Recreated: The Minetest Game "castles" famous screenshot map

[Blockhead]

Update: 2024-07-15: I have now managed to almost entirely accurately recreate the original screenshot with the use of the Hometown server data backups. See my later post for details. The original question and background info remains in this post.

I'm looking for the original source of the image of a castle/some castles that's often used as the cover image of Minetest Game, as used on the ContentDB page, in the screenshot gallery on Minetest.net, and on a lot of 3rd party sources for Minetest downloads or discussion. Here is it in case you've been living under a rock and missed it:



I have figured out where it's from and will share it, but I would really like to be able to play in the world, and am not looking to painstakingly hand-recreate it. I would like to take an 8K screenshot with all latest lighting effects from 5.9.0-dev applied. This 'improvement' approach is what I used in prior work like my recreation of the famous Advtrains image, though the build is already good here, there's just not enough pixels to do it justice (or fit into a print.. - not for commercial use, was thinking more of sourcing images for a future roller baner).

So, I am asking for any help in getting a download if someone has it. Pretty please?

The questions and answers are threefold. Thankfully, after some extensive browsing, and a bit of git archaeology, I managed to find a reference to pull request #143 against the Minetest.net website repository, which explains things.

Q: Who is the original author of the builds shown? My best guess was Miniminaut, given a lot of their screenshots have a very similar architectural style. Miniminaut never uploaded anything to the Maps subforum as far as I know though.
A: Yes, according to Treer, Miniminaut is the author.

Q: Where is the world that has the builds now? Is it a server or singleplayer world? Is the server still up or the world available for download? Returning to the theory fact that Miniminaut is the author, it may be on servers where they played on, like IFS (tried it, was pretty interesting, but didn't find the castle) or Hometown (R.I.P., not sure how many backups there are of it).

Partial A: Yes, according to Treer, Miniminaut made the castles on Hometown server, at (-5640,-10080), and the image is a recreation and improvement of this one from 2018-05-19.

The question remains as to whether this area was backed up, and if so, who by and if they are still around and can/will publish it. I'm really only interested in the Miniminaut area in particular, though of course a lot of other places on Hometown are of historical significance. Later I will try to see what I can find, but the thread is quite long and links die, so it may be a long but unfruitful search.

Q: Who took the screenshot? The build's author, or someone else? And who suggested it be used in Minetest and/or Minetest Game marketing materials?
A: As the pull request author, Treer, mentioned, they took it themself. It was then accepted into the website gallery; and since then has probably been copied many times to different websites, and by (I think) rubenwardy or LMD onto the Minetest Game ContentDB page.

Again I'll restate the main question: Does anyone have a backup of that area of Hometown - around (-5640,-10080), - with Miniminaut's castle intact? Would you care to share it?

Edit 2024-03-15: Fixed image link by retargetting at ContentDB. The castle was on Minetest.net but the only MTG screenshot left there is the last one now, captioned "where it all began".

[Festus1965]

I have no backup of hometown,
but miniminaut was also very active on 'Wildes Land' (hectic) with sure 20-30 castles and that map is still the same on the world 'Asia Thailand Braincraft' spawn areas 1 and 2 maybe 3 and can be visited.
I am sure they building style isn't different that much - If you need screenshots.

[Skamiz Kazzarch]

Mostly offtopic: but, every time I see this screenshot used to show off MTG I am slightly annoyed, because it contains modded content and thus isn't really representative.

[Mantar]

There's a backup on hometownserver.com, but despite what the page says the modpack won't run on 0.4.17. It worked on 5.3.0 for me.

BrokenCastles.jpg (722.5 KiB) Viewed 5225 times

Sadly, some of those structures appear to have missing bits, perhaps due to map corruption? That apparently happened at one point.
The map was reconstructed by combining the partial map saves gathered from players. I would imagine it's possible something went wrong with that and somebody's older save overwrote some newer bits. The invidivual map backups are available on that web site, and there's a python script for combining them, one could trawl those and look for a more complete backup of the castles area.

If that doesn't work, recreating that screenshot would presumably require rebuilding the castle, which I suppose could be a fun community project.

[Mantar]

Oh, and disable fire if you want to preserve the map, there's a house on fire just north of spawn.

[Blockhead]

Well, I have a "working" copy now:

castle_recreation_1080.jpg (383.47 KiB) Viewed 4322 times

The full file is of course way too big for to be a forum attachment, but you can download the full 22MB 8K file at catbox.

Edit: Also see another perspective and a night shot at Post your screenshots!

