What's Happening Now?
Fly Spy
Pop on over to this Twitter thread for 3 months of development updates on Fly Spy, a huge Minecraft Bedrock open-world Elytra mission map: |
Mini Melbourne by @EduElfie
Minecraft Education Edition Melbourne city world via Stephen Elford: https://fuse.education.vic.gov.au/Resource/LandingPage?objectId=31466a40-3da7-4b02-9d36-c3cd1bdff365 Additional info:
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GDMC 2019 - Procedural settlement generation in Minecraft (Round 2)
Just here for the code? Check out https://github.com/abrightmoore/ProceduralSettlementsInMinecraft Framework The approach I have taken to settlement generation involved identifying plots of existing landscape that can accept a building and then placing clusters of rooms on them. I populate the buildings with contents and then connect the buildings together with paths. The areas between the building plots are strung with low wall sections, and some farm land with various crop types are placed where possible. Building types include houses, towers, and a village square with a fountain. Placement of generated schematics on the landscape requires some minor adjustments to parts of the landscape. Sometimes it is necessary to create sections of building foundations to prevent parts of the flooring floating over air. Buildings Buildings are a collection of rooms packed close to each other using a simple packing algorithm. The contents of the rooms are determined from a simple blueprint that associates the room type with a generation procedure. Orientation of blocks to line up with walls and avoid windows is done through the generator inspecting the area and making appropriate layout decisions. Windows, lighting, and doors are punched through the assembly at intervals to provide passage for the inhabitants. Room Contents Carpet, crafting tables, furnaces, chests, beds and chairs are placed according to the room type to provide simple functional capabilities that an inhabitant might require. Building placement The algorithm profiles the landscape using a heightmapping approach. It then attempts to isolate areas of severe terrain height change, and then searches the remaining gently sloping areas for square sections that can be used to place buildings. Each settlement is defined by a blueprint which is a collection of feature generator names. The generators are delegated the responsibility to populate the region of the landscape with features. This framework is extended by adding a generator to the blueprint for a village. Towers The tower variant of building has been introduced to provide a watchtower to the settlement. It was primarily created to show how generators can be created using python and the features of the pymclevel library. A worked example is in this thread: https://twitter.com/TheWorldFoundry/status/1087616035992170496 The structure of a tower shows some of the procedural methods used to create it: Paths between plots Each building plot centre is an anchor point that can be used to mark paths between the plots. By adjusting the number and weights of path plotting the settlement can get a ‘lived in’ feel. Walls Establishing a voronoi graph for the plots in the settlement creates sections of landscape where walls can be placed. Farmland Adding a farmland generator was then as simple as creating a blueprint entry and writing the corresponding generator to create farmland, water source, fences and crops. |
GDMC 2018 Competition - a participant's perspective
2018 has been a crazy year for Minecraft projects. Microsoft and Mojang seem to have hit their groove, and waves of gaming platform integration and feature releases are washing through the map making and player community. Unexpectedly, at the start of the year, New York University burst on the scene with a community challenge to create a practical village in Minecraft worlds through the use of procedural generation or artificial intelligence methods. "GDMC" stands for "Generative Design in MineCraft", in case you were wondering. You can read all about the challenge here: http://gendesignmc.engineering.nyu.edu/ My response to this was: "this is great! I want in!" I have been an avid follower of all things computer-generative ever since I first picked up James Gleick's excellent book "Chaos!" as a teenager. The prospect for computing to create new stuff that's never been seen before is exciting, and the tools and techniques to do it are fascinating to study. The other major influence in my interest is a quirky novel about 'computer contact with a 2D world' called "The Planiverse" by A. K. Dewdney. In this story, a species of flatworld creatures exists and we join one of them on their journey through their world and beyond. I thought about approaches for pretty much the entire competition time, then jumped in to write some code just as the deadline approached (FYI this wasn't the best approach). In my defense, there's a lot of projects underway all the time so prioritisation of the fun stuff (like this competition) suffers. Here is a short description of what I did up until the point of submission (spoiler: I made it on time). If you're interested in procedural methods, Minecraft content creation, and Python programming then read on. If you just want to see how things worked out, check out the GDMC wrap-up presentation, and my final submission. Thoughts on approach From my reading of the competition, the challenge was to respond to an arbitrary section of landscape with an in-game village that has in-game playability characteristics. The framework provided was a custom version of the popular MCEdit Unified tool which I often liken to a CAD package for Minecraft worlds. It has scripting support for batch-style jobs that modify the Minecraft world. It also has an interactive interface for touch-ups and real-time ad-hoc editing. MCEdit has a good capability for working with the 1 metre x 1 metre blocks that make up a world. It has low-level APIs