Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work

Discharge, Sun Nov 14 2010, 10:57PM

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.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Sun Nov 14 2010, 11:02PM

Reading this post, what I'm doing when I should be doing my university work
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Sun Nov 14 2010, 11:06PM

Links don't seem to work right on these forums unless they're plain.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Sun Nov 14 2010, 11:12PM

link is working fine for me now.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Sun Nov 14 2010, 11:18PM

Keeps sending me to Custom404error.com ...
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Sun Nov 14 2010, 11:19PM

try refreshing the page?

if not: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~eh392/minecraft/cartograph.html
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Sun Nov 14 2010, 11:34PM

That link worked for me.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Mon Nov 15 2010, 04:33AM

Nice! It worked fine!
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Mon Nov 15 2010, 04:33AM

Haha who put Hi Mom! on the beach?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Mon Nov 15 2010, 04:35AM

And Discharge, your dojo is the most apparent. Lol
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Mon Nov 15 2010, 05:25AM

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!
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Tue Nov 16 2010, 02:02AM

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.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Tue Nov 16 2010, 04:33AM

has broonie allowed you to gather more data? I don't remember it being this large.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Tue Nov 16 2010, 04:38AM

The path to pyramid I found in my recycle bin just before CCleaner emptied it.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Tue Nov 16 2010, 04:10PM

o forget about what i said lol i didnt know we could tag tongue
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Tue Nov 16 2010, 04:58PM


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
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Tue Nov 16 2010, 06:14PM

-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
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Tue Nov 16 2010, 10:24PM

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
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Wed Nov 17 2010, 12:01AM

So when will we be able to see the map of Toast Town?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Wed Nov 17 2010, 12:06AM

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.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Wed Nov 17 2010, 07:10AM

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.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Wed Nov 17 2010, 07:22AM

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.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Wed Nov 17 2010, 01:12PM

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.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Wed Nov 17 2010, 02:28PM

They're already clickable is the thing.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
BRooNiE, Wed Nov 17 2010, 04:45PM

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? smile * in a way which would be seen differently from tagged areas.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Wed Nov 17 2010, 05:08PM

Continent names - that's a really neat idea! Should be easy enough to do. Do you have any idea how you want that to look?

And I've updated the first post now. Thanks for reminding me.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Wed Nov 17 2010, 05:45PM

Alright. I look forward to seeing the finished map. =]
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Wed Nov 17 2010, 05:52PM

The full map has been online since yesterday. There are probably people who didn't want their houses mapped, and I apologise if this is you.

If you build any houses in the future and don't want them to be seen, place a sign with the word hideMe on it anywhere near your house. Can be underground or anything. Has to be all one word. It's not case sensitive. Doesn't matter what line you put it on or what else is on the sign. This will hide any blocks within a 24m radius from the sign. If you want to hide an area more than 48m across, you'll need multiple signs.

Please consider other people when doing this and don't place such signs inside towns.

hideMe signs wont leave a conspicuous gap in the map or anything - they just mean that the map will show the area as looking however it did in the last successful scan of that chunk.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Wed Nov 17 2010, 11:24PM

The map looks awesome, and continent names would be sweet.
How would we go about naming them? Toast Town is really the only major settlement in that section of land.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Thu Nov 18 2010, 02:24AM

How about server competitions? Win a contest and get a continent named after you.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Thu Nov 18 2010, 02:45AM

Continent after you or you get to name it?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Thu Nov 18 2010, 03:44AM

I tagged some of my stores wink
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Thu Nov 18 2010, 04:50AM

Well, whichever.

And yes, I found your stores cheesey
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Thu Nov 18 2010, 06:12AM


The full map has been online since yesterday. There are probably people who didn't want their houses mapped, and I apologise if this is you.

If you build any houses in the future and don't want them to be seen, place a sign with the word hideMe on it anywhere near your house. Can be underground or anything. Has to be all one word. It's not case sensitive. Doesn't matter what line you put it on or what else is on the sign. This will hide any blocks within a 24m radius from the sign. If you want to hide an area more than 48m across, you'll need multiple signs.

Please consider other people when doing this and don't place such signs inside towns.

hideMe signs wont leave a conspicuous gap in the map or anything - they just mean that the map will show the area as looking however it did in the last successful scan of that chunk.

Discharge

So if you have a house already on the carto you're fucked?

What about having a dialogue box appear to the side of the tag when you hover over it with the name and the link? This would allow you to keep their current click-able function and still provide a place for links.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Thu Nov 18 2010, 12:20PM

To put it bluntly, yes you are.

I was considering just having different types of tag, like on google earth - so tags for labels, photos and hyperlinks.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Thu Nov 18 2010, 04:54PM


To put it bluntly, yes you are.

Discharge
They could possibly craft a dirt blind over their location, let it get scanned, and then place the sign. That would be a pain to do however cheesey


I was considering just having different types of tag, like on google earth - so tags for labels, photos and hyperlinks.