Unfortunately, since I will be following the terms set out on hometownserver.com.. a kind of informal licence, those prohibit redistribution, so I can't share the map file directly, at least not without permission from Miniminaut (who hasn't posted since Dec 2021). BUT I will give you a guide on how to put it together yourself using the hometownserver.com data set.

World data sources used from hometownserver.com

I figured that since my own copy had parts that Mantar's screenshot was missing, that the data were definitely there, just not assembled properly. To figure out what map backups actually had data for the relevant area, I used minetestmapper on them. I found two useful sources were all that was needed, though I still performed a few manual edits based on comparing my WIP attempts to the original.

The two sources I ended up using were the jSnake backup dated 2018-06-10 and my output from the python script that merges all the individual map backups. See the spoiler for the shortlist

Spoiler

• chimneyswift_middle20180516 is too old and only has same edge base terrain
• chimneyswift_old20180602 is even older and doesn't cover any terrain the middle one doesn't
• jsnake 20180610 appears to have the entire castle
• jsnake 20180618_1 (unzipped) has part of the southwest quarter of the castle
  island, but nothing that jsnake_20180610 doesn't have and in some cases less
• jsnake 20180618_2 (the zipped one) has no difference in this area of the map to 20180618_1
• jsnake 20180610 has the most complete copy of the castle-island, but lacks the tower in the southeast corner
• My merged world has the southeast tower but large blocks of the rest of the island are missing which are present in jsnake 20180610. Those parts that are present also seem to have cobblestone scaffolding in place for the edges of the roofs that are smoothed out in later versions lake jsanke 20180610 - though it seems some of the scaffolding was never entirely removed even from that version).
• techy5_techy5 has only parts of the northwestern and western parts of the castle-island. It has a missing roof on the "central-northern huge building". The terrain is closer to natural than the terrain of the jsnake 20180610 version, but the terrain modification probably represents the latest existent form (I may find it personally somewhat more aesthetically pleasing though I have to check in-game first). (Didn't actually use in the end as it wasn't relevant to the screenshot to do so)

Manual edits applied

• Manual merge world took jsnake20180610 base then copied changes from my
  merged copy.
• Fixed the southeast tower by importing it with worldedit
• Fixed the windows in terracotta-roofed tower.
• Ran /fixlight because the world lacked shadows
• Fixed up the nodes near the cave entrance: remove 1 dirt, move one down one
• Chopped down the tree at -5635,19,-10049 and the one east of it
• Added missing cobblestone wall nodes on the back of the wall section
  connected to the terracotta-roofed tower

Recreation Graphics parameters

• Draw distance of 310.
• Mipmap and anti-aliasing OFF, but render at high resolution 8K so that the stained glass looks smooth as do the edges. See: "Giant screenshots".
• Restore old MTG pine needle texture (2014-2018, commit 7998de67).
• Use the protector_logo.png from sorcerykid's version of protector which has the more detailed sword shape. Still seems slightly saturated, but the shape is a better match.
• Default FOV.
• Leaves: fancy.
• Turned off directional_colored_fog, but later realised it was the fog changes from PR #9502 that had caused the difference in sky colour (thanks also to a user on the Minetest Matrix for helping confirm older versions had a different sky). Decided to apply a change to the sky with Lua so that would use the old colours (reference: PR #1147). It still is not exactly the same since the new sky is hardcoded as a gradient whereas it used to be a sharp transition from one colour to the next.

Recreation point of view parameters

I used a command with debug mod to set up my position, camera angle and sky colours.

Code: Select all

/lua minetest.get_player_by_name("singleplayer"):set_pos(vector.new(-5671,37.5,-10124.057)) minetest.get_player_by_name('singleplayer'):set_look_horizontal(6.06) minetest.get_player_by_name('singleplayer'):set_look_vertical(0.175) minetest.get_player_by_name('singleplayer'):set_sky({sky_color={day_sky='#8cbafa',day_horizon='#9bc1f0'}})

Mods used

Mods used were from the modpack/game provided on hometownserver.com. However, the only things really needed for the screenshot are: Minetest 5.8.0, Minetest Game for 5.8.0, moreblocks and homedecor. Other parts of the map not visible, such as the roof inside the castle use some kind of mobs mod, but I disabled all the mobs mods since that building was out of view and the mod was so out of date it was causing crashes.

[Mantar]

Nicely done! It's good to see this bit of Minetest history survives.

[freshreplicant]

Whoa. This is actually really cool. The alternate images in the screenshot thread are beautiful. Perfect day/night wallpapers.