Recreating Windurst - A Minecraft ProjectFollow

Hi all, I'm not sure anyone will remember me since I stopped playing 7 years ago but I played a BLM character named Thurgood on the Fenrir server. Since I stopped playing I'm sure many of the people I used to play with have moved on, but I did pass my character off to a couple people, and the last I heard Grimace still had him...but that was years ago.

Now, let me tell you a little bit about what I'm trying to do. Essentially my wife and I both have very fond memories of FFXI. We have a strong affinity with Windurst especially since it was my starting town (I was a taru), and it's also the town we got married in game. We are actually married in real life and just celebrated our 4th anniversary.

After playing minecraft for a little while my wife and I were having a conversation about FFXI and how we still remember to songs and just overall how magical Windurst felt to us. That quickly evolved into the idea to rebuild Windurst in minecraft. We actually started out back in Minecraft version 1.7.3 when there were limited creative tools available without mods, and the height limit was not where we needed it to be to build the great star tree. Now with the latest release of Minecraft 1.2, they raised the height limit to 256 blocks making the project a possibility.

So, why am I making this post? Well, we need help. We thought our first go was OK, but it had a lot of flaws, so we plan to start over. I am looking for two things:

1. a person who would be willing to take several screen shots of windurst, at least for now Windurst Walls. Our first go at it was based on a couple youtube videos I came across and the map from the strategy guide. In-depth photos showing some of the more hidden locations of windy walls along with photos that help show scale would be really beneficial.

2. people who would be interested in working on the server. This is the just small server I have on my computer and can only hold a few people. If there is an actual interest in this I'd be willing to open up the server to let others work on it.

3. Are there any other forums that FFXI players still hang around? I remember alla being pretty big back when I played so this is where i gravitated to.

If you remember me I'd love to hear from you. This is still one of my favorite games of all time and I'd like to create a minecraft monument to it.

Let me know if you're interested or just pop by and say hi ^-^.

Main structures will help. I like the google maps idea but I know that would be asking a lot.

Around the giant tree will be helpful too as I really don't remember how it was decorated, how the base formations looked, etc.

that is if i can remember where to find them on my PC...

Very interesting suggestion! If anyone knows anything about this I'd love to hear more. I don't have it install on my PC but I do have to software around here somewhere. That'd be perfect.

It'd be worth considering the following;
How much can your server handle;

- Do you just want to recreate one of the windy areas, or do you want to recreate all four, or even including the inside of heavan's tower (which I have issues believing is actually to scale in FFXI, let alone conceptualizing how difficult it would be to finagle in MC)

- Are you intending to use mods, or just vanilla minecraft? If you're just using vanilla, it'll be a lot harder, and a lot slower going, no matter how many people you get. For something like this, I'd say the Voxel Box's VoxelModPack would be your best bet for ease of building.

- How do you intend to scale it? Do you want to scale it for Minecraft standards, or FFXI standards? If you're using FFXI's scale, it'll be a bit tricky to figure out just how much one block is, but if you're using minecraft scale, **** may get to small... hmmmm.... Eitherway, Heavan's Tree aside, the old 128 block height cap would be fine for the most part, though you may need to use superflat for the sake of Windurst Walls. also, fullscale, partial scale, or bigger?

Also, I'm not sure if you've looked for/found them yet, but the maps of windurst would be incredibly helpful, I'm sure.

Overview
This page has all the other maps

mmmmm, you've piqued my love for FFXI and my addiction to creative minecraft, expect a pm soon breaking down the overview map

Id have to be really stoned to measure for you too. I am off this afternoon Ill snap some screenies if I remember.

Instance heavens tower by putting a portal to the nether at the entrance. Then build the inside of the tower inside the nether. Make sure you line the whole thing with cobblestone so ghasts don't destroy it.

I love that idea!

You could also be kind of creative as well I think without taking to much away.

For example you could place the different types of armor and weapons you can make and put them on shelves in the AH windows (diamond swords, Steel axes, etc.) . So as you run by in Minecraft you can see the gear on display for purchase.

Ive always imagined thats what the AH would look like, but alas we only get to choose from a NPC chat window.

Small cute things like that could add to the realism of a created city I would think.

Also yours looks pretty good so far, seems structurally accurate. Scale wise I couldn't tell ya but it is impressive.

My wife mentioned that she wanted to give a larger scale a try so i started to look over some of the numbers. I removed the boarder on the windust walls map and that shrunk it to 480 x 480. Divide that by the 15 boxes on the map and you're looking at 32^2 pixels per box on the map. Treating each pixel as 4 blocks in mincraft that gives you 4096 blocks per box, resulting in a 921,600 block outline...that is if i did all that math correctly. So with that in mind I might give that size a shot. I just laid the outline and while huge, I think it could possibly make it seem like you're looking at the world through the eyes of a taru :)

It would actually be a lot cleaner if you left it at 512x512, since 512 is a power of 2 (2^9), as well as 8 (8^3). This gains the benefit of the map outlines not messing up the conversion as much, since there are a bunch of land-edges that are under border lines. The main reason I'm not a fan of resizing is because it ruins the surprising clarity of the map in terms of which pixel belongs to what, and makes it a lot harder to differentiate in certain spots. I'm working on converting the map into a simplistic, clean, 1-tone pixel rendering atm, which if I use a resized version would be a lot messier and harder to interpret.

edit: also, I think your math on the area is a bit off, just a sec...

32x32 converted to 2x2 blocks per pixel would be 64x64, which is clean in and of itself, but it doesn't account for the grid outlines, which can't be ignored on this map. As it stands, a cleaner way to handle with that measure would be 33x33, where each box accounts for 2 of the four grid lines that border it, making them a 15x15 grid of 66x66 areas, plus one extra 2x66 line on two of the four edges of the map, making the map 992x992, so the outline itself should only be 3968 blocks, it's the internal area that gets up into the hundredthousands/millions of blocks.

The thing about resizing is that it's not necessary for what you want. The entire image is 512 by 512, but when you cut away fluff bordering (the entireties of the A and O columns, as well as rows 1 and 15 are unused, so they can be cleared away, in addition to the row/column labeling itself)... cutting those away gives you a 417x417 area, but you can actually reduce it a bit more, since neither the M or N columns are used for the map itself (though you may want to leave M since the area is filled in game, visually, though you can't actually go there). Hmmmm, lemme finish rendering this map and I'll post an accurate way to judge the area you need.



The only real problem with my solution is actually getting the end portal to work where you want it, since they're rather finicky about where they can be placed and still function properly.

Edited, Mar 4th 2012 4:47pm by Jinte

Ok, having trimmed off most of the unnecessary sections, leaving only the ones that might be needed for the sake of the bordering treeline, I've got a rectangle of 385x417 pixels. There's still a lot of unnecessary space, but it's a bit cleaner.

If we apply the same method of grid inclusion as before, we get 2 hard borders, of which the two cleaner options are the bottom and right borders, so if for each grid box, we count only it's top and left borders as part of the internal box, we're left with a very clean 32x32 box. The remaining grid IDs are; Rows 2-14 (so 13 rows) and columns B-M (12 columns). The reason the bottom and right borders are going to be ignored is because row 14 and column M are, by a huge, the emptiest row and column respectively, thus one can make the effective mape size 384x416.

Now, if you take that and apply the 1 pixel = 2x2 blocks, you get 786x832 block border. If you account for the corners, since you have to adjust a little when using pixels/blocks as the corners won't be points, but rather will count twice, you get a perimeter of 3232 blocks, or 50 and 1/2 stacks.

Math is fun, when it isn't calculus.