Whizz kids recreate towns on Minecraft
PAUL BEHAN
Three computer whizz kids have faithfully recreated parts of Prestwick, Ayr and Alloway- thanks to one of the best-selling video games of all time.
Dilan Flanagan, Eoin McCann and Joanna Kennedy, all 20, spent a staggering 8000 hours building exact scale replicas of Ayrshire locations on Minecraft.
And the hope is their replica locations can be accessed and appreciated by the masses.
The trio spent months during lockdown on a private server, as they set about the task of surveying areas of interest, before applying their calculations to their task at hand.
The group managed to virtually build a full-scale replica of Prestwick Oval, together with pitches, nearby housing, trees, roads, lighting, footpaths and other features associated with the site.
From there they moved on to Ayr Road, where they re-created the Sainsbury’s store, complete with parking, road markings, bollards and other key details.
The trio also applied their Minecraft building skills and re-created the cycle path near Burns Cottage, Alloway, again in full-scale and with all the key elements you’d expect.
Prestwick youngster Dilan, a former pupil at Belmont Academy, said: “Right at the start of lockdown we said to ourselves, we need to do something to keep us busy.
“So we started on a wee server together and from there we decided we’d rebuild parts of Prestwick and Ayr. We thought it would be fun to do.
“We’ve built wee bits and pieces, just random places, but we also did the cycle path out at Alloway, near the bridge, the Sainsbury’s in Prestwick and the Oval itself.
“We were talking about it the other day [that] between us, we’ve committed over 8,000 hours to the project. Some amount of effort’s went into it.”
What’s even more impressive is that the project was undertaken in Minecraft ‘survival mode.’ Survival is the primary game mode in Minecraft where players must collect resources, build structures, battle mobs, manage hunger, and explore the world to survive, thrive, and ‘complete the game.’
Dilan said Google Maps’ tools helped the project along in terms of collecting dimensions and co-ordinates, which were then directly applied to the schematics. When it came to working out dimensions for certain other areas of land, Dilan completed additional measurement work with a digital camera. Dilan began playing the Minecraft game when he was 12, while Eoin and Joanna are also experienced with the smash-hit game.
He said: “During the lockdown, the server was a place to meet and that’s how the whole thing got going.”
Now the aim is to get the finished work onto a Minecraft ‘World’ mode, so that anyone can dive in and take a virtual tour of parts of Ayrshire.
Dilan said: “Our end goal, along with having something to do during lockdown, was to have our work mapped, then anyone who owns the game can download it, install it and have a walk around it. A few weeks ago we were thinking ‘we’re coming to the end’, but Eoin said ‘what about building the next street along?’ So it continues.”
Dilan, Eoin and Joanna would like to thank the following people for their help and assistance during the project: Lucy Brown, Matthew Baines, Josh Crawford, Laura Scott, Heather McCreadie, Cate Chambers and both Morgan and Josh McMillan.