The City of Melbourne in Minecraft

It has been a while since I have shared a project from the 'development' side. So, here you go!!

I am in the process of 're-creating' part of the Melbourne CBD in Minecraft as a base for one 'experience' for students across Victoria to participate in next year and beyond. This is a 'trial' run and we have at least one other 'experience' worked out ready to implement in this map if everything goes as well as I expect it will.

My long term plan is to actually 're-create' the entire CBD in Minecraft so that we can get rural and regional students planning trips and exploring the CBD before they come to Melbourne, or even international students to explore the city of Melbourne. But that is getting well ahead of myself.

So far I have spent a total of "a lot" of hours learning the process to get this to happen, and on multiple occasions I have had to throw away what I was working on, and start again because it just wasn't working right. The worst example was last week, I spent about 5 hours on stream testing out processes and getting everything made in Minecraft (Java version) and then I realised that the scale was wrong.... Yup, 5 hours work down the drain, but a great deal of learning happened.

I has taken quite a bit of back and forth to get the 3d files out of the people that hold the data in a format I can use. Originally I was going to go through Tinkercad as I have done that before, but I very quickly found that that process wasn't going to work for this, as it lost way too much 'fidelity' and we had missing 'faces' and holes in the terrain and 'post processing' this would take a very, very long time.

So I hunted out some other processes and spoke to some community experts (thanks Adam Clarke and Adrian Brightmoore!!!! No really.... THANKS!!!) and we have a neat little process. So today, there was even more learning, I spent the morning getting everything sorted and ready in Qubicle (a very neat little software package by the way) to find out that it was way, way easier to 'stitch' the pieces together in MCEdit.

Then after spending an hour or two stitching everything together, in the correct scale, I even saved it multiple times in separate locations along the way only to learn on a re-load that MCEdit cannot 'generate chunks' in PE/Bedrock worlds. Not only that, If the chunks are not generated properly, MCEdit still shows the entire world as if they did, but when you press save... it really doesn't save anything. So that was the entire mornings work thrown away for me, but again, Adrian Brightmoore to the rescue. He showed me a neat little schematic he created that 'generates' chunks in Minecraft by teleporting the player iteratively 'down and across' a Minecraft map.

So with all the learning that happened across the last few weeks and after I had the chunks generated properly it only took about an hour and a half to stitch the 28 different pieces of the below 'city' together. This is larger than the project brief called for, but I am not too sad about that. Next steps for me are 'painting' the city the 'mostly correct' colours in MCEdit, and then putting the finishing touches on the buildings.

The whole 'map' in MCEdit as it stands currently. There is on 'average' 40 blocks of ground underneath the city as I have been told, none of the 'underground buildings' are lower than that.

What the map looks like in Minecraft: Education Edition... currently.

I have a list of 20 or so 'key sites/buildings' that need different 'levels of rendering' so that is the next actual step for me. To pick an example of each 'level' and 'render' it at the appropriate quality. I am really excited by the prospects for this project, and look forward to continuing to share it as we go through the development process.

A future step is to 'liven' up the city somehow, pedestrians, bicycles, trams and the like to make the city as 'alive' as it is in the real world. I am not 100% sure I can do this the way I want, the 'trams' could be 'reskinned' Minecarts, but I also want trains as well, and I don' think I can have both. I am in the 'thinking' process around all of this right now, so early days in this part.

Thanks as always for reading, if you have any comments or feedback, feel free to drop them in the comments section below.