for working with the hidden meta-data, called NBT, that describes chests and their contents, as well as ingame characters like Villagers. MCEdit also provides a way to work with aggregates of blocks and NBT through the use of 'schematics'. Schematics are pre-build structures that can be placed around the landscape in an editing session. The core problem in this challenge is attaining a holistic understanding of the world so that decisions can be made about designing where to place things. The supplied framework for the first challenge leaves it up to the participant to build an appropriate framework to respond to the challenge. The evaluation is based on the results, however, so whatever ideas I had as to how to apply holistic thinking to the problem were not really important to the competition ranking. Still - that's where my interest lies, so that's what I'm going to write about in this article. Artificial Intelligence is a field that involves a lot of choice of methods to get machines acting in a way where decisions can be made. Not all methods are appropriate for all tasks. Consider Machine Learning, which is the discipline of generating statistical models that support the evaluation and production of assets by examining features of things that are 'like' what we're after while also avoiding features that are not. Choosing a machine learning approach can be complicated by a lack of available large and good training sets, for example. You can see some of the problems with machine learning against small training sets in this example using Minecraft's skin system here: Machine learning with Minecraft skins Traditional approaches to design problems in computing involve evaluating criteria and then responding with a procedure that takes input to create a result. Some systems are iterative and involve repeated application of 'rules' to generate an outcome. My work on this challenge was 'procedural' and not-iterative in nature, and not statistical/learning based. My approach was to evaluate the landscape and then build something in response to what was found. The first pass: "Find places to build out" I decided that regardless of whatever I would eventually build, it would be important to have an understanding of the characteristics of the landscape at different scales so I could make decisions about how to respond to it. If there was a lake of lava then I'd be well-placed to steer clear of it with a flammable wooden house. To do this, I established a height map by scanning from the sky to the surface of the landscape and then used a set of grid systems across the heightmap to work out what the 'roughness' of the terrain was, among other things like what materials were present. The height map is a 2D row/column structure of height values generated through a brute-force looping process as shown:
Once the landscape height was profiled, a series of doubling grids from size 4x4 and up were applied to it and each cell was examined to determine the roughness and the materials present on the surface:
Once there was some landscape information to examine in the cells, placement of structures to conform to the landscape properties was (in theory) a matching exercise of generating candidate locations and selecting one for each building. This approach supports individual structure placement, but does not deal with what the structure should be and how it should participate in the village as a whole. This approach was explored by placing 'marker tape' box outlines on the plots that would be selected to build on based on the 'flatness' of the terrain cell, as determined by the max and min heights within the cell. The code for this is in abode_v2.py. The drawback of this approach is that it doesn't offer any clues as to whether the terrain between selected plots is passable (or can be easily adjusted to be passable) for roads and pathways, making it unclear whether the resultant village would 'look' right. At a high level, my plan for generating a village was:
Note that in thinking item 4 was the more difficult and interesting task, I focussed exclusively on understanding it and solving it first. Ultimately I did not leave enough time to fully explore this idea, except it did drive the next revised approach. The second pass: "Gently sloping pathways" If I was going to tease out information from the landscape about how areas were connected, I figured the height map was probably a good place to start because by examining the way that block heights differ I could work out if the slope of the terrain was too aggressive to walk and build across. The other useful thing about a height map is that it is two-dimensional and so, in theory, the connectivity between points on the map can be determined using standard well-understood pathing methods. I used PyGame as the library to work with image representations of the landscape because MCEdit Unified, which is the supplied framework, bundles it in for its own use: Height map (left) and derived edge map (right) showing connected areas of gentle sloped terrain Edge detection was done simply by calculating whether the difference between two heights was excessive, which for a Minecraft player is the unjumpable height difference of 2 blocks, and also by projecting this difference out far enough that there is sufficient area marked as 'near the edges' that would allow a building to be safely placed anywhere there was a 'flat' pixel in the edge map:
