Danish government builds Minecraft world of Denmark from geodata

http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/

by tudborg • 12 years ago

134 76 12 years ago

Svip5• 12 years ago

Translation:

    The Geodata Agency's data is now free, and we have inserted them into Minecraft.
    
    That means that the whole of Denmark proper is now available as a virtual world
    in 1:1 in Minecraft itself, so you can freely move around in Denmark, find
    our own neighbourhood, construct and deconstruct like in any other Minecraft world.
    
    On this page, you can read more about the free data in the Minecraft world, and
    how you get started playing or download the free data.

According to this page[0] the map is divided into three regions, each which has their own server:

  * Northern Jutland: server1.gstcraft.dk
  * Southwestern Denmark: server2.gstcraft.dk
  * Eastern Denmark: server3.gstcraft.dk

[0] http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/spil-her/

ManAboutCouch• 12 years ago

The OSGB in the UK did something similar last year: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/innovate/developers/minecraf...

Apparently it was built by an intern, it took him two weeks to create the 22 Billion blocks: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2013/minecraft-ma...

Svip5• 12 years ago

Is it 1:1? It doesn't appear 1:1, given how tiny the A/B-roads are. I am just curious, there are not a lot of screenshots (or information on the scale in fact).

oliveoil• 12 years ago

building whole cities and landscapes by putting together small bricks piece by piece? would be surprised if they were not all over it in DK, the land of lego.

axx• 12 years ago

I'm wondering how they did it? Is there some kind of converter to transform GEO data to Minecraft Worlds?

Svip5• 12 years ago

GST itself has a very detailed explanation in Danish.[0] But basically, two of their employees worked to created the converter. They even include a table list of GST's own descriptions of terrain types and what Minecraft biomes they were converted to.

They don't have underground data, so some simple steps have been taken for each area based on a general idea of the underground (e.g. Bornholm's underground becoming stone).

As for buildings, they know the shape of buildings, but not their texture, so they are merely randomly generated in 'unrealistic colours' (as they describe it).

As the map data is updated each quarter (3 months), the Minecraft data will also be updated.

It's a very interesting read, I recommend you learn Danish and read it!

[0] http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/om-frie-data-i-e...

w1ntermute• 12 years ago

Or just use Google Translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=...

fetbaffe11• 12 years ago

What a waste of tax payer money.

Svip5• 12 years ago

The intent of this data release is to help children explore Denmark in a virtual environment in class. This is to help Danish children at least to better grasp Danish geography.

bananas6• 12 years ago

Isn't that what Google Earth is for as an example?

Putting it in Minecraft is a hack and a PR thing, nothing more.

fetbaffe11• 12 years ago

There is nothing wrong with the intention, the problem is result. I hope I'm wrong, but on my experience of these kind of things is that the popularity is short lived. Soon, some new idea comes along and removes the just implemented old new way.

How about a school trip instead?

bananas6• 12 years ago

I came here to write this but am quite surprised that other people don't agree with it and downvoted you. These agencies aren't paid from our tax money to produce toys - they are there to provide a cost efficient service where possible.

I have the same worries about the entire gov.uk rework.

Neat hack yes, but this is government, not private enterprise or personal time.

In the UK we almost called for the hanging of an MP who bought a duck house on expenses and I'm sure these "neat hacks" over time have cost a lot more.

zimpenfish3• 12 years ago

If you go down the "government should be cost efficient" route, you end up with things like [/PPI/] which, whilst making the government more cost efficient, has thoroughly damaged many vital UK services.

Edit: By PPI, I meant PPP/PFI. I conflated the two into one incorrect abbreviation. Apologies.

fetbaffe11• 12 years ago

I usually get down voted here, so no surprise.

Sweden made a virtual embassy in Second Life. It's closed now. Just money down the drain.

http://secondhouseofsweden.com/

Politicians have really hard time these days to put tax payer money where they should go, education, health care, law enforcement.

schrijver• 12 years ago

In your other comment you call this a ’hack and a PR thing’ and it is exactly that: a neat hack to draw attention to the fact that the government is now publishing this data-set as free data.

I think it’s great the government publishes this free data (given as it is was probably collected using tax money), and I also think it’s great they do a project to attract attention to this: the more people know about this data, the more people can use it, and the better the tax money has been spent.

Plus, I imagine the Danish blog post provides good starting points for anyone wishing to use this data in similar ways.

JetSpiegel2• 12 years ago

I'm pretty sure that paying an intern or two for a few weeks to produce tangible results is well down on the "unnecessary government spending" ladder.

prof_hobart• 12 years ago

As the link is down, did it cover how much taxpayers' money was spent producing it?

Squarel• 12 years ago

I think the amount of taxpayer money spent on this is negligible in the scheme of things, and far cheaper than an ARCGIS license for every child in the country to explore virtual geodata with instead.

DanBC2• 12 years ago

What a useful bit of soft power. Denmark is being talked about on an influential Internet forum. People on HN usually complain about how bad governments are at makig data open. Here is an example of a government making data open and doing fun silly things with it.

The cost ofthe project is probably minimal compared to other government spending and has had a reasonable impact.

The children using this Mincraft world will grow up to do other neat things.

fetbaffe11• 12 years ago

That is exactly the same argument that was made when Sweden made a virtual embassy in Second Life. Not convinced that it benefited anyone except the programmers.

And also, I'm not making an argument against open data.

lesingerouge• 12 years ago

Even if this is a minor "show-off" project, it's a good reminder for the power of open data. Location services, emergency planning software, tons of other stuff benefit enormously from this kind of openness.

