Hat's off to you sir, I've been working on something similar recently... you are far along compared to me.

This was my first test render: http://i.imgur.com/0c0mD.jpg

I mapped each landblock as an 8x8 minecraft grid, using terrain data. Obviously it needs to be bigger than that to scale properly, and then properly smoothed....

Good job!

I've got a friend who's been working on the same thing as well - he lost his VN login information, but wants me to ask you how you created the actual heightmap?

 

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Can the Minecraft engine even support a world that big or we just talking about a map to look at?

MyopicM2aces:
Oi, that would be tedious. Congrats on even getting that far along. I'm cheating by comparison, by simply importing a heightmap. Other than adjusting the brightness and contrast to get the land to scale properly, all of my work has just been creating a workable colormap... [which is basically editing a 3600x3600 image pixel by pixel... aaaagh].

There was someone over on Darktide back in April, who was rebuilding Dereth at ~1:100 scale using MCEdit. He gave up on it, last I talked to him. I had already rebuilt Dryreach and had offered to construct the towns for him.


Jennifer_the_Great:
Back in 2003-2004 or so, a series of 3d renders of the Asheron's Call landscape (especially Aerlinthe and the Obsidian Plains) were posted by various individuals, using a heightmap created from the Cell.dat and Terragen. I believe Ganzor was the first to produce these. Here's one of the original threads: http://vnboards.ign.com/ac_general_board/b5141/63541236/r63576141/

And here's some of those old renders: http://sminc.bounceme.net/pub/photoalbum/Dereth/index.html

Oh, a much more complete gallery is still available on the long defunct Sucamarto's AC Heaven.
http://acheaven.buwahaha.com/
Left panel: TerraGen Image Gallery --- I HIGHLY recommend anyone who's not seen those renders take a look at them.

I downloaded all of the renders I saw posted, as well as the 2041x2041 greyscale heightmap and made a few renders of my own. Ever since losing all of my screen shots from my first year playing AC (2000, when I was in 8th grade), I've been pretty cautious about data backups. Unlike most of the individuals who produced the heightmaps, I never lost them to a harddrive failure - I had them on DVD as well as an external drive. Funny little story... Ganzor, who was the original creator of the heightmaps to my knowledge, lost them. Back when I first posted on the official Minecraft forums about importing heightmaps to Minecraft, I specifically mentioned having a Dereth heightmap and color map. Small world effect - Ganzor saw the post, and asked for copies of the original heightmaps.

The original method for generating heightmaps from the Cell.dat involved use of a little batch file which would read the landblock data and assign a greyscale color value to each section, based upon its elevation data. I tried importing it into Oblivion once... Didn't go over so well - it was too big and broke the TES Editor! I still have the batch file somewhere, but can't find it right now; can't remember the actual file name. It wouldn't work on a ToD Cell.dat, however. The original AC CD - or the DM CD would have fully useable Cell.dat files, though!

Listos: The 3rd party software scene for AC produced a hell of a lot more than Decal. We even used to skin the user interface before a change in the Cell.dat format; I even made my own skins for it. Some skins can still be seen on the above-linked Sucamarto's AC Heaven. Left panel: AC Skin Updates.


Aerlinthian:
Minecraft's world can support /infinite/ dimensions. The theoretical limit for a Minecraft world, from the limits of the number of integers Java can store, is more than eight times the surface area of the Earth. Dereth is about the size of Rhode Island. A 1:10 scale of Dereth is in no way a problem for Minecraft.

 

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DarkDecending: There was a utility to convert the TOD cell.dat/portal.dat data into the old .dat format. I used that on the TOD .dat files, and then used david simpsons old c program to extract the terrain data. I couldn't do anything for a while, until i found the Substrate library. Using the terrain data and Substrate I started experimenting with recreating dereth.

Current idea: Take the terrain data (2041x2041 heightmap, 8x8 grid = 1 AC landblock, AC being 255x255 landblocks big), scale it up by a factor of maybe 8 to get a 16,328x16,328 grid, create a heightmap by using a resampling algorithm (bilinear or bicubic comes to mind)

The other thing is the terrain data also includes the terrain type for the points, so it would be easy to extract that info an generate the appropriate minecraft block for a given point.

If you want to discuss this further feel free to hit me up on aim, TenFlavorsOfGlue, or email mofidul2 at gmail.

http://sminc.bounceme.net/pub/photoalbum/Dereth/index.html

This is incredible!

 

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Steele should put this on the server when its done. That would be a blast lol.

 

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So, just a brief update:

Project is not dead, but midterms + research projects = working until 3-4AM every night.

@Myopic:
That's quite interesting, and I'd like to look into it - but may not be able to do much beyond this current project until December.

 

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I'm going to bet the engine cannot scale its performance to that level, though.

 

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