We've been playing on this revision of the map for about 2 months now. It's a survival map with PvP disabled, so all materials seen were collected by people.
There's a discontinuity square around the center of the map. I suppose a different terrain generating algorithm was used for that center area when the map was created?
The spawn is one that was built on the terrain of the previous map (different seed/generation) and was transferred to the new map. The edges of the spawn are currently being smoothed out to fit.
What the hell is that humongous funnel west of the center.
I'm always amazed by the size of the constructions people make in Minecraft (without the use of external editors). Myself, I once undertook to dig a 16x16 hole to the bottom of the world and build a tower to the sky. Never again, that was way too much useless work.
Then again, this is multiplayer, so there's extra motivation of group effort.
Anyone knows how does it compare to dynmap, another well-known renderer? Key differences (I remember that it didn't allow showing players location and chat and such stuff)?
Full disclosure, my experience is with a bit older version of both Overviewer and dynmap, but a quick glance at them suggests they haven't changed much.
Key differences:
Overviewer's web interface is much better. Smoother & faster. And the rendering quality is also superior to dynmap's.
Dynamp is, however, dynamic. Overviewer is an offline renderer, basically. You need to cron-job it or whatever, so there are delays in the map updating. Dynmap, on the other hand, is a plugin to the server itself, so it updates whenever a chunk in the game updates. This is how it also is able to have player locations and chat and stuff.
But this also requires plugin support to use dynmap. Overviewer can easily work with hosted solutions. You can pull down a copy of the world from your hosted minecraft instance and run overviewer on it nightly, so you don't have to take on hosting minecraft yourself.
However, if you are going the modded-minecraft route (FTB or whatever), dynamp is low-effort and since it uses the game engine itself to render has built-in support for all the crazy textures & blocks that mods add. Overviewer does not.
tl;dr: If you're running vanilla Minecraft, use Overviewer. If you're running modded Minecraft (FTB, Technic, etc...) use Dynmap.
Its more similar to dynmap than to overviewer. It combines the concepts of an in game minimap and the web map. That means a waypoint made on the minimap shows up online and vice versa.
Depending on your server, it can be a blessing and a curse.
Some players where I play have resorted to building things in ways that aren't visible on the map so that other players can't find them. Adding the map to the server made for some interesting dynamics.
Yeah, I really like building "hidden" structures that blend into the landscape. You might only see a door and stairs in the side of a cliff, but the inside is my masterpiece :)
Overviewer relies on a Minecraft client JAR file to pull the textures out of. It also supports pulling the textures out of a filesystem directory, so in theory you could just un-jar all of your mods, fish out the assets directories, and put them all where Overviewer can see them.
We've been playing on this revision of the map for about 2 months now. It's a survival map with PvP disabled, so all materials seen were collected by people.