AHelper wrote:
If you could get roads overlaid, I am sure that the view from the ground could make more sense. Other than that, nice job!
Astute idea, and proof that great minds think alike (then again, so do ours). My plan is to use OpenStreetMap to lay down roads and paths across the map after the terrain step but before the buildings to see if that helps.

Edit: Reaching out to Google Earth to see about those building models.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#category-topic/earth/imagery--data--layers/linux/K_NvZC1fXFc
KermMartian wrote:
Edit: Reaching out to Google Earth to see about those building models.
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#category-topic/earth/imagery--data--layers/linux/K_NvZC1fXFc


So young and so naive. Wink If you got a response from an actual Google employee, or anyone with any authority to handle your request, I would be shocked beyond all belief.

Google Product Forums are for collecting complaints to be ignored, and that purpose alone.


Don't forget about that link we dug up on extracting data from the Google Earth cache.
Hmm, that's discouraging. I have a few connections who might be able to get me in touch with people within Google, but I didn't want to pull strings until I tried the "standard" avenues first. I didn't forget that link at all, but I wanted to try to get official permission to use the dataset; thought it might be rather easier that way, plus all the better for me if this becomes something interesting that people find out about.

This evening I toyed with methods of parallelizing the third terrain conversion phase better, more specifically the final merger of all of the generated chunks into one contiguous world. My approach was to have the chunk-generating workers export numpy.tofile()-pickled arrays, and let the single-threaded merging code fromfile() those arrays to make things much faster. Unfortunately, I ran into issues with arrays losing their shapes (and being unable to reshape them), so I'm going to attempt a different and much cleaner method tomorrow. I'll make the workers operate not on single tiles or on single chunks (in TopoMC, a tile is a square of one or more chunks). Instead, workers will operate on region-sized slices, where a region is a 32x32 group of chunks. When each worker saves their world, they will get 512x512, fully-filled region.mca files. The single-threaded merging code will simply pull all of those region.mca files together and won't have to do any sort of array copying.
*bump* I spent the weekend obsessing over the fact that buildings aren't corresponding to their correct locations on the terrain when placed, even though they now appear to match its rotation correctly. I eventually pulled in a new latitude/longitude to UTM coordinate converter (my own method was very naive) and corrected some problems with the code that copies the voxelized model array into the Minecraft world chunks. Large structures like bridges still appear significantly offset from their intended location; I will try to determine if there's a relationship between the size of the structure and its offset.

I also started a project page about SparseWorld:
http://www.cemetech.net/projects/item.php?id=47
Quote:
Hmm, that's discouraging. I have a few connections who might be able to get me in touch with people within Google, but I didn't want to pull strings until I tried the "standard" avenues first. I didn't forget that link at all, but I wanted to try to get official permission to use the dataset; thought it might be rather easier that way, plus all the better for me if this becomes something interesting that people find out about.

If you have strings, definitely pull them. Google is a user-support blackhole, as you've probably noticed with your thread.



Good luck with debugging the UTM stuff Smile
This is amazing! ... Will we be able to explore these worlds any time? Smile
shkaboinka wrote:
This is amazing! ... Will we be able to explore these worlds any time? Smile
I hope so! I laid this project aside for a little bit for two reasons: I got stuck on fixing the building alignment, and I got stuck finding Google Earth contacts to help me get access to the buildings database. I hope to resolve both soon.
*bump* Because of recent inquiries, I have moved the current map generated from the current state of this project onto a dedicated server. While the server itself is currently whitelisted, you can view the dynamp map here:

http://nyc.cemetech.net:8123/#
*bumpity bump* I am very happy to announce that alignment problems appear to be entirely repaired! Here are two sample screenshots from the Dynmap linked above. First, the 1.13-mile (1825-meter) span of the Brooklyn Bridge. This screenshot is a combination of the orthogonal (surface) and depth/height (cave) maps:


Second, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, placed happily along Fifth Avenue:
That's pretty fantastic. I'd love to be able to walk around on that map, just for fun.
tifreak8x wrote:
That's pretty fantastic. I'd love to be able to walk around on that map, just for fun.
Thank you. Now that I've fixed the alignment issues, though, I'm more bent than ever on contacting the Google Earth team and getting permission to get and use their building models to complete the city.

