Timesink part 13: Not dead

Been a while since I posted anything, so I thought I would say everything is still going.

Minecraft has gone through a number of updates, and as a consequence I decided to roll a new world. As this is version 2 of the idea, I realized the number of cities I had created was far too many. 30+ abandoned cities might be great on a server with a hundred or more players, but the server I admin has under 20 players, and there are rarely more than five people on at a time. For that reason, I have lowered the total number of cities to 19.

Along the way, I have revised and extended my various scripts. Right now I have two basic ones: cityPlacer.py and mapExplorer.py

The cityPlacer is pretty straight forward: it uses method I described previously to teleport an admin around the world, leave them in a spot to allow cities to generate around them, and then moves them to their next spot. The mapExplorer script is pretty cool, though. It, too, teleports the player around, but it does so only to expose a map the player holds.

In this way I can have maps for each city without having to manually fly around. An interesting consequence of this is if the rate of teleporting is high enough, the maps will not fully render. This creates a really delightful ancient feel to the maps.

Being able to automate the exploration of the city centers is pretty sweet.

In upcoming posts, I'll share the new look of the teleportation gates.