BasiliskWrangler wrote:I wonder how hard it would be to make a Eschalon-to-Minecraft map importer?
So yeah, not really that hard. :)
Still as a tile-for-tile (1:1) conversion, but here's a zipfile (will unpack to "World3") of all (the outdoor bits) of Thaermore:
http://www.sendspace.com/file/46fdtw
Enjoy!
Some notes:
1) I didn't do any hand-tweaking on here, so there's bits that are suboptimal, but in general it's quite fun to wander around. Expect some weirdness here and there, though.
2) A few spots require breaking blocks to get through, since Eschalon lets you walk through a diagonal but Minecraft won't. Two examples are the entrance to the North Parish Family Crypt and the hallway to the guest rooms at the inn in Blackwater.
3) The trees are rather odd, as you'll see... Each tree that went through the converter had a 50% chance of actually being imported; if I imported
all of them it just looked too blocky and wall-like, rather than like trees. You'll notice that none of the trees have leaves that extend OUT from the trunk, though, so they look pretty weird regardless. I may end up addressing that eventually.
4) I didn't feel like taking the time to write something to figure out what "side" of the square doors should be drawn on, so sometimes you'll see recessed doors which probably shouldn't be. :)
5) Relatedly, none of the building have roofs; that would have taken writing something that'd figure out what's "inside" and what's "outside." Laziness wins!
6) Likewise, figuring out proper Sign orientation wasn't something I felt like trying to figure out, so you'll see some signs facing towards walls and stuff (the Aridell Council House sign in particular is an example of that)
7) There's no way (that I know of) to lay down dirt in Minecraft and have it stay Dirt - it'll always end up getting overrun with grass. The
best way I found was to put down Soil instead, and have a layer of water underneath so that it stays hydrated. Given ideal conditions, the soil will never switch back to dirt (and will therefore never get overrun by grass). Unfortunately, walking over unplanted Soil squares will eventually cause them to revert to Dirt as well, so as you walk on those paths, they'll eventually get overrun with grass anyway. Note that mobs walking over the paths can have the same effect. In conclusion: don't get too attached to those dirt paths. :)
8) There are some places where, when there's no tile data in the Eschalon map files, it'd make sense to make them mountains, and others where it'd make sense to make them pits instead. I just opted to make them all pits, so the scenic Thaermore mountain ranges won't be too impressive at the moment unless you fill them in yourself.
9) At least on my machine, I noticed that some of the fences up in the northeast (outside Shadowmirk, near all the Slimes) are invisible for some reason. They're still
there and I can break them apart, etc, but they don't actually show up in Minecraft. I wonder if there's some kind of max-fence limit or something? Or some other glitch. Dunno, hadn't noticed it anywhere else.
10) Finally, note that when the import process had to extend the existing Minecraft map (because Minecraft itself hadn't generated that terrain yet), it filled it in with all stone, with a couple layers of dirt at the top. So, an awful lot of the ground underneath Thaermore is very uninteresting and not worth your mining efforts, if you were looking for coal/iron/redstone/diamond/what-have-you. The bits more likely to have Minecraft-generated undergrounds are over by Crakamir. Outside of the imported Eschalon space, of course, Minecraft will pick up the slack of generating those.
We'll see if any of those end up getting fixed at some point. I'll probably do a version which changes one Eschalon square into a Minecraft 3x3 grid, which I think would look better and allow for greater detail; we'll see how it goes from there. I'll post the source for the converter eventually once I've cleaned it up a bit more. Anyway, enjoy!
