geoOttaWOW -- Successfully Connecting to a New World

geoOttaWOW
Successfully Connecting
to another World
Eric Storie
City of Ottawa
© 2016 City of Ottawa

About Myself
GIS Analyst with City of
Ottawa since 2005.
Eric Storie

GeoOttaWOW
© mojang.com© 2016 City of Ottawa

It Started with an Idea. I Looked at what we had already in geoOttawa, and
saw there was a whole other world in there.
© Justin Pelletier - Puddle Vision

Safe Software released FME Desktop, with Minecraft transformers.

FME new tools to transform data into Minecraft worlds
© mojang.com

geoOttaWOW
The Experiment begins.
Early in 2015, a couple of people in the
GIS unit at the City of Ottawa decided to
experiment, on their own time, with
FME, by building a Minecraft world of
Ottawa.
© icmes.tumblr.com

Wouldn’t it be Neat?
As this Experiment began to take shape initial thoughts were “Wouldn’t it be neat
if this resulted in engaged and interested youth?”
We were excited that this gaming data holds the possibility of getting young
citizens to be involved and understand how and why we do things at the City

City of Ottawa Youth and GIS
The adults of Ottawa have our
mapping application called
geoOttawa, and if it worked the
youth would have a Minecraft
world called geoOttaWOW.

FME 2015 new tools to transform
data into Minecraft worlds
FME
GeoOttawa
Data sets
Youth
Input

FME 2015 new tools to transform data into Minecraft worlds
• Uses Digital Elevation Model data with our existing GIS enterprise services.
• Creates basic Minecraft world in about 3 hours or less.

Focusing on Youth Interest, what can we do with this?
• Engage youth with gaming environment.
• Don’t just tell us. Show us how you want your City of Ottawa to be!
• Free for All

It’s a New World “In Minecraft“

So How Did We Build it?
© http://blogos-haha.blogspot.ca/

No, it’s not Rocket Science.
Posted on Reddit.com Minecraft by XxSlainMagicxX

Safe Software provides the tools
you need at the Knowledge
Centre.
https://knowledge.safe.com/articles
/1064/how-to-make-minecraft-
worlds.html
© Safe Software Inc.

It did not require Astronauts.
© CBC.ca

We used these.
© www.wisegeek.com

Restrictions on Building a Minecraft world at the City of Ottawa.
• The Minecraft game or Server cannot be installed or run on City of
Ottawa computers. Access to Minecraft.net is blocked in the City
network.
• We did not want to support a Minecraft Server.
• Needed tool to view the data after it was created on a lab PC, for
development.

Solutions for Building Minecraft worlds at the City of Ottawa.
• Released pre-beta worlds on DVD for testers to take home and
test in there Minecraft game.
• With no support for a Minecraft server, we planned to release
the data on the City of Ottawa Open Data website.
• MapCrafter tool used to view the data after it was created on
a lab PC.

Mapcrafter

Ottawa is Big. Really Big.

Ottawa is Big. Really Big.
• That means we can make a really big world.
• First attempts where in the range of 11.2 GB.
• Final Beta release is 1.65 GB.

It did get better as I learned how to use the tools.

Testing proved we could build stuff in geoOttaWOW, and prepared us for the
wacky world of Minecraft.© 2016 City of Ottawa

Layering is important, you must
decide what goes on top of what
and clip your data, where
required, according to that plan.
© City of Jasper Indiana http://www.jasperindiana.gov

In your Workbench Right Click on
your dataset and Move Up or
Move Down to control order of
data reading.
Rails on Top, so
read that data last.

Parcel Service Data used in
GeoOttawa became Grass Blocks

Roads, Driveways, and Pathways
were buffered and would clip the
Grass and Podzol layer.

Vegetation is clipped by the
roads and in turn used to clip and
replace the Grass Blocks.

Vegetation in Minecraft, close enough is good enough.

Rivers, Streams, and Lakes clip
everything.

Rivers, Streams, and Lakes clip everything.
• If you do not allow Rivers and Streams to clip everything, you
will end up with Rivers dammed by Roads.
• Rivers dammed by roads are essentially Lakes, and we did not
want that to occur.
• Users will have to build bridges over the water.

Major Buildings created using TIN data from a MicroStation dgn

Major Buildings created using TIN data from a MicroStation dgn.
• Using TIN data means you get extruded like forms for your
buildings.
• Height of each building had to be calculated using the
maximum Z value over each building foot print. That value was
then converted to the nearest integer value.
• Since Minecraft uses 1m x 1m blocks the resulting buildings are
block like in appearance.

Be Prepared. Kids can be Brutally Honest.
You will get Feedback you did not expect.

Be Prepared. Kids can be Brutally Honest. You will get Feedback you did not expect.
• I tried scaling to get a less block like appearance, and got:
“there is something wrong with your block size!”
• I did not know that you need Trees to be surrounded by, and
growing on top of Podzol blocks and got: "Trees do not grow on
stone they just pop off!"
• The Rail data was originally added as provided by our ESRI
service for Regional Railways, and all I got was: “Fix your Rail!”

I’ve Been Working on the Railroad
all the live long day

I’ve Been Working on the Railroad all the live long day
• The original posting in the Knowledge Centre was difficult to
follow for Rail construction, so I developed my own method,
which was similar, and appears to have worked. The Knowledge
Centre has recently been edited, and a template has been
added to help with Rail building. The template is now available
for download.
• The key is to be able to relate what is posted on the Minecraft
wiki and what values you should use for the blockID and
blockData.

I’ve Been Working on the Railroad all the live long day
• Build the Rail in a separate Workbench and add the completed
Point data back into your master Workbench. The Point data
can then be added to the Minecraft point cloud data set.
• You are going to have to replace every polyline feature in your
Rail data set with points spaced 1m apart, to represent the rail
data.
• Powered Rail was added by replacing every n’th Straight Rail
point in the master Workbench.

Your goal is to get your raster
grid to handle directional
changes the same as it would in
the game.
© minecraft.gamepedia.com

That way your Railway tracks
connect and function well.

Rail in your FME Workbench will
have a blockID of 66, unless it is
Powered Rail.

blockID = 66
blockData is calculated based on
the orientation of the block

Rail blockData values that can be
used in your FME Workbench

• In the end you should have a point data
spaced at 1 m intervals, which can be
written to the Point Cloud using the
Minecraft Rasterizer transformer
VectorInput.
• It will not be perfect and will require
some manual intervention by the players
in some cases.

Please refer to the Official
Minecraft Wiki at
minecraft.gamepedia.com for
good details on all the blockID's
and blockData values you will
need to build your Minecraft
world.

6500 page views since it’s launch on Open Data Ottawa.
Who knew this would be so cool?
Doctor Who logo © 2009 & TM BBC. © BBC WW Ltd

geoOttaWOW. It is alive, and has
been known to have Cats that
will wake you up in the morning,
and Sheep on Parliament Hill.
© http://www.munio-minecraft.cz

geoOttaWOW
Released to Open Data 24-Dec-2015
http://data.ottawa.ca/dataset/geo-
ottawa-minecraft

GeoOttaWOW in Mapcrafter

Thank you!
Eric Storie
gisteam@ottawa.ca

geoOttaWOW -- Successfully Connecting to a New World

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