Introduction

mcmap is a simple little glib/SDL utility that works as a proxy to Minecraft, reads the connection traffic, and visualizes a map in a window.

There are three main modes: a surface map (useful for general navigation), a cross-section (single altitude level) map (useful for finding things that are hidden in the ground) and a topographical height-map (useful for... I don't know).

Also there are some miscellaneous features, like client-side teleporting (though don't try it with health on).

Building

There's a Makefile; if you have SDL, glib and readline dev packages installed, and pkg-config knows where to find them, a simple make should suffice. (Although readline is actually just linked with -lreadline.)

Usage

Command line

In the most basic form, ./mcmap -s 600x600 host:port (or just host for the default Minecraft port 25565). The -s command line option specifies the window size. If you leave it out, the window will be resizable, but resize events are not handled, so something bad will probably happen. (Fixing this is on the hypothetical TODO list.)

Do ./mcmap -h for a list of options.

After starting up, connect with Minecraft. The program will automatically exit when you disconnect from within Minecraft.

Visuals

At the default zoom level, the map window has one pixel for each block in the world. Block colors are hand-assigned, and should be more or less sensible: edit in map.c if you wish. Not all block types are listed: unlisted blocks will be black.

The map is centered around the player (not scrollable at the moment), and the position (and look direction) of the player is indicated with a tiny little pink triangle marker. Other players are indicated with 3x3 pink rectangles.

In the height-map, heights in the [64, 127] range are indicated with a gradient from yellow and red, while heights in [0, 63] use a gradient from blue to yellow. (This was inspired by pynemap.)

Keys

Map modes are selected with the number keys:

1: surface map, topmost non-air block.
2: cross-section map, follows player altitude.
3: cross-section map, doesn't follow the player.
4: topographical map.

In addition, the up/down arrow keys can be used to set the altitude level in the cross-section map modes. This works also in mode 2, though moving around will reset the altitude.

The page-up/page-down keys control the zoom level. Each press of page-up makes blocks one pixel larger.

Right-clicking a point on the map basically executes a //goto x z on the clicked coordinates (or nearby).

Finally, the n key toggles "night mode" on: in this mode, blocks are shaded based on how well lit (excluding sunlight) they are.

Chatting

Thanks to a resounding demand made by a total of 0 people, you can chat -- with fancy line editing, no less -- with everyone else on your server through the console. It works exactly like you'd expect, and requires no documentation. Although right now, if you type a line that just happens to be too long (100 characters or so), you'll get disconnected.

But why would you do a thing like that?

Commands

Commands are prefixed with // -- chat packets starting with that prefix will be removed from the stream and considered by mcmap.

//goto x z: teleport into coordinates (x, z).
//jump ...: control the jump list (run without arguments for more information).
//coords: print your current coordinates.
//slap name: transport you to a magical world of faeries and unicorns.
//save [directory]: save the seen chunks to disk in the Minecraft world format.

The teleporting works by first moving the player directly up to height y=128, then moving to (x, 128, z). Passing through solid blocks is not possible, so teleporting will only work if you have clear view of the sky. Additionally you'll fall down from height 128, which is likely to prove fatal if you're playing on a server where health is on.

(Also, don't teleport into some ridiculously far-away coordinates. The server seems to generate all the terrain on your flight-path, and will probably crash.)

Building the Win32 port

Explode the following files into win/glib/ under the source root:

Also explode this into win/SDL-1.2.14/ (the SDL-1.2.14 part is already in the tarball):

http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-devel-1.2.14-mingw32.tar.gz

You also need the mingw stuff: on Ubuntu 10.10, the packages gcc-mingw32 and mingw32-runtime.

Then with some luck make -f Makefile.win will build a mcmap.exe.

To actually run it, you need the SDL/glib/zlib DLL files. Start with:

Explode those somewhere and collect all .dll files from the bin/ subdirectory. Also take the SDL.dll from:

http://www.libsdl.org/release/SDL-1.2.14-win32.zip

These, placed in the same directory as mcmap.exe, should be enough.

GregorR/mcmap