a high-resolution Minecraft world renderer with a LeafletJS interface
Written by brownan on Apr. 11, 2012
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!
Written by brownan on Mar. 03, 2012
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:
Written by brownan on Mar. 01, 2012
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)
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.
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!
Written by aheadley on Feb. 22, 2012
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!
Written by brownan on Feb. 15, 2012
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 on.
We currently don't have any plans to support the Anvil format in the old "master" branch. We are not against it, but I don't foresee anyone stepping up to do the work. This means there is a deadline for those of you to convert your config files and setups to the new config format if you want to stay up to date. We believe the new config format is not complicated enough to be a big barrier for converting. If you need help please see us in IRC!
We also currently don't have any plans to support both world formats in one code-base. The changes it requires are quite extensive and I don't see that as being a very feasible option. Thus, if you want to continue running an older version of Minecraft with the older level format in the future, you will be blocked from updating Overviewer past a certain point. We will probably end up leaving a Git branch or tag at the last commit that supports the old format for those that don't want to upgrade. However, as time goes on we think most everyone will end up updating (just like we did for the old chunk format when it upgraded to region files)
Again, this is our tentative plan. Things may still change depending on demand or who's willing to do what work or how difficult a task turns out to be.
As always, happy Overviewing!
-brownan