The Minecraft Overviewer

For the last few months, Overviewer development has slowed. Fear not, the project is not dead! The semester is coming to a close and us core devs will hopefully re-acquire the necessary free time and motivation to handle some of the larger, outstanding, and much-requested features the community has been asking for.

Features like:

• Easy addition of custom/mod blocks such as IC2, Redpower, etc.
• As a superset of the above bullet, a plugin-type system for Overviewer to easily add functionality
• A re-design of some of the config options that I personally think are confusing (like how --check-tiles works)
• Better handling of maps edited with external tools
• More performance improvements
• A re-design of the docs to make it more clear and easier to find relevant information
• Probably more I'm forgetting

I have high hopes that development will pick back up in the next few weeks. We've been keeping up with smaller bug-fixes and features, but these larger features require larger blocks of time.

Incidentally, if anyone out there has any Python experience, or would like to help e.g. with documentation, please see us on our IRC channel (#overviewer on Freenode). The Overviewer is a community-run project and needs volunteers to help keep things moving. That means you could help drive development while us regulars are too busy with school/work/vacation/whatever!

derchris in #overviewer has made for us an updated visualization of the Overviewer commit history. Check it out!

What's interesting is you can pretty clearly see when I left around 0:30, or November 2010, and then when I return around 2:00, or October 2011.

Thanks derchris for the video! Thanks everyone for your contributions!

For an intro to Overviewer in general, see the front page of our documentation site.

Support for Minecraft 1.2 worlds is now merged into the "master" branch of our repository!

Those of you who have repositories with "anvil" or "rewrite" checked out will need to switch to the master branch (git checkout master).

Those of you who have the old "master" branch checked out will need to see This Post to upgrade to the new version. Config files are incompatible with this upgrade, so this is important!

Also to note if you're upgrading from 0.4 (the old master branch): remember that due to changes made to the format you WILL need to re-render your maps from scratch. Trying to update existing maps will NOT work. Also due to major changes to the web assets, you should not simply copy over custom web assets to the new version. In particular, custom overviewerConfig.js files can cause strange problems.

The new version has been arbitrarily named 0.9. Windows builds are now available on our downloads page.

As always, stop in on IRC with any questions or just to say hi!

This is still in beta because there are a few features yet missing, but since Minecraft 1.2 is released, we felt that it was more important to have the master branch compatible with the current Minecraft. Here are the features yet to be implemented:

• Signs, Spawn markers, and other Points of Interest
• Ordering of renders and worlds in the javascript interface Edit: Done! Mar 6 2012
• Overlays

Edit: The "anvil" branch is now merged into master as version 0.9. The note about using anvil is still relevant, but there no longer exists an "anvil" branch. Links to the docs updated. -brownan

The Overviewer now has initial support for the new Anvil map format (used in Minecraft 1.2)! You can find this version in the anvil branch on GitHub. If you need a Windows build, feel free to ask us in our IRC channel.

(Edit: we build the windows builds on-demand. Right now things are developing rapidly and the current version may be unstable, so that's why we're not building them automatically. Once things stabilize we'll start posting the new builds on to the github downloads page. -brownan)

Using the Anvil Branch

The Anvil branch is based on our recent code rewrite, which means that it has a different configuration format and command line options. Please see our blog post or the documentation for more details. Changes made during the rewrite made it much easier to upgrade the Overviewer to Anvil; making these same changes to the old code would be much harder, so we are not planning to update the old code to handle Anvil.

Due to the large changes made to support Anvil, you will need to render your maps from scratch. Trying to update existing maps will not work. Also, due to major changes to the web assets during the rewrite, you should not simply copy over custom web assets to the new version. In particular, custom overviewerConfig.js files can cause strange problems.

A Note about Biomes

In addition to the much taller worlds possible with Anvil, the new map format now stores biome information with the chunks. This means that you no longer have to run the Biome Extractor in order to get biome colors on your maps. Biome colors are working right now in the Anvil branch; go check it out!

To complement our APT repository, we now offer an RPM repository for RPM-based distros. Currently the RPMs are available for CentOS 5 and 6 and Fedora 16 but other targets could be added if there is enough interest. Details on installing the repo can be found over on RPM repo info page.

Are there any other platforms we should support? Let us know in the comments or drop by the IRC channel!