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Floating through the universe in a region of spacetime in which Physics works mostly because people really, really, really, want it to work, in which a sun is only a couple of miles across, and the moon is burnt on one side (and has dragons on it because moon dragons), there exists a strange world of adventure that sits upon four elephants and a turtle. The turtle swims, and is supported by the medium in which the turtle swims. That is what turtles are for.
This is my project to build the Discworld, inspired mostly because the worlds we have are already discworlds (sadly, Starmade is deficient in Chelonium and Elephantigen), so I'll be using them as the basic guideline for how big the world should be at minimum
I think they're a bit small to be the Disc itself, but it should be plausible to create something maybe 4 times bigger that contains at least 3 kinds of 'continent' (which I'll theme as "vaguely early arcanopunk industrial revolution Victorian London aka Ankh-Morpork" "vaguely Arabic-fantasy desert of massiveness aka Klatch" and "Welsh-Scottish farming countryside that is small from above, but has a lot of land crumpled up in steep mountains aka Lancre"), all surrounding a central mountain, Cori Celesti, the mountain of the gods.
The disk itself shouldn't actually be that hard to make, to be honest, the main issue I've been trying to grapple with is working out how big it all should be before I get down to building at home. Also, the sheer massiveness of this structure will probably mean that it will murder my compuiter to render the entire Disc if I do anything more than the three central areas mentioned above.
So.
1. CHELONIUS GALACTICUS
Based on the d20 wiki here: http://d20npcs.wikia.com/wiki/A'tuin_the_Star_Turtle the Great A'Tuin is 10,000 miles across, and for the most part, square on the horizontal plane. Assuming we take the standard voxel game assumption that 1 block=1m, then this means a collossal 16,093,440 block width and depth.
Hoo boy. This is possibly bigger than I envisaged. However, the actual structure of the Great A'Tuin is fairly simple, as it is little more than a large engine, surrounded by a turtle shaped green, brown, and black hull of both strong and regular variants, with a cockpit in it's head that allows us to see out of its glass eyes while flying it, and a massive salvage beam cluster in its throat so it can eat asteroids likely to hurt the Disc.
The engine thrusters itself actually can be low in number: constellations on the disc, although changing, are still constant enough for astrology to be fairly static beyond the occasional flips to eat asteroids causing major astrological upheaval.
I'll use the common snapping turtle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_snapping_turtle as the model to base the A'Tuin on, since, although the official Discworld art is great, I'd rather have a lot of different reference models for the turtle that show it and others of its species from different angles.
2. But Technicolour Elephants, Is Really Too Much For Me!
Right. Our Pachydermis Galactus. They need to be big enough they are massive, but small enough that four can balance on our turtle's back.
Let's assume that each elephant is on top of a joint of the turtle's legs under the shell they stand on, as that seems plausible to me as a structural point they could stand for eons on. This means they are fairly equidistant from each other.
For simplicity's sakes, one elephant will be cocking a leg and have a lava-covered sphere nearby it, thus preventing the need for day-night cycles on the Disc, as it's currently 'night', as the sun is under the Disc, to be precise almost hitting an elephant.
Elephants will be structures of Grey Hull with White Hull wrinkles and glass eyes with cockpits in the head again, because it is awesome to see from the eyes of such a creature. I'm thinking two of the elephants will be bulls, two will be female ones without the tusks and whatnot male characteristics, thus ensuring that there's another gender issue going on for the Disc citizens to consider: What happens when the elephants have musk.
The only issue I see is scaling appropriately to the Turtle. There's actually very little information on the four elephants except for the fact that they are actually elephants, and the sun occasionally gets close to them, and presumably the moon.
They're each much less than quarter the diameter of the Turtle, so I'm going to guesstimate that they're 1/5th of the turtle's diameter each, which gives a bit of space between them.
... In theory. Going to need to prototype some elephant designs before doing anything to work out how the widest diameter's gonna look.
