Minecraft players can now download Denmark – all of it – in 1:1 scale Players of the popular sandbox world Minecraft have a new landscape to roam over, as the Danish government put a representation of the entire country in 1:1 scale online for download. Denmark Minecraft map The Nyhavn district of Copenhagen in Minecraft mode "All of Denmark is now a virtual world in the ratio 1:1 inside the …
anyone remembers when the same thing was done on a much smaller scale in CounterStrike a few years back?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/03/student_counterstrike_map_texasschool/
i wonder if / when will someone call the cops or a swat team down on these... or maybe just dispense with the niceties and use a drone strike directly
That was also my first thought (so I'm not the only one pining for the fjords). Then I thought, why not do the Benelux countries? It's sure to come in at much less than a Terabyte, being so boring and all (geographically speaking, of course).
Wait the Benelux Countries did you say? Isn't that where the Country with the most offensive name in the entire Galaxy is located? I shall refrain from speaking it so as to not upset all the turlingdromes out there.
I want to know why and what part? Do they have a Ministry for Computer Games over there? Is this the output of their Culture department? Did their Prime Minister just directly appoint someone to do this because she thought it would be fun?
I'm trying to imagine Cameron announcing a special House of Commons edition for GTA or similar. It just doesn't click.
"I want to know why...."
That's easy, madam (1).
Look at any table of either tax take or government spending as a proportion of GDP. Whichever way you cut it, Denmark always comes out top, exempting a handful of basket case countries like East Timor and Cuba.
When your government is spending almost 60% of GDP, and has done so for years, then it soon runs out of useful things to spend money on, but you can be sure as eggs is eggs that it isn't going to decide that maybe the citizens should be allowed to keep more of their money to spend as they see fit. And spending 60% of GDP in a wealthy country must be a real challenge when you don't have a huge military-tech-government combine and an interventionist foreign policy. Interestingly the French are only marginally behind Denmark in terms of economic socialism, and as far as I can see they've given the world nothing, so I presume that all the money in France is spent on mistresses and such like.
Note 1. Madam - or sir, or whatever may be appropriate for your gender and species. This is a general problem for most of us Pseudonymists. Speaking for myself I'm an ursine male, and it isn't just the woods I s*** up.
When your government is spending almost 60% of GDP, and has done so for years, then it soon runs out of useful things to spend money on, but you can be sure as eggs is eggs that it isn't going to decide that maybe the citizens should be allowed to keep more of their money to spend as they see fit
Or as a counter-argument, when your government is spending 60% of GDP, you'd expect their remit to extend far beyond traditional "government services", into research and stuff normally done by private enterprise.
Actually what happened is this. When they first saved the file, after typing it all in, it had some typos. The Scale parameter in the header of the file had an unintended uppercase M ("Mm") that was naturally interpreted as MEGA-meter. But all the data was entered in millimeter ("mm"). So it was not in 1:1 scale, but ONE BEEEEEEELEEEEON-to -one scale. Isn't that amazing? It took them only a few seconds to correct the case of the prefix ("mm"), and click Save.
/Sarcasm off
(Well spotted. Those 3 or more that downvoted your observation can hang their heads in shame.)
As a Dane, I was somewhat baffled as well.
I'd say only Bornholm and perhaps some eastern parts of our most eastern parts (besides Bornholm) are actually in anyway connected to the Baltic Sea.
We're far more connected to Kattegat, Skagerrak and the North Sea (aka part of the Atlantic) - Historically so as well.
I guess you could say that it's technically true, but it would take a least 5 guesses to get from "Name a Baltic Country" to "Denmark" - and that's after a few: "But there aren't others than those 3..."
First of all; I am a big fan of Minecraft myself so yeah; I really look forward to digging into Denmark a little upcoming weekend.
But the thing is; when I started digging for this download (being Dutch I can make out bits and pieces of the Danish language, but not that much) I eventually came across this kortforsyningen download page. As said; my Danish isn't too great, but looking at the pictures it seems to me as if Denmark has "simply" enhanced an already available download service.
What I make from it is that you can download several maps from Denmark in several different formats / resolutions. And in addition you can now also download the Minecraft "map".
So far the good news, the bad news is that it seems as if the download doesn't actually get you to a link which you can click. But I could of course also have missed the obvious.
I am a native speaker of Norwegian, so Danish isn't too difficult for me.
I had a browse, and ended up here: http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/spil-her/
It seems like you need to use their servers if you want to browse the entire areas.
The link you found does allow you to download minecraft maps of Denmark, but only 10x10km chunks, not the whole thing. I wasn't able to find a "complete" download.
"Vi henviser derfor til Kortforsyningen , hvor det er muligt at downloade 10x10 km blokke til egen computer, og så gå på opdagelse der. "
Which roughly translates to "We wish to point to the Map Service (Link), where it is possible to download 10x10 km blocks to your own computer, (...)"
1TB over the next 7 months equates to about 150Gb per month. On top of your usual monthly downloads, there isn't an internet plan around that will cater for that.
