Danish government builds Minecraft world of Denmark from geodata (opens in new tab)

The intent of this data release is to help children explore Denmark in a virtual environment in class. This is to help Danish children at least to better grasp Danish geography.

What a useful bit of soft power. Denmark is being talked about on an influential Internet forum. People on HN usually complain about how bad governments are at makig data open. Here is an example of a government making data open and doing fun silly things with it.

The cost ofthe project is probably minimal compared to other government spending and has had a reasonable impact.

The children using this Mincraft world will grow up to do other neat things.

I think the amount of taxpayer money spent on this is negligible in the scheme of things, and far cheaper than an ARCGIS license for every child in the country to explore virtual geodata with instead.

As the link is down, did it cover how much taxpayers' money was spent producing it?

I came here to write this but am quite surprised that other people don't agree with it and downvoted you. These agencies aren't paid from our tax money to produce toys - they are there to provide a cost efficient service where possible.

I have the same worries about the entire gov.uk rework.

Neat hack yes, but this is government, not private enterprise or personal time.

In the UK we almost called for the hanging of an MP who bought a duck house on expenses and I'm sure these "neat hacks" over time have cost a lot more.

Download here http://download.kortforsyningen.dk/

Instructions here http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=da&tl=en&js=y&prev=...

Edit: You need a user to be able to download from Kortforsyningen. Not sure what the user agreements says about foreigners because the sign up form is in danish and the options are like if you are a danish city, citizen, ngo etc. What I can see you only need to supply user name and email address.

What surprises me is that I can't find any pages in English. So good luck navigating if you don't understand danish.

The GADM database of Global Administrative Areas has boundaries for every country, in a variety of formats. They're normalized into 4 "layers" IIRC. You can push them straight into postgis or whatever.

http://www.gadm.org/

(Oops, I just realised you're looking for full maps with elevation at each point, and this is just a bunch of polygons. Still a very useful resource.)

The OSGB in the UK did something similar last year: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/innovate/developers/minecraf...

Apparently it was built by an intern, it took him two weeks to create the 22 Billion blocks: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/about/news/2013/minecraft-ma...

I think it's more likely to be a design decision. If you try to model a large real world area, some people will immediately notice how it is unlike reality; so the constraints of computational power, design skill, and developer ability are multiplied. The differences can be truly jarring.

My guess is that there is more upside to creating unique areas. This affords more creative freedom and the luxury of changing the simulation in accordance with constraints and resources.

We tried this in ActionQuake 2 thinking it was a great idea. When we were halfway done with our town we realized it was very boring to play in something realistic. The real world doesn't always present such an interesting landscape for FPS shooters compared to the ones that are designed to be fun to play.

GST itself has a very detailed explanation in Danish.[0] But basically, two of their employees worked to created the converter. They even include a table list of GST's own descriptions of terrain types and what Minecraft biomes they were converted to.

They don't have underground data, so some simple steps have been taken for each area based on a general idea of the underground (e.g. Bornholm's underground becoming stone).

As for buildings, they know the shape of buildings, but not their texture, so they are merely randomly generated in 'unrealistic colours' (as they describe it).

As the map data is updated each quarter (3 months), the Minecraft data will also be updated.

It's a very interesting read, I recommend you learn Danish and read it!

[0] http://www.gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/om-frie-data-i-e...

There is a "the" Denmark Minecraft server? It looks like the map data is just being provided. Is there an official server hosting a live game?

What, like this? https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26311

Somehow event at 10X/50X exaggerated height I don't find these particularly interesting. Planets, even Mars, are for the most part really smooth.

A somewhat exaggerated model of the Matterhorn was one of the first things I printed and it's pretty cool, though.

Not Minecraft per se, but close: http://www.voxelmars.com/

ominous answered this but was marked as dead. Not clear why, but my best guess is that people use Google Translate to bypass spam filtering?

Here's the link he posted. I'm leaving out the google translate link: http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/download-data/

There is no story but I enjoy the adventure mode. It's a totally different game but we can compare it to and Sims game, any other simulator or the more recent Dayz. It doesn't have a story but it's enjoyable to play. You need to survive the night, create a shelter, get stronger by obtaining rare block, build a nice house etc....

Wouldn't Hamlet: The Revenge just be Hamlet? :P Imagine a Hamlet roleplay server