alt Hacker NewsSwitzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale
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Recently I've gotten to a point where I am put off when a clearly vibe coded website asks for money.
I have seen too many examples of people trying to earn money on apps they clearly vibe coded in an hour. Why would I pay for that - might as well make it and sideload it myself. I might even publish it for free to the app store to spite them.
I really don't think you are in a position to be asking for money if you just made something using an LLM. You didn't put in much work yourself, and anyone could replicate it for the "low cost" of their LLM subscription.
This AI-written page seems to be typical of LLM: Sentences are 4 to 5 words long, and the reader have to fill in the details.
Did someone make 1x1x1 wooden cubes and remade Switzerland? Oh no, the tiny tiny text above the gigantic title says "Minecraft".
"Exactly as tall and as steep". How is a mountain that exists in a video game exactly as tall and steep as the real one?
Then there's an embedded map that is an attempt to convey information that I still can't figure out what.
How to run it? Aha, download Prism Launcher (not a clickable link), import the zip... and oh, you need to have purchased Minecraft too!
What an exercise in convolution...
Hi,
This is my first post although I have been following Hacker News for years.
I have been building something similar except not for Minecraft but hiking maps on mobile (Android). This is my app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chessvorte...
I combine OpenStreetMap data for routes, satellite data from Sentinel-2 and Copernicus DEM GLO-30 for heights, resolution is around 10m/pixel for image and 30m for heights - those are the highest resolution datasets I can legally redistribute, although I am also including what I call hi-res maps building for some countries (USA, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Romania) which has image resolution at 1.5m/pixel instead of 10m.
I could have used higher resolution for hi-res maps, data is available at precision like 30-50cm/pixel but this being a mobile app I needed to consider storage for a map on mobile, at hi-res a 10x10 km squared area takes around 25MB.
The idea for this came from my own hiking trips, in many mountains there is not so good internet connection, so I can build an offline map beforehand and in terrain I can use this to see where I am in 3D - and just use the phone GPS for location, no data needed.
For building the map packages I have setup a linux server that combines all 3 data sources (OpenStreetMap, Sentinel-2, Copernicus GLO-30) so once an area is chosen it can build it in like 1-3 minutes. Since all OSM endpoints are giving lots of timeouts I setup a local OSM mirror with the data that I need - takes around 50GB of storage for the whole world data and I have a script that updates it weekly.
Coming back to the original post, seeing 1:1 ratio of Switzerland made my heart stop for a bit, then I realized it's 1m resolution. Switzerland was also my first choice for hi-res data, they provide good accurate image and height datasets. Pretty cool all this Minecraft voxel rendering, I intend to see how it would look in my own app.
Nice ! I have a fun survival challenge: the swiss Via Alpina hike in Minecraft !
Quickly did the math. The real trail is ~390 km long, with 23,500 m of elevation gain and 14 Alpine passes. I found that Minecraft walking speed is 4.317 m/s (1 block = 1 m), so that's ~25 hours of continuous walking, or ~33 hours assuming 75% movement efficiency for terrain. That's one Alpine pass every ~2.4 hours, and a new hiking-stage destination every ~1h40!
It's not the most pleasant that you get the constructed buildings embedded into the map as crappy voxel approximations. Would be sweeter to have the terrain only. Also, total LLM goop.
I’ve actually been building the same thing except with the whole world.
Wait is that not a 1 to 1 derived work from the official "swisstopo open geodata", taking 15.- is for sure not "fair use"
>>Obtaining and using the data and services is free-of-charge, subject to the provisions on fair use.
https://www.geo.admin.ch/en/general-terms-of-use-fsdi#2.-Dat...
Am i wrong here?
This is a trivial task for any good model provided with all the tools it needs, and excluding the time it takes to download it from swissALTI3D -- which is the source of the data (heightmap, surface map, subsurface, building 3D models with swissBUILDINGS3D) and is a pretty useful resource for lots of terrain work. Other countries have similar datasets from airborne LiDAR, it's just very well published in Switzerland's case. Most European countries have this data available at similar 0.5m resolutions but coverage may not be as good in some cases. Some individual US states also publish them.
Related, though less artistic. See this French LIDAR data visualisation of buildings : https://batiment3d.ign.fr, and this other visualisation that shows France in 3D, measurable (measure heights, distances) : https://julesrumeau.github.io/Scopus
Funky stuff, nice use of government data.
It would be fascinating to see how my house and town is rendered in-game. Unfortunately, the full map costs 15 CHF o_O
> For legal reasons I sell all of Switzerland only to people who live in Switzerland.
Why tho? Something about the data itself, or because you don't want to bother with international purchases?
See https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/height-model-swissalti3d, which is an excellent resource.
I find https://buildtheearth.net/ way more interesting than this & the other autogenerated projects mentioned here. It's actually thousands of people coming together to build the actual buildings everywhere on earth, not just terrain.
Missing context: in Minecraft.
Reminds me of the Dufour map of Switzerland
https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/dufour-map
I still think it's by far the greatest map I've come across throughout history: given both the limitations of the time period and the painstakingly consistent hachuring. It's just immaculate
An ETH student's project apparently. Despite the naysayers, I think it's great someone had the impetus to get this done, and it has my son quite excited.
If you can't be assed to write even the marketing for a thing you want me to buy I'll never be assed to even try it.
How does it infer what's underground? Does it include tunnels / mineral deposits / bunkers?
> ONE BLOCK = ONE METRE
Aren’t most high-resolution aerial imagery (Google Earth), 1 metre resolution.
Wow. How can I view this on the meta quest? Can I import this into Godot and run smoothly? Is the licensee permissive to use it in a game?
This almost makes me want to have Minecraft, but apparently you need an effing Microsoft account for it. No way in hell.
The one from Denmark (while not as cool looking, because ... you know, mountains and stuff) had much more appeal, though. Probably because it wasn't 1% blocks and 99% of Claudism rubbed against your face.
> B~ b~ but they would have used LLMs back then if they could, too.
"You're absolutely right."™ But they didn't/couldn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is cool af.
almost want to download this just so that i can put furniture into the apartment i live in :D nice project.
Even if this is some vibe coded slop, it's still really cool. Where do people find such powerful LLMs?
AIDR
Everyone is complaining that the web site was made by AI?
Why? It looks like a hundred other web sites. The text isn't different from any other generic sales copy that humans have been doing for ever.
People are so paranoid about AI slop, that they see it everywhere, even if it was just a human. You can't tell.
Do we really need to post projects like this? It's obviously of no practical or even entertainment use. In the past it would have been a somewhat notable achievement due to the effort required. Today it's obvious that you can easily do this so what's the point? Showing off how many tokens you can waste?
It's like... if someone typewrites out every number from 1 to 1 million, wow totally useless but impressive effort! If someone prints that with a laser printer... Why? Who cares?
[dead]
Denmark did this in 2014 and didn't need a pile of LLM puffery to do it:
https://minecraftdanmark.dk/
https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/
> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.