2015. I had just returned from a family trip to the Bay Area in California. For whatever reason, I wanted to recreate my experience in Minecraft. I got on Google Maps Street View, fired up Minecraft, and started building. I had no idea what I was doing. Half a year later, I published the resulting build to Planet Minecraft. I named it SFMC (San Francisco Minecraft).
It was crude and really, really awful. I didn't know anything about scale at the time, I was just a teenager. So everything was approximated and "eyeballed". I built only based on what I could see on Street View. The end result was a map that was way out of proportion to the real deal, and none of the buildings were true to life, or at an accurate scale. It was my first time really trying to build something from the real world in-game.
The post on Planet Minecraft actually was received quite well at the time. I had received feedback from an SF local who actually agreed to provide photos of the city, especially of the BART system.
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A few months later, I suddenly became fascinated with the Pacific Northwest. I had just played the video game Life is Strange for the first time, which takes place in a fictionalized rendition of the Oregon Coast. I was fascinated, obsessed, and curious about the region. So, one day when I was bored (which I often was in my teen years), I decided to fire up Google Maps once again, this time I wanted to do Seattle. This time, it was on an "ocean world". Minecraft lets you customize parameters of the world generation. SFMC was built on a "flatland" map, which was just flat grassland. This next project was built on an ocean map. Water as far as the eye can see. I still had no clue what I was doing, I was improvising every moment of it and learning as I went. I actually started to measure some things. But I quickly came upon a realization; Seattle has *very* large hills. Adding insult to injury, Minecraft's height limit of 256 blocks meant I was essentially doomed from the start. Highrises couldn't be their actual height. And because I hadn't used heightmaps yet (I didn't even know what that was at the time), the hills were going to be a real problem. I had only gotten as far as a small sliver of the Seattle Waterfront, including the Alaskan Way Viaduct (RIP) and a few of the piers. The end result looked better than SFMC, but it was still not ideal. I posted it to Planet Minecraft, again received mostly positive reception, but also some constructive criticism regarding the terrain. "I hope you know Seattle has very large hills," one person commented. That really stuck with me.
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While I was working on SeattleMC (as it had been named), I had made the server open to the public whenever I was working on it. This information was made available on Planet Minecraft. I had received some enthusiasm from a user on the forums. beezbo76 was their name. One day I was messing around on the server and this same person joined my session. This began a now almost 10 year-long friendship, and is where the story of PortlandMC begins.
We both loved cities, architecture, urbanism, history, music - we shared a lot of common interests. And we both loved the PNW, even though we were not from the area by any means. I forgot how exactly it started, but Portland entered the conversation. If I'm remembering events correctly, I asked Jonathan what they thought about Portland. Jonathan was enthralled. But this time, I wanted to do things right. With Jon's help, we researched terrain. USGS maps. Historical photos. We basically tried to gather as much info about Portland as possible. Eventually after a lot of tinkering, we downloaded some topography in the form of a heightmap. We also found out about the program called WorldPainter, which allows for the importing of heightmaps and subsequent generation of a Minecraft world based on that data. We were getting somewhere. This was going to be more accurate than SFMC and SeattleMC combined. Once the map was generated, we got to work. Roads were laid out first. Measurements were taken. Some of the first buildings went in. The very first structure built was Umpqua Bank, the red highrise along the Waterfront. But we quickly ran into a problem; the hills weren't lining up with what Street View was showing us. So we decided to hand-grade each hill based on Street View imagery. Yes, *every* hill. This would eventually become a problem, but we pressed on, and made steady progress.
The early builds were rough, lacking detail, and nowhere near the level of quality or polish you see in PDXMC today. We were still learning. Development of PDXMC started in November 2016, and we didn't really hit our stride until around 2018 or 2019. That's a few years of building. We were being accurate, though, measuring everything, doing our best to stay 1:1 as much as possible and remain as true to life as we could. But the builds were just lacking detail. They weren't very good. After about a year or so, we realized we would have to redo a large portion of Downtown. We dreaded the prospect, but we carried on, because we knew we could do better with the skillset we'd had at that point. We did it in sections; first the Waterfront, then Yamhill area, and then moved our way westward. Eventually, we had essentially rebuilt every single building we had made up to that point. The process took about a year or two to finalize. But the end result was so, so worth it. We had become masters at our craft. We knew what to do.
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Terrain was something lacking early on and we knew it. Another user, this time from Reddit, had noticed our project after our post to /r/Portland on Reddit. User /u/AEguyproductions. Ash as we would later learn their name was. Ash is to put it simply, a computer wizard. We had toyed with the idea of generating new terrain for the project, as we had later discovered there was far better data available, with much more detail and precision, in the form of "point clouds" based on LIDAR data. In simpler terms, this data was *really* fucking good. But it was complex, and required specialized software to process. This is where Ash came in. It took months of tinkering, but eventually, Ash was able to successfully process the data into something that could be used in WorldPainter for the terrain. The data was hundreds of gigabytes in size. We had found it on some obscure FTP server on the internet. When we first did a test import, we were blown away. The data looked so good. It was mind blowing how fucking good it was. We decided, okay, we need to use this NOW. But there was a problem (as always). We would have to essentially start from scratch. We tried at first just copying and pasting buildings over to the new world, but this proved unfeasible because of our hand-graded hills. The buildings would all need to be altered. And our road network was incompatible entirely. We hadn't measured the roads 100% accurately, so there were lots of discrepancies. The task was super daunting and so for the moment, we had given up on this. But it has remained an eventual goal of ours to move everything over to this new, more accurate, map. But we couldn't do that without Ash. Sadly, Ash has been absent for several years due to health complications. We owe a lot of PDXMC's success to Ash.
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