In part due to a large number of requests on MaplePrimes, the command ?plottools,getdata was added to Maple 15. This new command gives programmers a better way to access the internals of plots and do things with the data they contain.
I was trying to come up with something really fun to do with this command, and another recent obsession came to mind: the game Minecraft. Minecraft is nice, since like Maple it is written in Java and runs on lots of platforms! For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a a sort of mostly unstructured "sandbox" game. The player starts in alone in a procedurally generated landscape consisting of blocks. They player can collect blocks with their hands or with tools and they use them to build new things. The wide array of things that people create in Minecraft is staggering.
So, I thought I would write some commands to export 3D plots in Maple to block structures in Minecraft.
