What the Cup?! - Recreating France in Minecraft, block by block: a study of GIS, Open Data, and AI-assisted development - Daniel Thirion

After the presentation of Sebastien Michelland on "Taking calculators way too far: unikernels and graphics pipelines", the next session of "What the Cup ?!", will next Friday (28/11 at 16:00 P.M.) and will be untitled: "Recreating France in Minecraft, block by block: a study of GIS, Open Data, and AI-assisted development" presented by Daniel Thirion.
 

Abstract:
This presentation introduces Francegen: a Minecraft world generator which combines high-resolution DEM, landcover and OpenStreetMap data to recreate France at a 1:1 scale.
We will explore the technical pipeline that converts IGN Digital Elevation Models (DEM) into the Minecraft Anvil format with 1-meter precision. We detail how various data sources are layered to create immersive environments: utilizing WMTS streams for land cover to biome painting, and querying OpenStreetMap via OverpassQL to inject vector features like roads, rivers, and buildings as a base layer for future building.
Beyond GIS, this project demonstrates the capabilities of modern modded Minecraft, with the use of LOD (Level of Details) to render huge worlds without heavy performance hits. It also serves as a case study on AI-driven and 'no-code' development: 99% of the Rust codebase was generated using Large Language Models (OpenAI GPT-5/Codex). We will discuss the no-code workflow, the challenges associated, low- and highlights of AI development.

Sources: https://github.com/defvs/francegen

We hope to see you there !

Sincerely,

The "What the Cup ?!" organizing team.

PS: "What the Cup ?!" is a (not so new) format of talks at LCIS, and take place alongside the Coffee Break! This will be a chill event to talk about cultural topics, history, oddities, research tips & tricks, to complement all the science we do in the Speech Pizza. If you have an idea for a talk, feel free to contact us (Louis) !