Oh, I'm sorry, it's Denmark. That makes much more sense than any pissweak Australian ISP who don't even have the courtesy of asking you to bend over before they insert their boot.
It erks me when people complain that things like this are a waste of tax payers money.
The same happened when downing street retorted to Jeremy Clarkson for PM.
The cost of these little PR stunts are so far bellow minimal is laughable to complain. More Money is wasted from bad policies that have to be backtracked and redone.
Absolutely agree.
Even if the Danish taxpayer paid a hundred thousand to a developer for this, that's a small company (hopefully) who will stay in business for another year to grow their economy. Meanwhile they get some great PR out to the world, & the goodwill generated makes the world a generally better place.
Being able to remodel the skyline of London would be cool. Could knock down that gherkin now they've gone bust, & see if it is an improvement or not. For nearly free!
"Even if the Danish taxpayer paid a hundred thousand to a developer for this, that's a small company (hopefully) who will stay in business for another year to grow their economy."
That's a good model. Maybe we should try it. Government could pick winners, and hand them public money to do things that they wouldn't be able to do commercially, and the whole economy will be richer as a result.
To be honest, if your map data contains height data (as it should), then it's a fairly trivial piece of software to convert the map data to Minecraft data. It might take a few days to generate (depending on hardware used), but hosting the data is probably the most complex part of this.
I'd rather pay for this, then some fake ass research into Farting Cows blowing up the Ozone Layer, thus causing an otherwise non-existant Global Warming to happen. The Snow outside would happen to suggest otherwise. Thankfully its gone now. But this last Winter was anything but, warm!
>>"thus causing an otherwise non-existant Global Warming to happen. The Snow outside would happen to suggest otherwise. Thankfully its gone now. But this last Winter was anything but, warm!"
Speaking as a AGW-skeptic, please don't ever support me in an argument. Your confusion between weather and climate would shame anyone and your ignorance that the real debate is not over if global temperatures have been rising (they have), but whether the primary cause is human activity and the degree that Carbon is it.
Some people believe whole-heartedly in AGW and runaway climate change. Others of us are varying degrees of skeptical. Then there are just idiots.
I don't think they can, technically speaking.
We have games today that boast about how the terrain can be modified, but they lie. They look gorgeous, but the terrain "modifications" are small and temporary.
In Minecraft, every part of the world is a modifiable entity. It doesn't look so good, but technically it goes way beyond just having a hole in the ground.
The tradeoff is clear : you use memory for gorgeous graphics, or for actual functionality. Minecraft has decided to go for functionality.
That being said, you can easily find Minecraft mods that propose texture packs. Some of them make the game look quite better than the original textures. Still just as blocky, obviously, but the blocks look nice.
Which resolution?
The screen resolution? Thats already as high as any other game.
The texture resolution? The game already supports replacement texture packs, which can be significantly higher resolution than the default textures. These can actually look very nice (particularly combined with a shader mod), but the blockyness of the default textures feels like a better fit for size of the blocks.
The size of the blocks? No, this is unlikely to change, the current size is a good compromise between having enough detail to tell whats going on and not having to place too many blocks to build something in a reasonable time.
The polygon count of models for blocks and other entities? Possibly, I think they're working on making models replacable (like textures already are) in a future relealse. As with textures it is likely that some of the third party models will be more detailed than the defaults.
29 is old enough to "get" MC, but you need to have started your family in your late teens. I don't know the actual stats, but I'm guessing that teen parents aren't a big part of the El Reg demographic, so you've probably got a few years to wait.
Joking apart, Minecraft has much of the same appeal as Lego, but is a lot cheaper and truer to the original blocky ethos of the latter. Making blocks smaller would make building anything more tedious so it might actually count as a backward step.
1:1 as a definition is clear nonsense. What matters is resolution. In principle, you can zoom any source of mapping information into whatever scaling you like, but it's the mapping resolution that gives you the detail. If what is meant be 1:1 scaling means that you can expect to see on your computer screen the level of detail you would see if there in person, then it's clearly not the case. Such a model would require vastly more information than a mere 1TB.
So, as always, don't swallow the headline, but find out what it really means.
Even survival mode there are many more things to do than fight monsters and kill the dragon. I see killing the dragon as just one of many things you can decide to do, or not. Its not even the last thing to do, if you focus on it you can get it dead in a few hours but not have what most players would consider an established base.
I'd agree about hardcore mode though, that probably is more gamelike and you probably do want to focus on the dragon rather than build stuff that'll get deleted one day.
According to DR Nyheder the plea about not using TNT did not go that well. The map of Denmark has been so good as destroyed by 10.000 players taking a poke at the Minecraft server hosting Denmark. The traffic was so high at one point that the server crashed. I hope the creators of the map of Denmark made a backup copy of it for an hard reset in the future.
http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2014/04/25/124123.htm
There are pictures of the damage in this news. Its in Danish.
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