3. Discworlds Are Not Floppy Disks, But Rocky Discs
I'm going to have the Discworld 4 times bigger than a standard Stamade world. Individual continents can be decided later, and I'm not entirely sure what to do inside the rocky inner itself, other than do a Minecraft and have an ore distribution, dwarven mines, ancient dungeons, etc. The Disc will be thinner on the edges than towards the centre, which has Cori Celesti on top of it like a giant wang.
I'm also not sure whether to do a rimfall
Individual regions can be easily built and can be planned later, as the superstructure of the Turtle, Disc foundations, and the Elephants is the important aspects of this build.
I'll have some hard calculations, some 3d block-editor program on iPad modelling of certain smaller aspects of this build later and some diagrams of the build later on this week, and I guess construction will start after Christmas if I can get the plans concrete enough that I know what I'm doing.
20:27, 26/09/13
Made a quick mockup in Paint.Net of the basic structure of the Great A'Tuin to use as a reference for the scaling of turtle to elephant without having either Turtle or Elephants be observable from the Disc unless you live nearby the edge, and have it be an important part of your life as a result.
15:36 29/09/2013
Small edit to my notes... It doesn't HAVE to be 1:1 scale. I am a moron who did not think of the fact that a 16,000,000 wide structure might be a teensy bit laggy.
Disc is to have a 5,000 diameter, maybe. This is much more feasible, and still is massive. Need to test some structures though to see what runs suitably well in multiplayer but is still big before I get into the nitty gritty of the Galactic Pentate of Elephants and Turtle and the Disc's surface...
Gonna be testing various sizes of one-block thick discs tonight on a server to get a sense of what is feasible.
01/10/2013 10:01
Okay so apparently my computer starts lagging in singleplayer when we hit the 1000 block diameters, and gets . Huh. I kind of figured planets were bigger than that. Maybe player-made stuff takes more resources to render than game-generated stuff? Or some single player server shenanigans is going on. Or, more likely to my mind, it's because I was on the edge of two sectors when I was doing all this.
Derp. Next time, actually think about where you are when you are testing things, me!
Hmm. I think I'll have a disc be 1,000 blocks diameter anyhow, and since Crusade (who builds awesome ships) told me the sectors are 2600 wide, that still gives me 1600 blocks extra in length and width for the turtle to poke her head and flippers out a bit. Plenty of room, and if I'm a bit conservative with the scale, then I can have it actually be a ship people can play in without much lag.
02/10/2013 11:02
So, I've been thinking. The Core's placement is kind of important. If the Turtle docks on anything, it will have its bottom be the side closest to the Core. So... The Core's going to be on the bottom of the belly. In theory, this should mean that it lands upright on objects... And not mountain-side as my previous idea had, of the peak of Cori Celesti being where the Core is.
There is a complicated issue here though, in that it'll make more sense to start building the Disc first, then the elephants, and then the turtle, from a scaling point of view, but since the turtle is going to be where the Core and the essential systems first...
I'm going to have to build the Turtle first.
But that's okay. We can work out the scale involved. So...
Our Disc is currently estimated to be 1,000 blocks diameter.
The Turtle's shell (flippers and head are a secondary concern to worry about later, to be honest) is to be a flattened oval with an organic look, so its width will be about 1,000, mostly matching the Disc in width.
Right. So, skim reading this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_turtle (yes it's a different kind of turtle, but it was the first kind I found with width and length measurements) a turtle of the same general structure more or less is 7.9cm long, 2.3cm wide. That seems like a fair enough dimension ratio for the turtle, so how long should it be?
7.9 is to 2.3 what x is to 1000
So, 7.9*x=2.3*1000
(I think. It has been a little while since I've worked out anything like this)
So, x=(2.3*1000)/7.9
x=2300/7.9=291.13
So the length of our turtle is... 291.13
... Wait. That seems wrong for the turtle to be wider than it is long, considering turtles are longer than they are wide.
... I've done something wrong.
