Tag: timberframed

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Visited the Black Forest open air museum Vogtsbauernhof in 77793 Gutach / Germany. This is a huge areal that has several very old farm buildings, that have been carefully de- and reconstructed on this site. There are often also tours, demonstrations or hands-on activities how people used to live in the Black Forest area but as a half-timber nutter I’m mostly interested in the buildings. These are from various periods starting as early as 1407 (though that’s an often refurbished exception).

Shooting any sort of pictures with my smartphone camera was very hard because the insides of the buildings are unbelievable dark and hardly lit. I guess this is driving home a point in itself. Anyway I did my best to improve the photos somewhat with Darktable (not that I have any idea what I’m doing there). Also the galleries won’t syndicate so you’ll have to check the source for the pictures.

Here are some of the pictures that are very dark in reality.

We also looked at plenty of farm equipment, of course. In fact one of the farms is still operated and has livestock around.

One of the most interesting things I found was a “mini house” that is basically of fridge for milk. It utilizes a water stream to keep milk on the inside cold.

Some of these buildings simply look gorgeous on the outside but my kids were pretty certain that they’d not actually want to life in such a building. Beside the darkness on the inside one could also always feel how air makes it inside. There’s always a slight breeze, which is probably nice in the summertime but not so much in the wintertime. Especially with only a few places around to heat the buildings.

One of their major show pieces is probably the Schlössle von Effringen, which is basically a mini castle that has been remade again and again dating back to ~11C.

This is also where I shot most of my pictures. Sadly we were running out of time and I have to revisit this again so look at some things a little closer. And maybe leave the kids at home too. They don’t really have the required patience.

I also rather enjoyed the various kitchens, that were almost all “smoke kitchens” – means the smoke from the kitchen fire was used to conserve food. This is a very medieval thing to do. Sadly the pictures I made don’t do them justice since they are basically black holes, that cameras struggle hard with.

One of the things I enjoyed most are models of various buildings. I made many photos of these for inspiration. Maybe I’ll come back to recreating such buildings in the Rising World game one day.

And last some unsorted photos in portrait mode (ugh, it happens, mkay?)

Website of the museum is: https://www.vogtsbauernhof.de/en with plenty of more pictures and a 360deg tour. Can recommend. Alas bring food along – the restaurants next to the site are rather expensive. Museum is worth every cent though IMHO.

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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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Mediaeval Mythbusting Blog #13: Ship Timbers by James Wright (triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com)
On visiting timber-framed public houses the story that the building’s timbers were re-used from a ship will frequently crop up. Such claims are made at the White Horse, Sibton (Suffolk) and the Green Man, Hurst (Berkshire). At the Ship Inn, Southfleet (Kent) the buil...

Rather interesting article on the myth of reused ship timbers: https://triskeleheritage.triskelepublishing.com/mediaeval-mythbusting-blog-13-ship-timbers/

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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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Orchard Barn environmental education CIC on Twitter (Twitter)
“We're reinstating this 1580 #Suffolk #Longhouse at #Orchardbarn Expressions of interest in attending 2020 #traditional #timberframing #courses are now being taken - please email irene.orchardbarn@gmail.com #greenoak #heritageskills #CPD #vernacular #handtools #communityproject”

🤩 Please keep posting all the cool pictures. It’s the only way for me (here on the continent) to learn more about the awesome hall houses of Medieval England.