Girls can and should become princes, and you could've and should've made this thread. Amazing work, I look forward to seeing the project progress.

Seriously Flah, thanks for posting this thread. This project was getting a little lost in the Minecraft thread, and it deserves more attention. Fantastic work!

I wonder if there are other games we could do this in?




....oh god, I did not just think of Dwarf Fortress. I so didn't. I will not do that.

So... What is this... thing?

This is Tower Elevator Mk VI.

Mk I didn't move at all. Mk II did move but it didn't move back. Mk III was flawed from the concept stage and should simply be stricken from the record. Mk IV did move, didn't move back, and when I tried to use it again, stopped moving entirely. (Then that castle burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp)

It's at this point that I decided to look up ways to build one in Minecraft and came across this video. Using this as a template, I built Mk V... only to discover that it didn't work. However the principle behind it was still good. The end result was Mk VI, what you see above. And I'll be damned if it doesn't work as fast as advertised. My final alternative, if this didn't work, was to use a minecart. And now I have the mental image of stoic Saionji or dignified Akio sitting in a little metal box, hands gripping the rim, face set in a serious expression as they head to a Student Council meeting or the planetarium. Totally worth it.

It doesn't look very pretty right now. But it will once I place some walls in front of the mechanism. The parts that are visible, no matter what, will be dealt with by modifying the texture of the Piston to look like the quartz block. Since I plan to make all of the working parts as invisible as possible, for the sake of aesthetics, this won't cause too much trouble. It's kind of sad that it's not as large as I want it to be, but that's a limitation of what I'm working with.

Now, the weirdness comes in: If you look at the opening shot of Utena walking through the entrance hall of the school in the first episode, you'll notice that we've basically got empty space going right down the middle of the main atrium. So where in the blue blazes do you find the elevator that opens to the centre of the Student Council chamber? This is the point where I realize that I'm going to have to cheat a little bit. I'll begin with elevators on the north and south sides (remember that the hall goes east to west). The Student Council elevator (let's say the north one) will go to just above the ceiling of the atrium where we will reach a hallway. The hall will lead to a second elevator, along the east side, which goes up the rest of the way. The southern elevator will go up to a few levels above that, again go to a hallway leading to the east, and then up farther to the apartments. On the other end will be yet another elevator that goes to the planetarium.

And, because I like to punish myself, I'm going to see if I can figure out a mechanism that makes the windows all around the planetarium shut themselves automatically (and hopefully open back up later). I have a few ideas in my head. We'll see whether any of them actually work (probably not).

Nice contraptions!!  Elevators are so frustrating in Minecraft.  No matter how good you are with redstone, the mechanisms take up a ton of space, and God save you if you want it to connect more than two floors.  Brilliant idea to retexture the pistons to look like quartz!  But nonetheless, it looks like a challenge to fit the elevator into your tower and still have room for, uh, the tower!

(As an aside, I would love to see a proper elevator in vanilla Minecraft.  It would be tricky to code, but it shouldn't be too too hard.  It could basically be a vertical minecart.  Meanwhile, I understand there are mods that add them -- though I haven't done a thorough review of the literature   You might consider it if all those redstone elevators become too frustrating.  Modding Minecraft is not too hard.)

I don't quite get the window!  I can think of a few ways to achieve that effect, but you aren't using any of them   It looks pretty magical -- what happened to the glass??  Are your pistons already reskinned in those pictures?, because I can't figure out where you're keeping the piston equipment of the size you'd need to interchange that glass with quartz!  And I love your story about Akio in the morning.  Also hilarious: creeper regresses to leaf.  Yes.  Now the rustling-leaves sound they make when they die makes perfect sense.

How sad that Minecraft has such beautiful sunsets, but no lengthening shadows to be used in shadow plays. 

Last edited by satyreyes (11-26-2013 12:02:15 AM)

As promised, the backside of the window mechanism.

Here it is with windows open...



...and with windows closed...



So, you can see that, for each level of the aperture, you need one piston above and one below. The pistons do take up a lot of vertical space, no matter how you arrange it, but that's not an issue here since I have the entire height of the tower in which to fit them. Less of a problem is the width. All I need to do to make that work is add another column of pistons and extend the redstone to control them. Quick and easy.