But that's easy enough to solve. Flip them around!
So, 291 blocks wide, 1000 blocks long. That was easy. 291 roughly equals a third of 1000 blocks anyhow, so that seems plausible as a width... ... Wait a second, 291 seems strangely short though, considering there's goddamn elephants on this goddamn turtle. Either Bloody Stupid Johnson was the Creator of the Turtle, or I am terrible at maths.
Maybe it'll be easiest if the width=0.5 length. That means 500*1000 block area for four elephants to be built on, and it's obvious the turtle is longer than it is wide but still is pretty wide.
I might regret this scale later, but this is the plan I'm going with for now. I think I'm ready to build a turtle, starting tonight. ... Why can I hear a doom chorus in the back of my mind?
Additional edit to this: that d20 link above actually states its reach as 6,666, which we can say is its effective width.
Since we adopted the 10,000 into a 1,000, we're essentially working at a 1:10 scale to the one mentioned in that wiki, so there's no reason why we cannot have the Turtle be 666 blocks wide. Bigger than half, less obviously half the size, and seems plausible. And, we have the classical number of the beast in there, and it is a beast, therefore, that's its number. QED.
Also, this link is AMAZINGLY useful for projects requiring knowledge of the scale of things in the game like sectors, how big a system is, how big a planet's diameter typically is, and I recommend all of you use it if you intend to build anything like a Discworld. http://star-made.org/content/graphical-size-comparison#comment-60222
Considerations I'm still planning:
1. Would it be rad if the Disc itself was a turret/docked ship, so it can rotate around the central axis of the Turtle?
2. Could it be feasible to exploit turret mechanics and how things attach to create a slowly rotating sun around the Disc?
3. Moon. What am I going to build the slightly burnt moon of? Also, moon dragons.
4. How thick do we want the disc to be, and what do we want inside it? Simple rocky terrain or hull or what
5. Ankh Morpork: The city of Ankh Morpork, due to the scale, will be a densely packed city of grey hull and a river. Might not actually be something one can walk through due to the small scale for V1 of the Discworld. If this one works out, then the V2 will be bigger and more habitable.
6. Klatch: A desert of sand. Temples, blocky houses, etc. Rather easy, actually, in a voxel system.
7. Lancre: Very steep mountains smaller than Cori Celesti. Gnarly. Grassy and rocky though, and little to no habitable land when seen from above, with villages being of wood and thatch in valleys
8. Oceans: Ocean floor is simple enough, just sand, dirt and whatever I can get for seaweed and animals if there's room. The water's going to be a pain to place down, but the non-expanding nature of Starmade water means that one can concievably build permanent waves on the water. Also, I want to make a Rimfall, the water that leaves the Disc then evaporates and becomes rain on the Disc (partially assisted by magic), so all around the Disc there's a waterfall.
9. Cori Celesti. I'm going to need to rewatch the Hercules Cartoon episode where he climbs up to Morpheus' cave-home to get the blanket of sleep. ... Disney was weird. But, that was Mount Olympus, and thus is a good thing to base on. Possibly a game-table at the top of the mountain?
04/10/2013 08:49
didn't have time to make a post last night, so here's my log of what happened.
TURTLES ARE HARD.
Decided to stick the core in the center of the Turtle, then build out from there.
It's going to take a long time until I'm done. The plan is for the turtle to be the engines and power systems, and no empty gaps, thus making it run a bit easier on people's computers. Might fill up any space left over in it with power tanks.
12:43 08.10.2013
So it turns out Turtles aren't just flat. Who knew?
Drawing out some stuff in Paint whilst at work to try and work out how the shell should curve, and looking up some stuff online to get an idea of how the shell should be patterned.
I'll use SMEDIT to shift the location of the Core at a later date, for now... I've got nothing to show except a bit of grey hull as a scaffold and a core.
