Monday, October 12, 2015

The moon in Minetest

I was at a conference over the weekend, and I also had some spare time at the airport, on the plane and in the hotel, so I entertained myself by finishing off a lunar mod for Minetest (a free Minecraft-like game, which works a lot better than Minecraft on old hardware) that uses real-world data from NASA's LRO spacecraft to generate lunar textures. To make this more Minetest-y, I flatten the moon out into two pancakes, and then I exaggerate the terrain by a factor of five (which is adjustable). And I added some sky background textures from SpaceEngine. (The Enterprise isn't a part of this mod, but is generated with the render.py script for RaspberryJamMod).