[Crazy fun idea]:Basically, given Denmark's open geographic data one could potentially build an MMORPG which takes place in Denmark and have the terrain pre-generated. I think I would call this one Hamlet: The revenge.

zxexz• 12 years ago

Wouldn't Hamlet: The Revenge just be Hamlet? :P Imagine a Hamlet roleplay server

drsintoma• 12 years ago

just yesterday I was searching for publicly available administrative geodata of European countries. it's not an easy task due to language barriers and fragmentation. Does anyone know where to download the source data of this project?

fetbaffe11• 12 years ago

Download here http://download.kortforsyningen.dk/

Instructions here http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=...

Edit: You need a user to be able to download from Kortforsyningen. Not sure what the user agreements says about foreigners because the sign up form is in danish and the options are like if you are a danish city, citizen, ngo etc. What I can see you only need to supply user name and email address.

What surprises me is that I can't find any pages in English. So good luck navigating if you don't understand danish.

6cxs2hd6• 12 years ago

What surprises me is that I can't find any pages in English. So good luck navigating if you don't understand danish.

The American expat community hasn't grown large enough to form an effective separatist group and demand that the Danish government translate everything into English? How awful. /s

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

The GADM database of Global Administrative Areas has boundaries for every country, in a variety of formats. They're normalized into 4 "layers" IIRC. You can push them straight into postgis or whatever.

http://www.gadm.org/

(Oops, I just realised you're looking for full maps with elevation at each point, and this is just a bunch of polygons. Still a very useful resource.)

zenon• 12 years ago

Didn't Mojang already do this? http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Superflat

DanBC2• 12 years ago

I'd love it if we could get things like this for the moon, or Mars, or deep sea Earth.

And I'd really like 3D printed toy models of Mars or Moon too - I haven't found anything that does this.

morsch• 12 years ago

What, like this? https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26311

Somehow event at 10X/50X exaggerated height I don't find these particularly interesting. Planets, even Mars, are for the most part really smooth.

A somewhat exaggerated model of the Matterhorn was one of the first things I printed and it's pretty cool, though.

rs232• 12 years ago

Not Minecraft per se, but close: http://www.voxelmars.com/

kator• 12 years ago

Is there a way to download the maps rather then connect to the servers? I keep poking around but it's not jumping out at me..

wlesieutre• 12 years ago

ominous answered this but was marked as dead. Not clear why, but my best guess is that people use Google Translate to bypass spam filtering?

Here's the link he posted. I'm leaving out the google translate link: http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/download-data/

sp332• 12 years ago

It was almost certainly the link shortener that got ominous's post autokilled by HN code. Here's the translate link: https://translate.google.pt/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pre...

wil421• 12 years ago

I never really got into minecraft, do people just mine and build things or do you actually have a story/things to complete?

duiker101• 12 years ago

There is no story but I enjoy the adventure mode. It's a totally different game but we can compare it to and Sims game, any other simulator or the more recent Dayz. It doesn't have a story but it's enjoyable to play. You need to survive the night, create a shelter, get stronger by obtaining rare block, build a nice house etc....

exDM69• 12 years ago

There is no story but I enjoy the adventure mode.

Well depends how you look at it... it doesn't have a narrated, scripted storyline but it most definitely has a kind of an open ended story these days. It was added gradually over the years so every update was a bit more to explore.

<SPOILERS> It is quite epic, really... you have to journey to the center of the earth, then descend into hell and finally ascend into the heavens. </SPOILERS>

Nothing forces you to do so, though. You can spend your time farming cows if that's your thing.

kapsel• 12 years ago

I have to say that I am quite impressed by their work. I spent 30 minutes earlier, walking around in the neighborhood where I grew up, and it was extremely easy to navigate and recognize roads, houses, and large buildings.

Even the train tracks through the city were there as rails in Minecraft (although not fully connected and working).

Very cool, the guys at GST did some amazing work here.. But as far as I can tell, there is no way to download the full 1TB world?

andyidsinga• 12 years ago

If they included Hans Island in this, any canadians are obliged to go there, build an inukshuk and leave a bottle of canadian whiskey for our Danish friends - i mean enemies! ;) - who happen by. see also : http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4797368

hyp0• 12 years ago

I've long been surprised that real-world places weren't modelled more often in minecraft (and fps games).

My tentative conclusion was it might be too helpful for e.g. actual shooting. Though, height data is generally available anyway (e.g. google maps' "terrain", council planning databases), just not as easy to work with.

Snail_Commando• 12 years ago

I think it's more likely to be a design decision. If you try to model a large real world area, some people will immediately notice how it is unlike reality; so the constraints of computational power, design skill, and developer ability are multiplied. The differences can be truly jarring.

My guess is that there is more upside to creating unique areas. This affords more creative freedom and the luxury of changing the simulation in accordance with constraints and resources.

Moru• 12 years ago

We tried this in ActionQuake 2 thinking it was a great idea. When we were halfway done with our town we realized it was very boring to play in something realistic. The real world doesn't always present such an interesting landscape for FPS shooters compared to the ones that are designed to be fun to play.

oldmanjoe2• 12 years ago

On the Denmark minecraft server someone has placed nazi insignia all over Amalienborg (Warp there to see).. I think the server admins should have made it impossible to break and place blocks...

devindotcom• 12 years ago

There is a "the" Denmark Minecraft server? It looks like the map data is just being provided. Is there an official server hosting a live game?

oldmanjoe2• 12 years ago

Eastern Denmark: server3.gstcraft.dk

Danish government builds Minecraft world of Denmark from geodata

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