This is my project to build the Discworld, inspired mostly because the worlds we have are already discworlds (sadly, Starmade is deficient in Chelonium and Elephantigen), so I'll be using them as the basic guideline for how big the world should be at minimum
I think they're a bit small to be the Disc itself, but it should be plausible to create something maybe 4 times bigger that contains at least 3 kinds of 'continent' (which I'll theme as "vaguely early arcanopunk industrial revolution Victorian London aka Ankh-Morpork" "vaguely Arabic-fantasy desert of massiveness aka Klatch" and "Welsh-Scottish farming countryside that is small from above, but has a lot of land crumpled up in steep mountains aka Lancre"), all surrounding a central mountain, Cori Celesti, the mountain of the gods.
The disk itself shouldn't actually be that hard to make, to be honest, the main issue I've been trying to grapple with is working out how big it all should be before I get down to building at home. Also, the sheer massiveness of this structure will probably mean that it will murder my compuiter to render the entire Disc if I do anything more than the three central areas mentioned above.
So.
1. CHELONIUS GALACTICUS
Based on the d20 wiki here: http://d20npcs.wikia.com/wiki/A'tuin_the_Star_Turtle the Great A'Tuin is 10,000 miles across, and for the most part, square on the horizontal plane. Assuming we take the standard voxel game assumption that 1 block=1m, then this means a collossal 16,093,440 block width and depth.
Hoo boy. This is possibly bigger than I envisaged. However, the actual structure of the Great A'Tuin is fairly simple, as it is little more than a large engine, surrounded by a turtle shaped green, brown, and black hull of both strong and regular variants, with a cockpit in it's head that allows us to see out of its glass eyes while flying it, and a massive salvage beam cluster in its throat so it can eat asteroids likely to hurt the Disc.
The engine thrusters itself actually can be low in number: constellations on the disc, although changing, are still constant enough for astrology to be fairly static beyond the occasional flips to eat asteroids causing major astrological upheaval.
I'll use the common snapping turtle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_snapping_turtle as the model to base the A'Tuin on, since, although the official Discworld art is great, I'd rather have a lot of different reference models for the turtle that show it and others of its species from different angles.
2. But Technicolour Elephants, Is Really Too Much For Me!
Right. Our Pachydermis Galactus. They need to be big enough they are massive, but small enough that four can balance on our turtle's back.
Let's assume that each elephant is on top of a joint of the turtle's legs under the shell they stand on, as that seems plausible to me as a structural point they could stand for eons on. This means they are fairly equidistant from each other.
For simplicity's sakes, one elephant will be cocking a leg and have a lava-covered sphere nearby it, thus preventing the need for day-night cycles on the Disc, as it's currently 'night', as the sun is under the Disc, to be precise almost hitting an elephant.
Elephants will be structures of Grey Hull with White Hull wrinkles and glass eyes with cockpits in the head again, because it is awesome to see from the eyes of such a creature. I'm thinking two of the elephants will be bulls, two will be female ones without the tusks and whatnot male characteristics, thus ensuring that there's another gender issue going on for the Disc citizens to consider: What happens when the elephants have musk.
The only issue I see is scaling appropriately to the Turtle. There's actually very little information on the four elephants except for the fact that they are actually elephants, and the sun occasionally gets close to them, and presumably the moon.
They're each much less than quarter the diameter of the Turtle, so I'm going to guesstimate that they're 1/5th of the turtle's diameter each, which gives a bit of space between them.
... In theory. Going to need to prototype some elephant designs before doing anything to work out how the widest diameter's gonna look.
3. Discworlds Are Not Floppy Disks, But Rocky Discs
I'm going to have the Discworld 4 times bigger than a standard Stamade world. Individual continents can be decided later, and I'm not entirely sure what to do inside the rocky inner itself, other than do a Minecraft and have an ore distribution, dwarven mines, ancient dungeons, etc. The Disc will be thinner on the edges than towards the centre, which has Cori Celesti on top of it like a giant wang.
