Building 2D and 3D Structures - Adventures in Minecraft - page 197

DIGGING INTO THE CODE
The points of the polygon's face are created using minecraft.Vec3(x, y,
z) . The minecraft.Vec3() is the Minecraft API's way of holding a set of
coordinates (x, y, z) together. Vec3 is short for 3D vector.
The points of the face are added to the points list using append() ; this adds a
new item to the end of a list.
CHALLENGE
What other shapes can you make using drawFace() ? How about a five-sided
shape such as a pentagon?
Pyramids
Find a picture of a pyramid and take a good look at it. What do you notice? What shape
are its sides? What do all the sides have in common? How many sides does it have?
As you probably know, each side of a pyramid (except the base) is always a triangle. The
pyramids in Egypt had four sides (or five if you include the base), but they can have any
number of sides from three upward. Did you also notice that the base of any pyramid
will fit exactly into a circle! Take a look at Figure 7-9 to see what I mean.
You are now going to create a program, which by using the drawFace() and find-
PointOnCircle() functions, will make any size of pyramid, of any height, with any
number of sides:
1. First, open IDLE and create a new file. Save the file as MinecraftPyramids.
py in the MyAdventures folder.
2. Import the minecraft , block , minecraftstuff and math modules by typ-
ing:
import mcpi.minecraft as minecraft
import mcpi.block as block
import mcpi.minecraftstuff as minecraftstuff
import math