Discharge
Sounds like a good solution to me.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Thu Nov 18 2010, 05:38PM

sounds awesome to me now I will be able to get to places as soon as I figure out where I am that is...
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Thu Nov 18 2010, 08:26PM

you can type /getpos in chat to give you your current coordinates. Then just match it up with the map (it shows you the coordinates you're hovering over at the bottom)
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Fri Nov 19 2010, 12:48AM

UPDATES FTW!!!

By request, I have added a photo-tag option to the context menu (that's the thing that pops up when you right click btw).

It allows you to add your photos to the cartograph. Photos can either be externally sourced (just paste the url in the url box) or you can uploads straight from your pc with the upload button.

Picture tags will show up (when you are zoomed in) as a little orange circle. Click on the circle to view the image.


NB. Please do not upload 100GB videos files or other stupid Griefers using my applet or I will get cross. Photos are the only thing that work! kThx.


Note also that the location of the applet has changed slightly. Don't forget to update your bookmarks!

What do people want to see implemented next? Suggestions?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
cmg5217, Fri Nov 19 2010, 04:37AM

To be honest I'm running out of things that would be useful to a cartography applet... Maybe a field that we can punch coordinates into and it'll center on that point? Would be useful as the map becomes larger with time.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Fri Nov 19 2010, 11:36AM

yeah I agree and I still cant find my house I don't know what co-ordinates the bottom bit is lol but could you add in a n XYZ to the co-ordinates bar?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Fri Nov 19 2010, 05:12PM

The coordinates at the bottom are world X,Y,Z, just like what you get when you use /getpos. I'll make that more explicit.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
dubien, Sun Nov 21 2010, 12:36AM

I have an idea... We should make continents or regions. Maybe some regions could go to war with other regions when pvp comes out? Just a thought.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Sun Nov 21 2010, 02:01AM

I was thinking it would be cool to have a war with tnt cannons, landmines, arrows, ect. That would be kinda fun.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
dubien, Sun Nov 21 2010, 02:57AM

Yea sample, But only in areas where people will be ok with losing buildings.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Sun Nov 21 2010, 04:57AM

Yeah, we'd have it really far away of course.
We could have designated times for building shelters and whatnot, then fighting time.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Sun Nov 21 2010, 09:24PM

sounds fun lol.but if we do that we'll have to make an easy way of accessing gunpowder sand shouldn't be that hard if the area is in a desert though although it might be ideal to have the sand "respawn" after a while.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Shrapnel, Mon Nov 22 2010, 07:05PM

Sounds kind of interesting...Maybe make another thread for it? Might want to do that before this gets too off-topic.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Mon Nov 22 2010, 08:31PM

I'll start a new thread under suggestions.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
dubien, Fri Nov 26 2010, 05:15AM

Your gonna have to make a new cartograph for the new map. Just reminding you smile
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Fri Nov 26 2010, 08:27AM

I know, easy to do. Not much to cartograph yet though is there?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
dubien, Fri Nov 26 2010, 02:25PM

No, but it would be nice to look at the cartography and find some nice locations for beach city. It's not necessary though.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Fri Nov 26 2010, 09:42PM

I'm almost maxed out on my bandwidth limit for this month. (It says I have 300MB to last me the next 4 days). Minecraft eats enough bandwidth as it is and scanning maps is one of the more bandwidth intensive things you can do. It'll have to wait until the 1st of December I'm afraid.

Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Fri Nov 26 2010, 09:59PM

Dis youve already contributed more than your fair share to this community, just do it when its easier for you, simple as that
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Aconan, Sat Nov 27 2010, 08:55PM

Be nice to see this on the new map. I gotta say, you are a good addition to the server. I also see you have taken some of your "bannable" habits elsewhere cheesey I wish all griefers and trolls were as intelligent as you. And 90% less.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
dubien, Sat Nov 27 2010, 10:34PM

Discharge is a griefer/troll?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Sat Nov 27 2010, 11:03PM

Wouldnt we all be if we had Discharges talents?
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Sat Nov 27 2010, 11:06PM


I'm almost maxed out on my bandwidth limit for this month. (It says I have 300MB to last me the next 4 days). Minecraft eats enough bandwidth as it is and scanning maps is one of the more bandwidth intensive things you can do. It'll have to wait until the 1st of December I'm afraid.


Discharge

Are you using some sort of mobile broadband or something, that has limited bandwith per month?

You can get Netlimiter or something, to make minecraft eat less bandwith. Though it might lagg..
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
Discharge, Sat Nov 27 2010, 11:29PM

Thank you for you kind comments!

And I'm at university actually. The university supplies us with free 50kbit broadband, but we have a 30GB/month cap, which is pretty reasonable. Never used more than 10GB/month in the days before minecraft....

A Netlimiter is a fantastic idea. I will look into that at once.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
SampleName, Sat Aug 20 2011, 04:42AM

Damn, this thing still works - For the old map at least.
It was cool seeing toast town again smile
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
dubien, Sat Aug 20 2011, 04:55AM

Oh wow, it does still work! Theres beach city in all its glory. Thanks for pointing this out Sample.
Re: Cartography applet - what I do when I should be doing my university work
, Mon Aug 22 2011, 10:55AM

Discharge is a wizard O_o, i want his hat!!!!!!!