When playing Minecraft, I love doing stuff underground: mining, spelunking and digging great big tunnels. I really wanted to map out the mines I have dug and the caverns I have explored. There are a lot of great Minecraft mapping tools, but not many of them that seem oriented to underground mapping. I also thought it would be fun to write my own, and I have a few ideas for distinct directions to develop it in when it gets far enough. This series of articles will cover all the code that I've written and will span a range of topics including Pygame, OpenGL, Numpy and the structure of Minecraft maps.
You can see some teaser images of the sort of things I have working right now over on the right. The textures are from the Painterly Pack, which I thoroughly recommend as a Minecraft texture pack.
Here's the rough plan for the series:
- 2D rendering strategy
- Pygame – Making a diagnostic texture
- PyOpenGL – Rendering with a pixel shader
- PyOpenGL – Tiled rendering with a pixel shader
- Pygame – Zooming and panning
- NBT – Reading Minecraft files
- Numpy – Flattening a Minecraft map
- Ambient occlusion part 1 and part 2
- Rotating and flipping to render mine-cart tracks
Lighting(Never finished this one.)