Category: Mediaeval

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Visited the abandoned silver/copper/barite mine in Hallwangen, 72280 Germany. It’s a rather interesting one as it dates back to times and is still excavated by voluntary workers. The earliest record found dates back to 12C and the upper mining gallery “Himmlisch Heer” shows markings that are the result of hand tools while the second gallery “Irmgardsglück” has holes for explosives drilled with machines powered by compressed air. That part also has wider tunnels while the upper part is mostly crawl spaces.

The mine was abandoned and reopened several times for different reasons. The last activity was in 1912 and some stuff like an old rail for push carts and parts of electric installations can still be seen to this day.

I liked especially that we were allowed to walk through the mine at our own pace. I remember a visit to another mine where we were ushered along so fast that the children had trouble keeping up. Not so in this case. Our guide was very friendly and described everything in an exciting way so the children would even pay attention 😀

Speaking of, the guide noticed my interest in the medieval part of the mine and recommended me the De Re Metallica (yes, like the band 🤘) by Georg Agricola, which is apparently a treasure drove on historic mining operations (and myths) and lucky me: A translation in English is available on Project Gutenberg (as well as the original Latin text) – figures included.

I can totally recommend a tour. We got to see a lot of interesting stuff packaged with fascinating stories and explanations. Been to some mines in my life already but seldom did I get to see so many details in such tiny tunnels. Granted, most mines were rather modern and huge drilled exclusively with modern machines.

If you visit don’t forget to greet the tunnel at the entrance with the classic “Glück auf!” shout of the local miners for safe passage and fortune.

Links:

https://www.bergwerk-hallwangen.de/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_re_metallica

https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/38015

https://echo.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/ECHOdocuView?url=/permanent/library/5CTEBAHQ/index.meta&tocMode=figures&viewMode=text&pn=308&viewLayer=dict

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Some weeks ago I started making a ship for based on NZ-43 (14C) and while I was happy with the basic result it helped me mostly to get an understanding how such ships were made.

I never cared much about ships before and had absolutely no idea about this topic at all. During my research to close that gap, which consisted mostly of reading into Flevobericht, 331 (ISBN 9036910862) and following the awesome actual model builds by @silverman834 at https://modelshipworld.com/topic/25300-a-small-cog-by-silverman834-scale-120-c-1410-finished/ did I decide to reapply the lessons learned and go for the famous so called “Bremen Cog” ship.

This is a very specific ship type that was widely used from the 12th century on for trade via the sea. It was between 15 to 25 meters long, had one square sail and was crewed by approximate 12 people that worked in shifts. Unlike other sailing ships it was very reliant on wind direction but it’s flat bottom permitted it to be beached without taking damage so it could be unloaded everywhere e.g. during low tide. The aftercastle on it’s stern deck makes for a very distinct impression and can be recognized from many period depictions of ships. Several full sized replica have been built to this date.

The “Bremen Cog” is the best preserved example of this ship type. It’s wreck from ~1380 was discovered in the Weser in 1962. It took almost 40 years until it could be presented to the public. It’s my understanding that the conservation techniques applied had to be developed first. It’s on display in the German Maritime Museum and the cog apparently played a huge role in the founding of the museum itself: https://www.dsm.museum/en/exhibition/exhibitions/bremen-cog

The museum is located in 27568 Bremerhaven / Germany (and closed during the wintertime). No idea when I’ll get the chance to visit this but the museum does also foster a YouTube channel and one of the most recent videos up on their channel is a drone flight around and through the Bremen Cog made by Dennis Vogt so make sure to check this out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KjYigiyF014

So why did I take this effort on me to recreate this famous ship type once more in a game? Curiosity and hyper focus I guess. I can tell you it was cumbersome because the game does not support bend objects so everything is basically a block. It does also not feature tools for e.g. Bézier curves or something. I spent quite some hours trying to get the hull and proportions right and while the superstructures are kinda opinionated I’m really happy with the end result. I also saved a lot on the ropes and while I know in theory how this should work and look it’s just _too much work_ to get this right in the game. So I only went with the most important running ropes. I hope any navigators reading this can forgive me 😉

The final result of the Bremen Cog under sails

I also prepared a variant without a sail and maybe I’ll even create a version with a reefed sail and with another version of the bow someday. I don’t know yet for I feel very exhausted from this little side project for now.

