Monday, February 8, 2016

Minecraft - Link to the Past Lost Woods



This post will finally finish off the tour of the Light World in my Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past Hyrule Build.

This makes the 11th post in my series of this project spanning 3 years (with massive gaps in between). To help you get caught up, here is the history:
Now that that's over with, lets wrap this thing up and officially call the project "half complete".

Friday, February 5, 2016

Minecraft - Link to the Past Kakariko Village



Since my last post a few days ago, I've completed the entire Light World! Everything is built and in place from every tree, bush, cave, and building. The only things that remain are aesthetic touches like what you are able to see from certain viewpoints. The prime example is being on top of Death Mountain and looking around the world, you can see past the "boundaries" of the map to the blank outside world. I'm working on creating natural looking structures (mountains, fields, etc) outside that to blend it out and/or hide it. I'm really putting a lot of effort into making the world feel "real".

But for now, I'm going to leave you with two more posts. The first one, this one, will give a tour of Kakariko Village. The next post to follow will cover the Lost Woods and remaining areas as well as a few of the finishing touches I've done on the Light World. So without further ado, I present my take on Kakariko Village.

The southern end of town.
We'll start at the south and make out way north. One of the biggest challenges with the entire world is the elevations. Taking a 2D game into 3D has been a huge challenge and I've done my best to make the elevation differences work. For this area, I wound up dropping the entire space down into a valley just so I could create the ramps back up into the main village. I believe it worked well enough.

A game of chance perhaps?
House of the quarreling brothers.
Race to the Heart Piece.
Some light reading in the library.
Moving up into the village, lets start at the Blacksmith's House. I had to be extra careful around this house to insulate it because of the lava in their furnace. I think it turned out great and I like using cobwebs as smoke coming from the chimney.

The Blacksmiths' House.
The Blacksmiths' House.
And of course, the caves under their house are there complete with the shrine to "curse" your magic.


Moving into the village itself, I spent a lot of time detailing it out as much as possible. In one of my earlier posts, I said I had to "stretch" the world to fit the full-size castle in place. For Kakariko, that greatly worked to my advantage. Where I normally did the world in as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible, the village itself is 2:1. This allowed all the houses to be decorated internally in a way that fits their size without making them feel cramped. I really like how this scale turned out. Looking inside the tavern (below) is a prime example of the amount of detail I was able to achieve.

The Tavern and surrounding space.
Inside the Tavern.


Grass filled yard.





The cave in the northwest.
Inside the northwest cave.

So there you have it, my rendition of Kakariko. I didn't post a screenshot inside every house, but you can get the idea from the ones I did post. Next time, we'll move on into the Lost Woods.

Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Minecraft - Hyrule from Link to the Past Update



It's been almost 3 years since I started my Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past Hyrule Build in Minecraft. I pretty much stopped working on it for a very long time, but recently have picked it back up again to try and finish it. Quite a bit of the places around the Light World have been updated or modified slightly since I originally started as my methods and design ideas have changed over time. Plus, when 1.8 came out, I gained a whole new set of blocks to play with that made a lot of areas just look better.

The Light World as it currently stands.
My last status post was almost a year ago and I covered the Desert Palace. Since then, as you can see in the screenshot above, I have moved north from there and finished Kakariko Village and the Lost Woods. All that is left in the Light World is the strip from the wood cutter's hut down to the blacksmith's house and the Light World will be complete according to the original layout. I still have some aesthetic cleanup to do around Death Mountain and Zora's Domain to blend or create the background and try to make it appear more natural.

When I started doing this, I didn't have the most powerful computer and my render distances were low. On newer hardware with a high distance, the flaws around the edges show a lot more, so I have a little cleanup work do do now.

Once the Light World is complete, the plan is to put MCEdit to the test and see if I can copy/paste the entire map into the Dark World below. As I explained in my first post, I created a custom super flat map that consists of two "worlds" on top of each other. The Dark World is the first 150 blocks and the Light World is the second 150 blocks.

I'm in the process of taking more screen shots, so look for detailed updates on Kakariko and the Lost Woods soon.

Download Link?
I've had several people ask for a download link. I do eventually plan on doing just that and releasing it to the wild, but for now, I want to keep it until it's finished. Since the Dark World mirrors the Light World in so many ways, creating it should not take nearly as long to complete as it will mostly be "done" as soon as I paste it in and switch the grass to Mycelium.