FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

There are several worlds that have been built on for some time by diffrent players but now get less visits. The buildings might even be distributed far apart from each other so that a visitor without fast and interact has no chance to view them anymore.

Would it be possible to merge two maps into one by taking chunks from one database and copying them into the other one? Maybe even to a diffrent position (i.e. db index)? Of course that would require the same mods to be installed in the target world for everything to function. And a way to find out which chunks ought to be copied. How to turn the coordinate set of one chunk into a database index is well documented, but I don't know how to turn coordinates ingame into chunk coordinates.

Might that work? Or are there any factors that might work against such a transfer of raw chunks? The copied parts have to be large enough to include the sourrounding scenery and cover for some in-drifting dirt from new mapgen with the (diffrent) seed of the target world.

The worldedit mod has a feature where you can copy chunks of the map to external files, then import those files into other maps. It's all done from within the game.

http://forum.minetest.net/viewtopic.php?id=572

Does worldedit really work on *chunk* level now? To my knowledge it saves areas on a per-block-level in a file (one block = one line). If it can handle map-chunks (16x16x16 blocks, including meta information, stored under one index in the database) please tell me how.

I think it does it per block. I haven't played around with the copying and exporting much I just know it does it.

BrandonReese wrote:I think it does it per block. I haven't played around with the copying and exporting much I just know it does it.

per node, you mean.

I don't think worldedit - which is a mod and thus has only access to what a mod has access to - will be a solution for this. Most likely it will be helpful for some after-work, cleaning-up, smoothing the connection.

Celeron55 told me about a (closed) pull request about such a feature. Apparently someone did merge maps in the past. Reports about how successful that was would be helpful!

I have used worldedit to copy 200 x 1000 x 200 towers within the same world in singleuser mode...I don't know if that metric is at all useful, BUT I am definitely curious about how to merge large regions between worlds...has this been somewhat addressed via the recorder approach?

Maps can be merged to a degree. All you really have to do is go down to the database level, have a look at how the coordinates of the mapchunk (16x16x16 blocks in the world) are transformed into the id - and then determine which chunks you want to copy (and that's the huge problem - determining what you want to copy...). Export the desired mapblocks in one database and import them in the other one. Extremly fast as it's an operation on database level.

the biggest problem would be with things like wallmount and metadata (same problem as with mapgen) - you could write them down but to recreate them you have to do it by individual nodes anyway as far as i can figure out