By Andrew Brown and contributors (see CONTRIBUTORS.rst).
- Documentation:
- http://docs.overviewer.org
- Github code repository:
- http://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer
- Blog:
- http://overviewer.org/blog/
The Minecraft Overviewer is a command-line tool for rendering high-resolution maps of Minecraft worlds. It generates a set of static html and image files and uses the Google Maps API to display a nice interactive map.
The Overviewer has been in active development for over a year and has many features, including day and night lighting, cave rendering, mineral overlays, and many plugins for even more features! It is written mostly in Python with critical sections in C as an extension module.
All documentation has been consolidated at our documentation site. For information on downloading, compiling, installing, and running The Overviewer, visit the docs site.
A few helpful tips are below, but everyone is going to want to visit the documentation site for the most up-to-date and complete set of instructions!
Alternatively, the docs are also in the docs/ directory of the source download. Look in there if you can't access the docs site.
See examples of The Overviewer in action!
https://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer/wiki/Map-examples
Before you dive into using this, just be aware that, for large maps, there is a lot of data to parse through and process. If your world is very large, expect the initial render to take at least an hour, possibly more. (Since Minecraft maps are practically infinite, the maximum time this could take is also infinite!)
If you press ctrl-C, it will stop. The next run will pick up where it left off.
Once your initial render is done, subsequent renderings will be MUCH faster due to all the caching that happens behind the scenes. Just use the same output directory and it will only update the tiles it needs to.
There are probably some other minor glitches along the way, hopefully they will be fixed soon. See the Bugs section below.
Within the output directory you will find two things: an index.html file, and a directory hierarchy full of images. To view your world, simply open index.html in a web browser. Internet access is required to load the Google Maps API files, but you otherwise don't need anything else.
You can throw these files up to a web server to let others view your map. You do not need a Google Maps API key (as was the case with older versions of the API), so just copying the directory to your web server should suffice. You are, however, bound by the Google Maps API terms of service.
http://code.google.com/apis/maps/terms.html
For a current list of issues, visit https://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer/issues
Feel free to comment on issues, report new issues, and vote on issues that are important to you.