The final result of the Bremen Cog without sails

It’s also very sparse on final details because I can imagine that the blueprints for this ship will see a lot of reuse on various servers of the game so it should be really easy to individualise each placement with different colours or textures or cargo.

Speaking of: The blueprints for Rising World (Unity) can be downloaded from here:

Bremen_Cog_A-BekoPharm-CC-BY-SA-4

You’re free to share and adapt this work as indicated by the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license. Please do inform me if you make use of this simply because that would make me very happy. It’s not required though.

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With (Unity) improving a lot lately we’re feature wise almost on par with the old Java version again. Due to my hobbies I’m playing on the server https://medievalrealms.co.uk/ where I usually construct buildings based on specific periods according to my understanding of timber-framed constructions. Which may not be the best to rely on but hey, it’s a game after all.

One of the features still missing is an ingame map. We do have the compass already though and with debug enabled we even get an exact position on the current map. And the new maps are huge! And since we’re building here in multiplayer it’s no wonder that this is a dire missed feature to get an idea where the others are and what they are building, because it’s not fun navigating with X,Y,Z alone to visit other players (and keep note of where the own spot is located).

So I was intrigued to see that the player @Bamse did what gamers tend to do when a feature is missing. They start some sort of helper app (or wiki or whatever). This resulted in a Cloud map project at https://qgiscloud.com/Bamse/MapMedievalRealms/ where players from the same server may add POIs and do the leg work of surveying the “new” world.

The only drawback (haha. sorry.) is: It’s a PITA to do the surveying because stopping every few meters to note down a bunch of coordinates takes hours! Someone had to do this though, because “my” isle – a piece of rock I randomly stumbled over after the latest server reset – was still missing! And while I clocked roughly ~700h on this game already I was not going to do that. I’m a programmer – which equals to lazy in my opinion. So I started scripting and after a few minutes came up with the following still crude solution:

echo "" > move.log
while true; do
	gnome-screenshot -w -f /tmp/snapshot.png && convert /tmp/snapshot.png -crop 165x30+905+975 /tmp/snapshot-cropped.tiff && tesseract /tmp/snapshot-cropped.tiff - -l eng --psm 13 quiet | awk 'match($0, /([[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]])+.([[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]]+).([[:digit:]]+[.][[:digit:]]+)/) { print substr($0, RSTART, RLENGTH)}' | awk '{ printf "%0.0f,%0.0f,%0.0f\n", $1, $2, $3}' >> move.log 
	sleep 2
done

This surely can be improved a lot but… minimum viable product. We’re still talking about a game. Here is what it does:

* Take a screenshot of the active window (Rising World while playing)

* Save it to /tmp (that’s in my RAM disk)

* Crop out the coordinates and convert it to tiff using `imagemagick`

* Run `tesseract` for OCR detection

* Pipe the result to awk and use a RegEx to identify three numbers

* Reformat the 3 numbers (remove the precision) and dump it in as csv-like log

* Sleep for 2 seconds and repeat until terminated

And in case you wonder why I used gnome-screenshot: I’m on and the usual suspects written for X do simply not work. I did recompile gnome-screenshots tho to disable the annoying flashing though so it’s silent now.

Why the awk program? Well, tesseract is good but the raw data looked something like this in the end and the RegEx cleans that up somewhat:

serene ep)
9295.2 95.4 2828.0 |
9295.2 95.4 2828.0 |
9296.4 95.4 2828.5 |
nn
9303.1 95.4 2838.5 |
9295.0 98.4 2857.65
9289.1 98.7 2868.1 (7
9296.5 96.7 2849.0 |»
9301.1 95.4 2835.5 |
9301.1 95.4 2835.5 |
nn

So I put this to a test and jogged around “my” isle and here are the results:

One(!) data point was misread during the ~15 minutes run. Not too shabby! That could easily be fixed manually and who knows… mebbe I’ll improve on the script to check for implausible spikes like that at some point.

