How to design and add new buildings to the project

• Prerequisites:
  • Minecraft Java edition
  • SimCity 2000 (And also the SCURK building editor that comes with it)
  • Pixel editor, such as MS Paint
  • Some kind of Minecraft world editor, I use MCEdit

1. Check the building_stats.xlsx file on the project root to see which buildings still need to be added

• They are ordered by a combination of how often they appear in actual cities and by size. The idea is to create the buildings that are more common and smaller first, to minimize the effort required to fill up the generated cities.

2. Find the selected building in SCURK (It's much easier than finding it in a city, and also gives you an unobstructed view of it), take a screenshot and paste it into your pixel editor
3. Prepare 2D sketches of the building from the front, right and top sides. Here are some examples of building sketches: sketches.zip

• The most important part here is that every pixel in the sketch must correspond to every pixel of the original building as exactly as possible
• Sometimes an exact match is not possible and you have to improvise a bit, but you have to try to stick to the original
• This is how I create the side drawings in MS Paint:
  • To create the view from the right I copy the original image and skew it vertically by 27°
  • To create the view from the front I copy the original image and skew it vertically by -27°
  • To create the view from the top I copy the view from the front and skew it horizontally by -45°
  • I hope this doesn't sound too confusing, I'll try to make a visual step-by-step guide sometime :)
  • Create pixel-based drawings from the top, front and right using the above views

4. Create a building in Minecraft that corresponds exactly to the sketch

• Each pixel from the sketch MUST be exactly represented by a block in Minecraft
• Use common sense and your imagination to construct the left and rear sides of the building, since these are not visible in SimCity 2000's 2D representation
• The material used is not that important, but the color must match the original as exactly as possible (This is why many buildings are made of wool)
• You should construct this building in a special template world.
  • These are the files for the world: template.zip
  • You can open it by copying it to your Minecraft Java Edition worlds directory
  • You can also modify an existing building by copying it from this project's buildings directory in to the template world directory and renaming it to r.0.0.mca.
• The building should have at least some kind of sensible interior with rooms, lighting and a staircase that enables access to all floors
  • In smaller buildings I have also added furniture such as beds, bookshelves, etc.
• When the building is finished, take the file r.0.0.mca from the template world and copy it into the project's buildings directory
• Rename the file according the building's ID that you found in building_stats.xlsx. For example if you added the building M Condo 3, the file should be renamed to 147.mca
• Paint the new building's row green in building_stats.xlsx, so we can see that it has been added

5. Create a new Pull Request on GitHub with these two changed files, and add me (@jgosar) as a reviewer