjoy smashing them up with toy tanks)

Spiderman 2 is a decent recreation of Manhattan, but it is not exact.

It's not an open world game, but racing games work the same way these days.

I know almost every corner of the Nürburgring at this point. Hell, I was watching a video of the new Porsche 918 (1) a few weeks ago and I was puckering accordingly knowing how much speed he was carrying into certain sections.

(1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_AuhjpQPs1M

just got back from PyCon uk - where the education track was a blast. 40+ professional devs using minecraft raspberry pi edition in a dojo format to produce a dozen different approaches for making Mario in minecraft with python scripts. Bank of America even sponsored a quad copter that follows you in real life as you fly over minecraft

all this code was happily handed over to real teachers of 11 upwards kids and a school had most of Sunday playing and learning with said professionals

anyway the point I am making is this seems like a great add on for the raspberry pi syllabus of learning real computing

if anyone from ord survey is on here please get in touch with PyCon organisers (john pinner) or drop me a line

The RPi will have trouble with the amount of data.

the we can write open sourced features to feed data in from outside servers, to limit flying to within a few miles of the schools, to get kids to map their school playing fields in more detail and build more exact maps that can then be uploaded

seriously the pi is amazing. forget the arduino. this is where it's at.

(of course only those schools in the uk who still have playing fields can do this ;-)

For those who are wanting a higher quality preview of the map, I've setup a Minecraft Dynmap for it over at: http://ordnancesurvey.geit.co.uk/

Also, For anyone actually wanting to give this a go in game without having to download the world file, there's also a public server running it on 5.9.102.172 with the tppos command enabled.

Is it alright if I link this elsewhere? Or did you want this to be an HN-only server? How long will it be up?

I'll probably keep it up for a few weeks, so feel free to share it around.

I wish more screenshots were available of this. The screenshot at the top doesn't really show much.

The person that worked on this posted a comment on reddit (in r/minecraft) and included 14 screenshots (along with some information on the process): http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1mzsf2/ordnance_s...

images link: http://imgur.com/a/oZ1iR

edit: removed "m" from mobile url

Unfortunately it really does. I think their primary concern in creating this was to be cartographically accurate -- not pretty by Minecraft standards. To do that they'd have to hack/extend the biome generator I suppose, or take forever by hand.

Or implement their own "biome" generation. All that a biome is, is that it defines which type of landscape is generated and with which types of blocks.

Except for swamp biomes of course, which generate slimes. And desert biomes, which have no rain, or ice biomes, where it snows. But those are almost flags, in the end.

Here's a few I just took: London, Snowdonia, etc.

http://jamiegrove.tumblr.com/post/62149228450/screenshots-fr...

Wow - would love to see what the Cuillin on Skye look like :-)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuillin

[Arguably the most spectacular mountains in the UK]

Sgùrr Alasdair

http://jamiegrove.tumblr.com/post/62265934579/sgurr-alasdair

That's a pretty impressively dense save file.

For comparison's sake, the MindCrack (full-time professional online Minecraft server with ~30 players and no guest access) server, after a dozen or so months of use came to ~5GB itself!

(Minecraft doesn't track historical entities or really much apart from the map block data itself, so the comparison is reasonably fair...)

Having said that, the depth of this map appears to be relatively insignificant, with its only substantial co-ordinates being in the X and Z directions, increasing the number of chunks, but keeping them pretty small. shrug

I'm gonna let you finish, but Westeroscraft made the best map of all time. Size of South America www.westeroscraft.com

Side Note: You can get OS Grid data on Wikipedia. Then you can use the conversion tool without the need for Silverlight.

http://oslabs.s3.amazonaws.com/convert.html

Anyway that we can get a 1:1 scale planet Earth rendered in MC using open geo-spatial data?

Challenge: Reproduce the planet Earth to scale in MC. Comment replies please link resources, and we should see something come together.

This reminds me of people using tools to generate maps for Dwarf Fortress based on given elevation/biome data. People have made maps of North America and even the whole earth this way.

This is very cool. Now I'm tempted to do something like this with some of the CORRINE land use data from the European Environmental Agency. Make all of Europe in minecraft!

People doing things like this is so cool. One guy a few months back made a MC world map, of the world. This one includes roads which takes things up a notch.

People doing things like this isn't cool. You know what's cool? Quasi-governmental mapping agencies like the Ordnance Survey doing it to demonstrate the availability of their open data sources.

Just as I saw this story I was working on the same thing in voxeljs :P

why not html5?

Indeed, they seem to ask you for "Silverlight" for other stuff, ugh.

dont need ask for something happen

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