GDMC Competition 2021 Submission

Submission for the 2021 GDMC Competition.

We serialized several buildings from various publicly available Minecraft worlds to populate our settlement. These buildings include various houses, public buildings (churches), and outposts (barracks). Our building generator detects the biome where the specific lot (not the average for the whole settlement) is being built and changes the building's materials to adapt to the biome (e.g. stone to sandstone in a desert). This feature includes the ability to build any building over a river or ocean biome on wooden planks. The building generator favours flatter sections of the build area for greater adaptability. For building roads between buildings in a settlement, Prim's Algorithm and A* search were used. First, Prim's algorithm was used to find a minimum spanning tree (MST) for all building plots in the settlement, then A* would find optimal paths along each edge of the MST and place the road. The roads are placed such that a Minecraft player can navigate by only walking and jumping. Along the path, streetlights were spawned randomly to illuminate the way. The nature of an MST for choosing how to connect the buildings in the settlement leads to organic-looking roads that give the sense that the road network grew along with the settlement. A fence is built along the perimeter of the village for protection, but has gaps in the middle of each of the sides (this is buggy) so that people can enter and exit the settlement. To add a sense of life to the settlement, villagers are spawned next to each building, and iron golems are spawned along the roads. We had a lot of fun experimenting for our first GDMC, and perhaps in the future we can improve upon this submission, and implement features that we never got the chance to finish.