MCEdit 2.0

MCEdit 2.0 is the next version of MCEdit, the World Editor for Minecraft. MCEdit allows you to edit every aspect of a Minecraft world, and to import and export .schematic files created by many programs including WorldEdit and the original MCEdit 1.x. It is free to use and licensed under the BSD license.

MCEdit 2.0's development is in the alpha stage. Many features may be buggy or missing. To download MCEdit 2.0 anyway, head over to http://www.mcedit.net/

The rest of this file is of interest to programmers only.

Getting Started

This guide is written with Windows developers in mind. Linux / OS X developers can read how to install below. Windows developers are assumed to be using a unix shell such as the GIT Bash included with the Windows distribution of Git.

• Install Python for Windows v2.7.9. Edit your PATH environment variable (or your .bashrc) to have both the python27 and python27\scripts folders. (by default, c:\python27;c:\python27\scripts;)
• Install Microsoft Visual C++ Compiler for Python 2.7. This is not needed if you already have MSVC 2008 (Visual Studio 9.0) or the Windows SDK 7.0 installed, but you probably don't so install it anyway.
• Install virtualenv: pip install virtualenv (pip is now included with recent versions of Python)
• Update to the latest setuptools to make sure Cython modules compile: pip install -U setuptools
• Create a local clone of the MCEdit sources: git clone https://github.com/mcedit/mcedit2
• Using the bash shell, change directory to the local clone: cd mcedit2
• Create a virtualenv using virtualenv ENV
• Activate the virtualenv using . ENV/scripts/activate

A virtualenv is created in the local clone directory to keep MCEdit's required libraries isolated from those installed in the systemwide Python folder. This prevents unpleasant surprises when you update a library for another project and later find it isn't compatible with MCEdit.

Now, install the required libraries.

On Windows, easy_install is able to install binary installer packages into a virtualenv. Download each of the following and run easy_install <module>.exe while the virtualenv is active. Binary packages for the following are available at Chris Gohlke's page. Download the versions for Python 2.7, and make sure to download the win32 versions if you installed the 32-bit Python (the default) or the win-amd64 versions for 64-bit Python.

• pyside
• pyopengl (be sure to grab PyOpenGL-accelerate too.)
• pywin32 (for registry access)
• cython (for building nbt.pyd)
• ipython (for debugging)
• pygments (required by IPython)
• numpy **

Also use pip to install these libraries:

• pip install arrow - a date/time class with nice text formatting.
• pip install pyzmq - Gohlke's pyzmq builds don't work on Windows XP

**Note that Gohlke's numpy builds use the Intel Math Kernel Library (MKL) which requires a license to use. If you have not purchased an MKL license (it's expensive) then you DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO DISTRIBUTE APPS built with it. I didn't notice any better performance with MKL regardless.

An alternative is to install the official builds of numpy from the SourceForge Downloads but 64-bit builds are not provided. If you need a 64-bit build of numpy that does not include MKL, you will need to build it yourself. Also, the official builds are packed into a "superpack" installer which easy_install chokes on. Just open the installer in an archiving program like 7-zip and extract the SSE3 installer, then easy_install it.

Another alternative to downloading all of the above is to download all the packages from my dropbox folder. Note that the 64-bit numpy package is one I built myself, with several facilities (LAPACK, BLAS etc) disabled because I couldn't be bothered to find out why MSVC 64-bit chokes on them. MCEdit seems to run fine without them. Install python-2.7.9.msi first, then install MSVC++ for Python, then virtualenv, and create and activate a virtualenv as above. Install each of the .exe files using easy_install and make sure to pip install arrow too.

Once all of the requirements are met, install MCEdit itself into the virtualenv. This will build nbt.pyd, ensure both mcedit2 and mceditlib are on the pythonpath, and also create an mcedit2 script making it easy to launch the app.

python setup.py develop

All that's left is to see if the app launches.

mcedit2

As a bonus, you can use the -debug flag to enable the Debug menu and a few extra widgets.

mcedit2 -debug

Linux/OS X (not tested fully)

cd (Your mcedit2 location)
virtualenv ENV
. ENV/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py develop
mcedit2

If your distro packages python3 as the default version of python instead of python2, you will probably want to set your virtualenv to use python2, i.e.

virtualenv -p python2 ENV

If you get a Library not loaded: libpyside-python2.7.1.2.dylib error, try running pyside_postinstall.py -install to fix this.

If after that, you get a Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/QtGui.framework/Versions/4/QtGui error after that, try installing qt using a package manager like Homebrew or apt-get or similar equivalent on your distribution. You may also need libxslt-dev and python-dev packages installed before the commands above will work.

Example: brew install qt etc. or:

sudo apt-get install qt-sdk
sudo apt-get install libxslt-dev
sudo apt-get install python-dev

Note: This information is not fully tested and might not work for you

Troubleshooting

• python setup.py develop or build produces the error cannot find vcvarsall.bat or similar. Old version of setuptools don't know about MSVC++ for Python 2.7. Run pip install --upgrade setuptools to upgrade.

• When running mcedit2, ImportError: cannot import name nbt is produced. The extension module nbt.pyd failed to build. Run python setup.py develop to rebuild it and look for any errors. The most likely error is the vcvarsall.bat error above.

• When running mcedit2, ImportError: %1 is not a valid Win32 application is produced. This happens when switching between 32-bit and 64-bit Pythons on Windows. The nbt.pyx must be rebuilt after switching, so run python setup.py develop again.