Diddums

Holy shit, this is amazing. Ordnance Survey, the people that map stuff, have recreated GB in Minecraft, to the block. All 22 BILLION of them. Clicky Ordnance Survey, the body responsible for mapping Great Britain from top to toe, have recreated 86,000 square miles of it in Minecraft. The map was built in two weeks by intern Joseph Braybrook and OS's Innovation Labs team using the mapping authority's OpenData products, and can be downloaded to explore for free. Ordnance Survey’s data covers England, Scotland, Wales and their surrounding islands. The resulting Minecraft map incorporates 224,000 of Great Britain’s 229,848 square km. “We think we may have created the largest Minecraft world ever built based on real-world data,” OS Innovation Lab Manager Graham Dunlop told the BBC. “The resulting map shows the massive potential not just for using Minecraft for computer technology and geography purposes in schools, but also the huge scope of applications for OS OpenData too.” Once downloaded, the map starts new players on the spot of OS’s head office in Southampton. From there, they can make mainland Britain - 22 billion blocks of it - their playground. Using a combination of two programs - OS Terrain 50 and OS VectorMap - the mapping authority has managed to port a 3D model of the earth surface into the game, and overlay it with accurately placed bodies of water, woodland and roads. The entire generation process took about seven hours on a “modest” desktop PC. OS have found equivalent materials for each of the key terrain types in their maps. Motorways are built in diamond, for instance, and B Roads from pumpkin. “Each blocks represents a ground area of 50 square metres,” write OS. “The raw height data is stored in metres and must be scaled down to fit within the 256 block height limit in Minecraft. A maximum height of 2 500 metres was chosen, which means Ben Nevis, appears just over 128 blocks high. “Although this exaggerates the real-world height, it preserves low-lying coastal features such as Bournemouth's cliffs, adding interest to the landscape.” Bloody hell, eh? You can find the map to download here - it’s approximately 3.6GB uncompressed. OS have also provided coordinates for some notable geographical landmarks, including Mount Snowdon, the site of London, and Lake Windermere. Wow. Just wow.

Sup dude, welcome to the new site

let me know what happens Dave, I'd like to keep this as smooth as possible for everyone. Try clearing the cache, that usually helps too.

Busy shopping for this weekend. Got stuck at Bison and Bird. Having a Mojito. You lot had best bring your drinking faces.

I'll check this out later!

I'll join next time I've got a few free moments to myself. We need some events, like racing around a certain area on nothing but bicycles and tractors.

Yep. Tell him that Tam. Tell him I'll drive to Hawick and whoop his ass. Go, tell him.

Unbreakable poles eh? *looks* Yep.

I need to see if there's a plugin which allows me to like every post in a topic with one click.

Just a lil' photo I took this evening...

That's perfectly fine. When it hits 90deg it's time to start worrying, although the card only goes into failsafe mode at 98deg. It's nothing to worry about, Unigine are the best for stressing a card to it#s max.

One thread is enough thanks, I'd really prefer to stay off MI5's radar for a bit longer.

What the fuck am I meant to do with this?

You guys know more about how this software works than I do.

I swear to god, if this results in a console war I'll climb through the internet and punch you both in the face.

Awesome! Cheers Arris. If Cals works I can move on to the next thing.

Lurvely, cheers Cal!

I come here for tips and all I get is a load of bullshit.

I find it to be very useful.

I've just set up Facebook Connect. This lets people log in using their Facebook data, which makes the forum a bit more accessible. It *should* work fine, but it appears to be more for people that aren't registered yet. I need some people to test it out and report back please. If there are any error codes or whatever, let me know. Cheers!

So do we want it back or not? I've got some left over real estate at the moment but I can't guarantee that it'll stay there for very long. I agree with the PPR thing though, that's an entire forum for status updates. If people don't read your PPR, then odds are they're not too bothered about your status either.

Hey Sam! Glad you finally signed up! The shout box needs ten posts to unlock, anti-spam measures and all that. Hopefully you'll stick around and enjoy the fun of not only GTA V but many more games to come!

Gets rich. Buys Morgan Aeromax. #failingatlife Still, fuckin jelly

Not me

Never have I wanted to punch someone in the face so hard. Having said that, he got off on the wrong foot by wearing shades.