Edit: And I'd be happy to whitelist you so you can explore the city. Smile You'll need a modded version of the Minecraft client, though.
KermMartian wrote:
tifreak8x wrote:
That's pretty fantastic. I'd love to be able to walk around on that map, just for fun.
Thank you. Now that I've fixed the alignment issues, though, I'm more bent than ever on contacting the Google Earth team and getting permission to get and use their building models to complete the city.

Edit: And I'd be happy to whitelist you so you can explore the city. Smile You'll need a modded version of the Minecraft client, though.


Why would we need a modded version / modded how?

Can you add me to the whitelist too? (dcook1021)
I too would like to view the next version of amazing.
Username: ordeosca
shkaboinka wrote:
Why would we need a modded version / modded how?

Can you add me to the whitelist too? (dcook1021)
The NYC world is currently 512 meters high and will probably go up to 1024 meters to allow all of New York's tall buildings to fit. The map format supports it, but the default Minecraft server and client don't support it. To make things even more challenging, Minecraft 1.7.x seems to have rewritten networking code substantially, so I will probably have to re-write my patchset.
Do you have plans to implement the NYC subway system into the map as caves? I think it'd be pretty cool.

Perhaps for v2 you can create your own world generator that generates a flat word with no caves and buildings, roads and subways are added. Trees and bushes would be placed by hand cause I think automatically doing that would be a lot of work.
What needed to be done to fix the alignment issues?
comicIDIOT wrote:
Do you have plans to implement the NYC subway system into the map as caves? I think it'd be pretty cool.
Absolutely, but I plan to make it by hand (maybe with help?).

Quote:
Perhaps for v2 you can create your own world generator that generates a flat word with no caves and buildings, roads and subways are added. Trees and bushes would be placed by hand cause I think automatically doing that would be a lot of work.
Google Earth includes tree models and real-world placement. And in essence this is what you describe, except for the subways. Smile

elfprince13 wrote:
What needed to be done to fix the alignment issues?
As I suspected, I was computing where to put the buildings into the final map incorrectly based on the metadata in the .kmz files. The initial alignment problems were because I was not computing my UTM-to-Minecraft coordinates accurately enough. I was assuming a rectilinear coordinate grid over the city area, but for an area as large as the city, the latitude lines are more curves than straight lines. The final problem turned out to be a subtle error based on when I was applying inch-to-meter scaling versus when I was discarding other precision.
I looked at the Dynmap and - why is it all flat? I thought NYC was 3D; I may've been wrong. Razz
CalebHansberry wrote:
I looked at the Dynmap and - why is it all flat? I thought NYC was 3D; I may've been wrong. Razz


There's no height data in Google Maps; you can extrapolate the top-down view but 3D buildings are from Google Earth and Kerm is trying to reach out to them to use their models to render them in Minecraft.

For what it's worth, some builds are 3D. It's just hard to spot them. I found a few while switching between top down and angle view.
comicIDIOT wrote:
CalebHansberry wrote:
I looked at the Dynmap and - why is it all flat? I thought NYC was 3D; I may've been wrong. Razz


There's no height data in Google Maps; you can extrapolate the top-down view but 3D buildings are from Google Earth and Kerm is trying to reach out to them to use their models to render them in Minecraft.
Just to adjust that slightly: The satellite imagery (orthoimagery) and elevation data is from the USGS. The few building models I have are from Google Earth's 3D Warehouse; as comicIDIOT says, I am reaching out to the Google Earth team about getting access to their models on a purely academic basis.
  
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