I demoed the script to other players on the same server and some already started investigating into solutions to adapt this script to Windows. Just don’t ask me how to do that – I really wouldn’t know 😛

Updated 10th Dec 2022: A solution to do the same on Windows PC appeared on https://wiki.calarasi.net/en/public/medievalrealms/ocr-coordinates

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One of my first experiences with was trying to get a P-51 into the air after getting comfortable with the Cessna. There is no special reason for this beside that it simply was one of my first plane models I got as a child. It’s not like I did know anything about this plane or avionics at all. It simply looked good so I went with it.

And I failed miserable on my first try. The P-51 was build for war and has like nothing in common with the set of controls I started to get comfortable with. Not that I know much about avionics to begin with, I mean. Anyway, YouTube to my aid: There is a wonderful channel named “Kermit Weeks” that I stumbled over when looking for answers and I found em here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z1Z-WEZZGM

After watching all three parts I finally managed to get one off the ground in – felt really good about it and… forgot about it again.

Until the YouTube algorithm decided to come back at me today and showed me https://animagraffs.com/how-a-p-51-mustang-works/ where it is explained in great detail how the P-51 Mustang actually works. There is a list of errata on the pinned comment on YouTube but after all this is a really high quality animated description of the plane and it’s workings.

I highly recommend to watch both pieces if you’ve only the slightest interest in planes or wartime history.

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I was delighted to read about the digital reconstruction of a chain mail based on an exhibit next door.

  • Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart / H. Zwietasch (CC BY-SA)

The piece in question (exhibit F 14,01-2) was found in a grave near 72501 Gammertingen, Germany and consists of ~45.000 iron pieces. It’s well preserved and can be viewed in our local state museum or online at https://www.landesmuseum-stuttgart.de/sammlung/sammlung-online/dk-details/?dk_object_id=1280 – both basically next door for me.

The interesting part is that it’s a mix of riveted and stamped rings, also known as “Roman Mesh”. I own a similar piece myself and I’m fascinated by this type of mail.

This pattern was digital reconstructed using Blender and it’s polygonal modelling functions and uploaded to SketchFab under CC license by it’s authors:

Aleksei Moskvin (Saint Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design) https://independent.academia.edu/AlekseiMoskvin

Mariia Moskvina (Saint Petersburg State University of Industrial Technologies and Design) https://independent.academia.edu/MariiaMoskvina

Martijn A. Wijnhoven (VU University Amsterdam) https://vu-nl.academia.edu/MartijnAWijnhoven

It can be viewed in 3D with a modern browser at https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/gammertingen-mail-fabric-3d-reconstruction-dd52c61041f04f27a613488893082e29

So dear game devs, there is no longer an excuse for shoddy chain mail patterns in games – here it’s served on a silver platter 😛

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Re-Visited Campus Galli in 88605 Meßkirch / Germany mostly for the new barn that is almost finished by now. My last visit was in 2019 so it was really time to see how much changed (despite the gorram pandemic). This time I took so many pictures that my battery drained.

Visitors aren’t allowed inside of the barn yet since it will be under construction until the end of the month. That was perfectly fine for me because catching the impression of the almost finished building is what I was after:

This cart also catched my attention so I checked it out closer. Spoiler: It doesn’t come with free rust proofer:

I consider myself lucky with the weather situation by the way. I could see a lot of systems that prevent flooding of the area in action – or not.

The orchard changed a lot since my last visit. The entrance for example is now completed.

Many trees were cut down for the constructions going on. Wood is needed everywhere and for everything on the site and some areas are becoming aerial.

The wooden church also got some changes. Most important the bell tower next to it and also a new porch. Couldn’t get enough of it.

All the other buildings required on a medieval construction site are also still there. Some show a lot of wear by now and constantly ongoing repairs are required.

The masons seem to be busy with a new arch. No idea where it will go tho 🤔 Their space doubles as a place to dry scales of wood in the attic.

This time I also managed to get pictures of some of the livestock!

This was a great day. Didn’t poke my nose outside much over the last year and I really missed excursion like this.

I also recorded some small video snippets so I may eventually come around creating a small video later too 🙂

https://www.campus-galli.de/

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This isn’t strictly based on sources. The goal was a church for a walled city center ~14C in England. There’s a lot of free interpretation here since I don’t know all the details and I’m somewhat limited by the engine, of course. I mean creating arches and getting the geometry right in Rising World is a pain in the neck. I’m still very happy with the outcome especially considering that this is on a survival server.

