Pierre-Yves Rollo
French developer. 8/16/32/64 bits compatible.
I also do some photography and try to write texts.
I've been doing urban exploration before the Y2K bug, and a bit after.
Contributed to Luanti/Minetest project (core & mods). Still developing some mods.
Working at french mapping institute (IGN) since 2023.
Session
Over 10 years ago, the French Institute of Geographic Information (IGN) created "Minecraft on demand", a web service that uses real geographical data to build playable worlds for voxel games such as Minecraft (worlds made of small unit cubes). After 135,000 voxel world generations, including more than 6,000 from OSM data, the service turned out to be limited, missing flexibility and using only a small fraction of OSM data. The institute capitalized on its experience to design a new standalone and flexible tool able to exploit the full richness of OSM data and much more.
As many generation constraints as possible have been removed. For instance, size of created world is only limited by game format and not anymore by memory size. The extremely high configurability makes this tool very versatile. Decisions are driven by the user’s creativity and not by the software. All the tasks, ranging from data loading, processing, all the way to rendering are described through a human readable configuration file, so that even non-programmers can easily fine-tune their pipeline. This new tool can be seen as the "Swiss Army knife" of geographical data voxelization (conversion of data into voxel worlds).
The tool is open source, modular and can be extended with Java modules. It paves the way for new community-maintained features, such as support for new geographical data formats, processing algorithms, or voxel formats. Consequently, the tool has the potential to natively manipulate any type of data (vector, raster, point cloud...) originating from any provider (OSM Overpass, OGC WFS/WMS, local files...), process it in various ways, and create any voxel-based format as a result (Luanti, Minecraft, Lego...). For instance, it is possible to create a Luanti world with terrain elevation imported from OpenDEM, and any feature from OSM (road network, buildings, land use...).
While most of the existing tools are focused on "fun" or educational usages, this one makes no assumption about the user's intent, and can be used for any purpose, including:
- Immersive exploration (e.g. for citizen participation)
- Rebuild in context (e.g. of a monument)
- Thematic rendering (e.g. based on a tag such as restaurant's cuisine)
- Mixing/custom sources (e.g. with local files)
- And many more to discover!