Next, here's the version of the Rose Gate that I'll be using (plus or minus a few decorative blocks here and there):



The redstone is now fully hidden behind the wall which turns out to give some depth to the whole thing. A happy little accident.

Finally, the basic layout of the tower, as done in Paint:



The blue circle is the base of the tower. The orange circle is the main spire. Those green squares represent where I'm putting the elevator mechanism. Since I plan on making the atrium at the bottom roughly the same diameter as the central tower, I've recently realized that there is a minor hiccup in my design. Or maybe it's another happy accident, depending on how I get the issue resolved. Basically... Where am I going to put the elevators in the atrium? Again, I have some ideas in my head which might prove to make things a little bit more elegant than what I originally intended.

In my mind, the size of the base is roughly equivalent to the distance between the Middle School and Elementary classroom buildings. I'm still trying to fudge out the layout of the classrooms themselves in Paint, which I'm slowly getting closer to looking right. Once I get a decent arrangement for them, I'll post that up as well. That arrangement is necessary so that I can judge the approximate size of the completed building.

So, there's my progress report to date. When I'm happy with the stairs into the campus, I'll put up a screenshot of that as well.

Ohhh, now I see how you did the windows!  I really admire your creativity with redstone   That's wonderfully authentic, and definitely the best possible way to solve the problem on a small scale.  But there's one thing you need to remember about scaling this design up, and that's that a piston can push a maximum of twelve blocks.  To close this three-high window, your bottom three pistons are already each pushing nine blocks.  If the window were four high, and you added an extra quartz block and an extra piston on top and bottom, you would be capped out at twelve blocks.  So I don't know if you can solve the problem this way if you want the windows to be more than four blocks high.

A solution that might scale better would be to use sticky pistons concealed to the left and/or right of the window on the interior side, stuck to quartz, ready to extend and conceal the window when powered.  This would not look as authentic as what you've got, which actually does look like the window is sliding shut; my solution would look more like a series of shutters are being closed from the sides, which is not what we see in the show.  But I think you could make it as big as you wanted in principle.  I'm sorry to be all fault-findy, because this, again, is beautiful!

Snow wrote:

Hmmm now I'm probably wrong (I'm trying to figure it out from the screencaps), but it appears likely that the elevators are positioned in a central hub,  a solid, narrower  pillar in the center of the floor plan, and both the atrium and the living spaces upstairs 'wrap' around it. Insanely high skyscrapers are built in a similar way, irl.

I could be wrong, but I don't think the tower's elevator is in the center of the floor plan.  The planetarium has got to be damn near the center of the upper chamber, right?  And when Utena visits that room for the first time, she exits the elevator some distance from the planetarium, and Akio and Kanae are making out on the sofa behind it.  So either the tower is even bigger than I thought -- big enough to have a central elevator, then an enormous planetarium, then a lounge suite -- or the elevator is set into a side of the tower.  This is also consistent with the elevator opening directly onto the Student Council balcony.  (In which case, the side it's set into is the west side, facing the forest.)

Last edited by satyreyes (11-26-2013 01:46:45 PM)

Oh bollocks... I wish I knew that pistons had that kind of limitation. I had such high hopes for the design.

As for the sticky pistons, now I'm having trouble visualizing what you're trying to describe. If you're saying what you think you are, I'll have to do some placement to see if it might work. Now, based on artwork, I've extrapolated that there are between 14 and 16 windows, total, around the planetarium. A back of the envelope calculation tells me that I would therefore have roughly six blocks per window. Again, artwork shows me that the windows are twice as wide as the columns between them. So I'd have four-block-wide windows between two-block-wide columns. That wouldn't give me a lot of space in which to fit the mechanism, let alone the redstone that would control it.

Of course, even while I'm picking the idea apart, my brain is chugging along, desperately trying to produce something that will make it work (though it probably won't). I may have to give up on that little pipe dream if there's no way to do it.

I always assumed that the apartments and the planetarium are on two separate levels of the tower, with the planetarium itself taking up the entire upper chamber. Also, as I mentioned in the other Minecraft thread, it's a good guess that the planetarium and the dueling arena are the same size, considering the big reveal in the last two episodes. That, of course, raises the question of how the duelists were transported from the forest to the tower without them noticing. But that's for a different thread (though it might have something to do with Rohypnol).