This build will now go to another person to add the final details and textures.

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I was nominated by Sebastian Reinbold to annoy everyone with LARP images of myself for ten days. I’ll pass on the nominating part myself – your timeline is yours and I usually do not participate in such ‘games’ anyway – but since it has been a while and I’m sort of having nostalgic flashbacks going by now, here goes nothing:

1 / 10

This image was taken during breakfast on the Irrlichter SWL in 2010. My participation was a last minute surprise and all of my gear was borrowed for the roles I got to play.

It also was an indoor con set in the SW verse and in the wintertime.

I also recall having an ache from all the laughing on that weekend 😀

2 / 10

Next in line is really old. It was taken in 2003 on Nebellegenden 8 – Auf den Spuren des Heiligen Prätorius where I – the smallest NSC in the group – got to play a bear.

This is a fun story because the costume was shrunk after washing and I was the only one who fitted somewhat into it at all.

So I was a tiny bear for our brave ranger to appease 😀

3 / 10

The next one was at Rathad an Damh – Der Weg des Hirschen 1 in 2016 probably taken by Aerfeiniel.

The setting was a celtic horror con in October and featured many undead zombies and litres of artifical blood.

Our fine and highly motivated NSC group kept the players bittenbusy day and night.

In the end I almost collapsed from dehydration and sleep deprivation but I was happy. So much fun and very epic moments. I’m just a bit sad that I missed most of the great feast in the end due to that.

4 / 10

This one is not exactly LARP and falls probably more into the category of Living History.

While my clothes are a wild mix mostly originated in LARP this is from a hike in mediaeval gear.

I don’t recall the year but I remember the walk of 20km in period footwear – and one guy even barefoot.

5 / 10

This is a more recent one from 2017. I have no idea who took this but the con was In der Flanke des Feindes.

The con was a bit unusual for me because I was a cast SCs but not allowed in the NSC camp on this. I don’t even remember the exact reasons but I remember doing what I do best a lot – getting beaten down 😀

I’ve also very fond memories of my tent oven because this was a rainy and cold weekend and we enjoyed plenty of hours in the warm tent playing dices.

6 / 10

This reminds me of a very arid one. It’s the infamous NewNo Order 2003.

Water had to be fetched from far away, so we had people picking up water for the camp all the time.

The camp was located on a dry meadow with a high voltage overland line over our heads.

Dust was everywhere. In the air, our shoes and probably even in the food. In the end there was eventually a thunderstorm and I’ve never seen people getting out of their plate armour in such a short time.

7 / 10

Speaking of armour. This one is from Drachenfest in 2002 and I’m wearing my very first mail. Well, sort of 😀

That was basically my second part of protective gear at all and out of money this was all I could muster back then. The helmet was my first and most important part.

There’s a story on that nasal helmet by the way. On my very first con I took a bad slash to my face. The nasal was bent and I had to form it back into shape. Almost nobody had a helmet in 2002 and I was really happy for mine.

People will laugh at this nowadays but twenty years ago I was proud on this piece 😉 Wonder where it ended up.

8 / 10

Here I played probably for the last time my Witcher back in 2014 at Der ruhelose Wald 2.

There’s a certain satiation for Witchers in LARP by now and frankly others play way better. Well, mayhap not the sword-ing but the costumes. The standards are high nowadays.

Sorry for the bad quality of the image. Somehow I never got my hands on a decent picture for this role – which is kinda sad.

9 / 10

Here is another one where I’m very sad that I got no decent picture of. It’s from 2004 – Drachenfest.

I was on guard duty – something I seem to do a lot as well (pestering people for Permit A 38 is so much fun) – wearing a borrowed cuirass. It was a perfect fit and I was sorry when I had to hand it back to it’s proper owner.

Years later I’m not much interested in this type or armour any more and while people look great in it it’s just too much of a burden for me anyway. Running away has proven to work as well 😉

10 / 10

That’s it. Thanks for staying with me through my flashback on LARP. A hobby I was infected with in 1996 due to the magazine PC Spiel Fantasy Special.

Many other of my interests nowadays are a direct result of this and while I seldom find the time to go for a play nowadays I still do so on [rare] occasions (and of course I let my children play with foam swords 😉 ).