
Minecrafting with OS OpenData - room271
http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/innovate/developers/minecraft-map-britain.html
======
sambeau
_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...](http://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/2010/08/05/project-myworld/)

Which has now found a new home here:

[http://www.mapply.com](http://www.mapply.com)

~~~
lifebeyondfife
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/](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.

~~~
Pxtl
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.

~~~
sambeau
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)_

------
lifeisstillgood
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

~~~
bayesianhorse
The RPi will have trouble with the amount of data.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
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 ;-)

------
geitiegg
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/](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.

~~~
Gambit89
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?

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

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

~~~
citricsquid
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/1mzsf2/ordnance_survey_create_complete_map_of_the_uk_in/cce9hlw)

~~~
galaktor
images link: [http://imgur.com/a/oZ1iR](http://imgur.com/a/oZ1iR)

edit: removed "m" from mobile url

------
tekacs
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...)

~~~
tekacs
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_

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

------
hownottowrite
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](http://oslabs.s3.amazonaws.com/convert.html)

------
Geomancer
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.

------
icesoldier
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.

------
rmc
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!

------
jebblue
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.

~~~
jameshart
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.

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

------
dancecodes
why not html5?

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

~~~
dancecodes
dont need ask for something happen

