I have been writing a cartography applet in flash. It takes raw cartograph information (block ID's, land height, light map info etc) and renders that information in a little interactive display thing at run-time.

It's by no means complete at this point. Still very much no-frills. Just thought I'd share what I have thus far. It takes a little while to load (mostly due to crappy upload speeds from our home broadband). Map file size is only around 3MB Please be patient...

http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~eh392/minecraft/cartograph.html

The map data can be gathered from multiplayer maps in chunks using a minecraft addon tool thing which I have also written.

The total size of the current map is 3000x3000, which I estimate to be the rough limits of civilisation at this point.

I made this purely to prove that Flash is a suitable platform for doing this kind of thing, with the applet running acceptably well even on my netbook (despite flash's notorious inefficiency with this kind of thing).

Things which could now be added:
-Minimap in top right
-Search/highlight block IDs (surface blocks at any rate)
-Rendering controls/options
-Basic drawing API? - for drawing on roads/boundaries etc
-Make it look less crap when zoomed out.
-Save image to pc functionality

and with upgrades to the scanner:
-signs (so that you can see what's written on signs in an area)
-railway lines (maybe - it would slow the scanner down terribly)
-valuable mineral search (perhaps maybe same as above)
-scanning chest contents is pretty simple but I don't think that's a good idea really.


And probably lots of other things!

Thoughts/suggestions welcome.

Reading this post, what I'm doing when I should be doing my university work

Links don't seem to work right on these forums unless they're plain.

link is working fine for me now.

Keeps sending me to Custom404error.com ...

try refreshing the page?

if not: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~eh392/minecraft/cartograph.html

That link worked for me.

Nice! It worked fine!

Haha who put Hi Mom! on the beach?

And Discharge, your dojo is the most apparent. Lol

Looks very nice. I like that this works through the client so that you don't need to be an admin or have access to the map files to use it. Keep up the good work!

Place tags now implemented.

Tags come in two types, depending on whether you are zoomed in or out.
Double clicking on regional tags zooms in on them.
Hover over local tags to show text.
Right click->Tag to add a tag (automatically adds the right tag for your zoom level).

EDIT - Apostrophes no longer break everything. If you were wanting @@ to appear in your tag though, you're now out of luck.

has broonie allowed you to gather more data? I don't remember it being this large.

The path to pyramid I found in my recycle bin just before CCleaner emptied it.

o forget about what i said lol i didnt know we could tag

The path to pyramid I found in my recycle bin just before CCleaner emptied it.

Discharge

I see, lucky find. Need more map =) I have a house at around X:-6.5k

-6,500? It's your own stupid fault for moving so far away! All the major settlements are within 1,500 blocks of spawn. If people start moving beyond that en mass, then it would be worthwhile expanding the map I think. Expanding the map to your house would increase the area of the map 16 times, which is a lot of extra land to map!

EDIT - just noticed you actually went to the effort of tagging your house! lol

New Features!

Now with a 100% genuine loading bar (the fact that it actually needs one for loading in a 543kb file says a lot about our home broadband upload speeds)

Also with more mapping modes - height-map and zombie map (which shows where zombies could spawn, taking into account the effect of height added in the Halloween update - I'm sure it will be useful one day!)

Using apostrophes in tags no longer breaks everything.

Lots of little UI improvements, like being able to zoom by scrolling, it showing what city you're looking at when you zoom in close, tag text colour changing for night mode, and lots of other little things you are quite unlikely to notice

So when will we be able to see the map of Toast Town?

Broonie just gave me permision to cartograph the whole map. I'm writing the autopilot script right now. Even by air, it could take up to an hour to scan the whole map.

I have a suggestion. Would it be possible to add a hyperlink to the tags? this would allow screen shots to be uploaded and linked.

Of course. Not sure how the interface would work, but it's perfectly possible. I was kind of thinking Broonie might like to integrate the thing into the main site. Uploading photos is something that would work better if that were the case. I'd be happy to listen to any ideas you have though.

I was thinking that we wouldn't actually have the pictures be in the applet but just be able to make the tag click-able so it takes you to wherever the person placed it specifies. i.e. a thread with pictures of the town forum or whatever they want.

They're already clickable is the thing.

You might be able to take away the fact your not allowed to use the cartograph script, since you've now got the use of it.

Anyway I'll create a page for this to embedded later, would you be able to add a part in which we can give the islands names? * in a way which would be seen differently from tagged areas.