We see very little of the living quarters on the level below. All we really see are the kitchen and the area behind the blinds where Utena and Anthy sleep. Judging by the curvature of the wall in the screenshots, that's only half of the space, with the rest of it on the other side of the wall behind the kitchen. Of course, despite all that, the layout of this level boggles the mind. Perhaps Akio and Anthy are actually Elder Gods, capable of ignoring Euclidean geometry whenever it inconveniences them. That would also explain their youthful appearance, despite their advanced age.

But that's beside the point. The point is that the shape of the living quarters is so ambiguous that you can pretty much arrange it any way you like and it would still be true to the artwork. That's why I've chosen to set up the elevator on one end of the apartments and stairs on the other.

The elevator I also figured was located along one side of the tower (the east side, so that it opens up to the Student Council balcony which faces west). The elevator design that I'm using can only link two separate floors. That's why I have the bottom elevators located on the north and south sides of the tower while the second set are located on the east side. It gives it some manner of symmetry while still giving the right end result. Also note that the elevator door would face toward the centre of the tower. Otherwise it would look very silly stepping out and smacking your face against a wall. Although... (the hamster wheel inside my skull is getting a good workout tonight)

I gotta stop writing about this or I won't be able to get any sleep at all tonight. And I already had a dream last night where I'm placing Minecraft blocks. And that just ain't right.

Anyhoo, I've got some more planning ahead of me. If nothing else, this discussion has given me a few half-formed ideas that I can play with at some point.

Sweet monkey nuggets!

I admit, I've never actually used command blocks before, so this is new to me. But I like! I like very much! True, I'll have to change some more textures but that's perfectly acceptable. I'll give it a shot later today after work. And, going up or going down doesn't really matter much to me. So it's all cool.

In the meantime, here are a couple screenshots of the stairs going to the campus, now that I've got the walls right (I had to do something to get my mind off the window problem):

From the bottom:


And from the top:


Remember when I mentioned changing the wood texture to white so that the Rose Garden would have a white picket fence? That will also give a bonus that we'll have an equivalent of the white scrollwork pattern like we see here. I think I'm going to have to make the gate a little bit higher though. Keep tweaking as I go, I suppose.

There will, of course, be trees on either side of the walkway by the time I'm done.

And one more shot from underneath:


I'm not going to fill in the inside of the hill. Not only would that be insane but it feels kind of appropriate that the campus would have a hollow foundation.

zevrem wrote:

My god... I just realized the absurdity of being part of this fandom. Ohtori Academy is meant to be a PRISON, and here we are, recreating it in our FANTASIES.

No offense. :'(

But it's a really pretty prison, you have to admit...

I see nothing wrong with celebrating a work of art and enjoying the work and care that the creators, and our fellow forum members, put into (re)creating it.

Besides, absurdity is the spice of life! (Or was that variety now?)

258,561 SOLD ( $8,258,545 )

We know, Flah.  Rock on. 

Flah wrote:

As I look through concept art and screenshots of the show, trying to wrap my mind around the layout of the school, my mind still boggles at the obscenely high ceilings in the place. How in the world was Utena able to afford to go to a place like this? I'm not 100% sure how the Japanese deal with school fees, but I can't imagine the higher class establishments not having some manner of extra charges on top of what a standard school would have. Her parents must have left her with one hell of an inheritance.

You know, I don't think we've ever had a thread specifically about how various characters manage to go to Ohtori, even though I remember having at least three in-person conversations about it at conventions and with Gio and Yasha.  We have a thread about social class, but I don't think we've talked about whether Utena is a trust-fund kid or is on scholarship or what.  Akio wants her at the school, of course, so my guess would be that he's giving her a free ride () under the guise of a sports scholarship, but that's speculation.  And speculation that belongs in a different thread at that.

The timing circuit could be tricky.  There are lots of different ways to make clocks in Minecraft, and some of them give you finer control than others.  The wonderful standby of attaching two hoppers to each other is not so wonderful if you need to allow several ticks between firings.  Good luck, and if you need a hand, just say the word!