Maps – ARBTServer

June 3, 2018January 9, 2021

Starting all over

screenshot from the game Minecraft, depicting forested terrain with a house and a tower in the distance.

Typical Andee syndrome – I have so many things going on and projects in the fire that often things get neglected. Like my games for one thing. I’ve barely had time to deal with real life let alone play games!

A friend of mine was raving about the Minecraft Update Aquatic this week (it’s been out for at least three weeks now, shows you how out of the loop I’ve been) and so I decided to check it out, and oh my, is it pretty. This got me back into wanting to build things and tinker around with the new stuff I hadn’t really played around with, and I got to thinking about the main ARBTServer map and how I’ve exposed so much of it in the last few years that I’d have to hike quite a ways through the Nether to find any new ground to generate new stuff on. That and we have only occasional outside traffic these days… So I made the difficult decision to archive it. That map, which I’ll probably forever think of as the Main Map, I’m renaming V.2. The old survival map will be version 3, and the newly rebooted map, which is now live, is v.4.

Speaking of which, yes, the server’s back up, and I’ve completely rebooted the map. I played around with Mineatlas for a little while after deciding I wanted to start fresh, looking at other seeds to try, and after awhile I was just like… you know what… same seed. Just start from scratch. What with all the new stuff since the last time I’ve generated a new map with this seed I figured there’d be a few slight differences in the terrain, and there are, but it still looks familiar, if not quite the same. I’ve already put in a new Spawn House, and there’s a beacon tower already at World Center (0,0) that will eventually become the center of a new rail system, because you can take the woman out of the subway but you can’t take the subway out of the woman apparently.

I’ll miss the old map, but the beauty of archives is that there isn’t anything preventing me from bringing it back one day.

In other game news, I am not sure when I’ll be back to Twitch or just regular game playing, as again… too many irons in the fire. Hopefully sometime soon.

November 11, 2015January 9, 2021

One more quick map post

I hit a little bit of a snag with regard to maybe bringing the browser interactive tool to the site – namely that the javascript is still looking for huge files instead of the reasonably sized cropped one. Stay tuned for alternate ideas.

Anyway, one more map, this time an enlargement of our densely packed spawn area:

Since on the previous two maps it was near impossible to label everything in the spawn area, I decided to crop it down just to Spawn and the area around it. There is… a lot here, some of which I didn’t recognize/remember, and even at double the size I still had a couple of places where I had trouble fitting in labels.

I mostly wanted to have a spawn map so I could visualize the border of the building/modification ban, and the good news is I’m taking it from 200 blocks back down to 100, which is more than reasonable. Possible exception being that area in the lower right corner, as that space is empty – the other 3/4s of the square is quite full. So yeah, outside the red box please.

Stay tuned.

November 10, 2015January 9, 2021

More Maps

When we last left your fearless leader, I was gleefully sorting through oodles of generated maps of ARBTServer and squeeing about finally having a world map after waiting a year and a half. I haven’t budged much from there, really. The interactive tools are really informative, since you can browse the maps by dimension, depth, etc once MCPE Viz crunches out all the pictures it’s capable of making. I really want to share ours, but unfortunately this means I’ve been spending large portions of the last couple of days cropping the generated overworld graphics down to a manageable size, because as generated they were well over 10000 pixels to a side and also well over 10MB a pop. Not exactly feasible – hell my husband’s brand new computer could barely handle browsing through these giant images and they were local to his machine. So I’ve been cropping them. The maps I’ve been showing around/ uploading skirt the dimensions of the known world; I figure when the builds edge farther than those boundaries we’ll start cutting it wider.

The other thing I’ve been doing is rotating the images 90 degrees clockwise, because according to how they come out, the sun rises in the north in Minecraft. (Come to think of it, that does explain why coordinates nver did quite make sense to me.) I’ve gotten used to orienting myself according to how the sun behaves on Earth, so I’ve been flipping the images on their “sides”. Cheating perhaps, but my world my rules, and if I want North to point upwards, by the Pants of the Server Mama it will.

The cropping and flipping process is tedious and slow because of the sheer whopping size of these pictures though – as it is I’ve only gotten from bedrock to “sea level” (lvl 62), though that may have been due to me looking at the level 62 map and thinking “ooh, continents.” Or at least very large islands separated by rivers?

Anyway long story short, there was a complete gear shift in what I was doing, and after tweaking colors, labels, edges, typefaces and various Photoshop effects, I came out with this.

When I was in middle school (back in the stone ages, practically) projects for history class often involved making maps or old fashioned letters by “aging” whatever paper we’d written or drawn on by first soaking it in old coffee, crumpling and smoothing it like 20 times, and then for that extra old document look, burning the edges with a match. That’s what I sorta wanted to evoke with this as well as it being a way to cover up the areas of missing/unexposed chunks. It didn’t quite mask it entirely, but it did work enough to get the suggestion across… and it looks awesome. BRB, changing my Facebook cover photo awesome, which says something considering the last time I changed it was when I finished Grand Central. But seriously though… I kinda want to get this printed and framed.

More map stuff later in the week!