Minecraft Pi - advanced features and creative structures!

This is the second blog post about Minecratt Pi. Do read until the end to see something nice.

It is quire an amazing tool for honing a kid's creativity. My kid looked at some images online, and was able to create mythical creatures. It shows that his spatial sense is on the high side. Something to be proud of. Here is a creature that supposedly breathes fire. Amazing, isn't it?

The last blog entry used pictures from a Windows 10 laptop, via screenshots on VNC viewer. Not so user friendly, and I had to move on the Raspberry Pi to align the screenshor,while waiting for the laggy interface to update the image on the screen. Used Paint to crop. Time consuming, isn't it?

For the images in this blog post, I used raspi2png. Just need to read up on some of the settings to get it right. You can call it from a python script, which makes life many times easier. Align, start the script, and take the screenshot. It will crop and save the images accordingly. Say bye bye to ugly borders. For details, leave a message here and I will get back to you soon.

Here are some more mythical creatures built by my kid. Sea serpent that he led me to, and phoenix near the eiffel tower breathing smoke. Glad my kid has been trained to do this. Let's hope machines are unable to become creative in future.

We decorated the castle that I built with python scripts. See the flag on that newer castle. H (yellow) and J (blue). Many walkways were created to link different buildings. No covered walkways unfortunately because it is always sunny in Minecraft Kingdom.

My kid decided to build a greenhouse between the old houses in the village. To plant bamboo. No pandas here to eat it unfortunately. I built a long staircase up to the older castle, from a beach house. We also decided to help the Kingdom progress by building an 11 storey condominium on reclaimed land, with a bridge and pathway to the newer castle. The rooftop view is breathtaking, because it looks like there is a layer of clouds between the ground and the roof. As usual, my kid decided to decorate every floor with a different theme.

Here is another image of my kid's creation. He wanted Batman, Captain America and Power Ranger to be shown. See that bridge? It leads to the newer castle. Took a while to build that.

Somehow my kid is into interior design. He decided to overhaul the Batcave I dug. The original boring computer was replaced with a colourful one.

As he likes reading, he built a library for studying. That is where I would hide to take a nap.

Here is something fun that I did not manage to finish before sending my kid to his mum last weekend. Here is how it was created:

1) Take an image I want to build as a banner.

2) Scale it accordingly to the width I want.

3) Identify the bricks to use for it automatically.

4) Clear the space around me.

5) Build the banner.

To do this, you need some skills in image processing algorithms (too long to elaborate here).

Finally, the finale. Optimised a python script to take screenshots while I chased my kid around the map while dressed as Batman. This is as good as it gets (for now) until I find a better solution.

Hope you enjoyed reading this. Feel free to post questions here.