A Bad Omen

So I've decided to use a map editor to make the building process less painful. Sounds great, but actually finding a tool that is halfway useful was more of a challenge than I was expecting. In my brief time with Minecraft I had heard of a map editor was called Omen. A quick trip to worldofminecraft.com and Omen was downloaded and ready to be tinkered with. The first task was to create a new world that I could work from. Luckily for me Omen has an option to generate a flat world with a bottom layer of stone, a ground layer, and then a layer of air above this. Perfect, I can create my flat land and start building! After creating the world and playing around in Omen I'm shocked to find that I can only edit in two dimensions. To create any sort of three dimensional structure you have to edit it in two dimensional cross sections. This fact alone started having me doubt if this project would even be feasible. I powered through however and made a simple hut. Time to test out my creation in the client.

This is where I hit my first real brick wall. There are two different level formats in Minecraft. There is a .mclevel file format which from what I understand was used in the old Indev version of Minecraft. The other format that is used in the Alpha version has a different folder for each world and saves the data in a .dat file. I won't go into too much detail in the differences between this formats (mostly because I don't know much) but more information on the Alpha level format can be found here Alpha Level Format. What really matters is that I am able to save a level and then be able to load it up in the Alpha client of the game. When I go to save my first world in Omen I am presented with the option to save in either the .mclevel or .dat format. I choose .dat; happily save and then go to load up the map in my Minecraft server. Only one problem; the file doesn't exist.

I save again just to make sure that I did it correctly the first time and it's still a no-go. A quick googling of the problem yields some promising results. The Omen editor requires the Minecraft server jar file to be able to create .dat format maps. Simply download the alpha server .jar and place it in the same directory as Omen and you're good to go. So I go ahead and throw the server .jar into my Omen folder and restart Omen to try and save again. Still nothing. At this point I get mildly frustrated before deciding to google some more and see if anyone has any other answers to this problem. No luck; the only forum replies are people saying that placing them in the same directory let's them save .dat files. After another day spent at work trying to get Omen to save .dat files and trying to fix this problem I have no luck and finally have to give up on trying to use Omen for my editing. Luckily after a little more looking I was able to find a program called MCEdit. After looking at a few screenshots it looked like a very promising alternative. 3D editing was already a major improvement over Omen, but there was one problem. From the forum description it said that the editor could only copy/paste blocks and it couldn't create new entities. I figured it was at least worth trying out so I downloaded it and fired it up.

Dungeon 01

There were two ways I could have gone about creating the world; either in survival mode or using a map editor. When I started work on the first dungeon in survival mode it took me much longer than I had originally anticipated. The amount of time it takes to farm all the dirt, wood, sand and cobblestone probably amounted to over half the time it took to construct the entrance to the dungeon as well as the first room. Not to mention that to obtain the stone you need to invest a significant amount of time forging and gathering coal to run the furnaces. Other problems such as trying to build under sea level and dealing with floods was a major pain to work around. The end result turned out pretty well but could have been done in a quarter of the time using an editor.

Dungeon 1 In Survival Mode

As I was working on the first dungeon I had the idea of recreating the entire world, and trying to accomplish this in survival mode would simply take way too much time. Clearing out mountains and creating a flat surface itself would be quite an accomplishment. The overworld is 128x256 "blocks" in the original game. For my build I increased each block to be about double in size to feel a little less claustrophobic. This would mean the overworld map would end up weighing in at 256x512 blocks. Clearing out this area and creating a flat surface to work from before I could even start creating the game world was unappealing; not to mention the amount of time it would take to farm all of the materials that would be required to build all the landscapes and dungeons. Therefore I decided that it would be much less painful to find a decent map editor and let it do the heavy lifting for me. Finding the tools required to do the job was a pretty frustrating experience in itself, but eventually I was able to find the applications I needed to get the job done. A quick overview of the tools I am using will be covered in the next post.

Inspiration

The purpose of this blog is to document the progress of a Minecraft mod I am creating. The mod aims to recreate the original Legend of Zelda from NES in the Minecraft world. In the end the goal is to have a replica of the overworld, the dungeons, and a texture pack to recreate the original games graphics. This project was inspired by a post on /r/minecraft that aimed to recreate the first dungeon in the game. I started working on the first dungeon in my own in game before I decided that I could take it one step further and attempt to re-create the entire Legend of Zelda world. The first step involves me recreating the entrance to the first dungeon in survival mode and deciding how I wanted to go about working on the overall project.