RamsesA's Crafting Azeroth project completely recreates the World of Warcraft in Minecraft using an elaborate series of custom tools and old-fashioned manual touch-ups. For the last month or so, the Overviewer team has been working with him to render high-resolution maps of these worlds.

The two largest continents, Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor, are complete and are ready to view. Other continents may also be made available as they are rendered.

The process of creating these worlds to begin with is difficult and extremely interesting, and you can learn about it in this Minecraft Forum thread. This blog post, though ...

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 ...

Thanks to those that have tried the new beta and given us feedback. We've already fixed several bugs; things are shaping up nicely!

About the new "Anvil" level format, we will be supporting this, but it is a rather hefty change. Our tentative plan is to make a new branch off of the beta "rewrite" branch for the anvil level format. Once the anvil format makes its way out of the Minecraft "pre-release" stage and into a proper release, we will merge the branch of our code and the new format will be the only one supported from then ...

Edit Mar 3 2012: The "anvil" branch has been merged into master. This post edited to reflect that.

Edit: Mar 1 2012, updated this post to reflect the new "anvil" branch.

In our efforts to rewrite the internals of The Overviewer, we have stripped overviewer.py of almost all its command line options and opted to require everything but the simplest renders into a new config file format. This post goes over the rationale and how to get started with the new format.

Why?

Before it was possible to run the Overviewer without a configuration file at all. Every option ...

Edit: Mar 3 2012: The new beta has now been merged into master, and as such, some parts of this post (like how to try it out) are outdated. See this post.

Edit: Mar 1 2012: updated this post for the Anvil format. -brownan

We've been working hard for the last two months to almost completely re-write a lot of the internals of The Overviewer. And now we need your help to test it out, and give us feedback!