As for buildings, finding a candidate place to build on the edge map then became a problem of looking for areas of the required size that did not have an edge marked as running through it. This was simplified by marking areas close to to edge as being non-flat so they would not be selected as the origin of a build location. To simplify selection of building sites (black, right), the edge detection (white, right) is expanded to prevent the building dimensions falling close to an edge (Note: The submitted code for building placement incorrectly places buildings from the corner. In subsequent code revisions the selected build location should be the centre of the building plot) The mad rush to finish By this time I was quite please with the ideas and simplicity of implementation, particularly since image processing methods are a mainstay of 'real' AI projects. I felt this was a reasonably good way to find legal places to place buildings. With scant hours until submission time I made the call that I'd be back for round 2, so solving this placement problem would be good enough for the first competition. I turned to a building generator I had lying around from earlier work with the Blockworks team on creating the greater London of the past and re-used my building generator by plugging it in once a suitable plot for building on was selected. As a result my submission was limited to buildings placed according to the flatness of the terrain within the supplied landscape area. This is suggestive of a village in that there's more than one dwelling, but if I lived there I'd be looking for a bit more supporting infrastructure! What came next The competition has become a catalyst for developing a few of the ideas further. In particular, the theme of generation at different scales is an area I have continued to explore using a variety of techniques to generate large scale structures: Modern city hierarchical procedural generation by the author in Minecraft (Building and project by @NitricConcepts) Hierarchical procedural generation framework adapted for space diorama Final thoughts I am grateful to the GDMC team for hosting and co-ordinating this competition as good governance and community management is always the hardest part of any project. I believe that the next round of participants will benefit from being able to select from already existing frameworks that solve some of the more time-consuming problems. If a competition participant can select from a library of functions and then string them together to do the tedious grunt work then they can focus on solving the challenge in new and creative ways! |
Map Making Under Pressure - Strawberry Jam
I have been having fun this month peeking under the lid of the CTM Community. This is a world of Minecraft map makers who enjoy making and playing 'Complete the Monument' challenge worlds in Minecraft. These type of games involve overcoming challenges to secure items that can be placed in the world to build a statue. Typically the player is fighting their way through monsters to grab coloured wool to place on a pedestal. The community runs 'game jams' which provide a time boxed period for a map author to create a playable CTM map. 72 hrs is common, though there is a 3 hour micro map challenge as well. This is a very active group who are welcoming of newcomers. Here are some handy links to get you started:
(Some creations I made for the recent Map Jam are below!) |
MapMag: The Map Making Magazine for Minecraft Map Makers
Issue 1 of MapMag is now available from here on the testfor[dev] site. This magazine is a community effort to foster collaboration in game-making using Minecraft as a platform. It is made freely available. Donations toward improving future editions of the magazine are welcome and can be made via PayPal to abrightmoore@yahoo.com.au |
On @CUBEHAMSTER
Recently @Cubehamster has been dropping around to work on some interesting projects. (1) We launched an expedition around New Year 2016 to explore the massive Mandelbrot world I created using a custom Minecraft Chunk Generator. The place is huge and, in fairness, we probably need a few more people on the voyage to do discover all it has to offer. (2) I have been playing around with the ultimate power in the universe for @JetSpice's Star Wars project, and it came at a convenient time for @Cubehamster to assemble into a working diorama of the Death Star assault. Kotaku wrote a short article on the project. Take a look at the slime-block-starfighter in its natural habitat here: If you are after something large scale that may be a fun project, feel free to shout out. Who knows, I may just have some voxel art that does the job! ______________ RESOURCES |
ARCHITECTURAL MINECRAFT - THE 'PALLADIAN TOOL" BY RIBA
I am very proud of the project where the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) have worked with Blockworks to release a construction set for Minecraft, themed around the massively influential Architect, Andreas Palladio. The Blockworks build is very impressive and worth exploration on its own, with in-game images of frescos from Italian Villas on the walls. The "game" has the player placing pre-fabricated walls/pillars/windows/statues around in Creative mode so you can create your own classic-style buildings quickly with most of the heavy lifting done easily. As a bonus there are sample floorplans and a dedicated build area where you can lay out your masterpiece, then go exploring the Blockworks' crafted Italian hillsides. Some links: Tips:
Have fun building your masterpiece, and remember to post a picture of your building to Social Media with the tag #PalladianMinecraft. Blockworks and RIBA will each select their favourite one! |
CREDITING CONTENT AUTHORS
SHAMEONYOUTUBER The campaign for proper accreditation of content, #ShameOnYouTuber, has been discussed at length in the Minecraft Map Makercommunity, polarising people into three camps:1) Support 2) Support for the idea, but not the method of using the #ShameOnYouTuber tag in tweets on the topic 3) Certain YouTubers who feel they are being unjustly 'attacked' Limited Engagement (Twitter: @LtdEngageShow) discussion this issue in Season 2 episode 5. In response, I went looking based on a map where the author had actually licensed the property based on the YouTuber linking the original page: Y-RUN by @Shocking_Shots was suggested by @Wout12345. Here is what I found: There are some great comments from the community on this video, so have a read and share your opinions. |