I'm also not sure whether to do a rimfall
Individual regions can be easily built and can be planned later, as the superstructure of the Turtle, Disc foundations, and the Elephants is the important aspects of this build.
I'll have some hard calculations, some 3d block-editor program on iPad modelling of certain smaller aspects of this build later and some diagrams of the build later on this week, and I guess construction will start after Christmas if I can get the plans concrete enough that I know what I'm doing.
20:27, 26/09/13
Made a quick mockup in Paint.Net of the basic structure of the Great A'Tuin to use as a reference for the scaling of turtle to elephant without having either Turtle or Elephants be observable from the Disc unless you live nearby the edge, and have it be an important part of your life as a result.
15:36 29/09/2013
Small edit to my notes... It doesn't HAVE to be 1:1 scale. I am a moron who did not think of the fact that a 16,000,000 wide structure might be a teensy bit laggy.
Disc is to have a 5,000 diameter, maybe. This is much more feasible, and still is massive. Need to test some structures though to see what runs suitably well in multiplayer but is still big before I get into the nitty gritty of the Galactic Pentate of Elephants and Turtle and the Disc's surface...
Gonna be testing various sizes of one-block thick discs tonight on a server to get a sense of what is feasible.
01/10/2013 10:01
Okay so apparently my computer starts lagging in singleplayer when we hit the 1000 block diameters, and gets . Huh. I kind of figured planets were bigger than that. Maybe player-made stuff takes more resources to render than game-generated stuff? Or some single player server shenanigans is going on. Or, more likely to my mind, it's because I was on the edge of two sectors when I was doing all this.
Derp. Next time, actually think about where you are when you are testing things, me!
Hmm. I think I'll have a disc be 1,000 blocks diameter anyhow, and since Crusade (who builds awesome ships) told me the sectors are 2600 wide, that still gives me 1600 blocks extra in length and width for the turtle to poke her head and flippers out a bit. Plenty of room, and if I'm a bit conservative with the scale, then I can have it actually be a ship people can play in without much lag.
02/10/2013 11:02
So, I've been thinking. The Core's placement is kind of important. If the Turtle docks on anything, it will have its bottom be the side closest to the Core. So... The Core's going to be on the bottom of the belly. In theory, this should mean that it lands upright on objects... And not mountain-side as my previous idea had, of the peak of Cori Celesti being where the Core is.
There is a complicated issue here though, in that it'll make more sense to start building the Disc first, then the elephants, and then the turtle, from a scaling point of view, but since the turtle is going to be where the Core and the essential systems first...
I'm going to have to build the Turtle first.
But that's okay. We can work out the scale involved. So...
Our Disc is currently estimated to be 1,000 blocks diameter.
The Turtle's shell (flippers and head are a secondary concern to worry about later, to be honest) is to be a flattened oval with an organic look, so its width will be about 1,000, mostly matching the Disc in width.
Right. So, skim reading this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_turtle (yes it's a different kind of turtle, but it was the first kind I found with width and length measurements) a turtle of the same general structure more or less is 7.9cm long, 2.3cm wide. That seems like a fair enough dimension ratio for the turtle, so how long should it be?
7.9 is to 2.3 what x is to 1000
So, 7.9*x=2.3*1000
(I think. It has been a little while since I've worked out anything like this)
So, x=(2.3*1000)/7.9
x=2300/7.9=291.13
So the length of our turtle is... 291.13
... Wait. That seems wrong for the turtle to be wider than it is long, considering turtles are longer than they are wide.
... I've done something wrong.
But that's easy enough to solve. Flip them around!
So, 291 blocks wide, 1000 blocks long. That was easy. 291 roughly equals a third of 1000 blocks anyhow, so that seems plausible as a width... ... Wait a second, 291 seems strangely short though, considering there's goddamn elephants on this goddamn turtle. Either Bloody Stupid Johnson was the Creator of the Turtle, or I am terrible at maths.
Maybe it'll be easiest if the width=0.5 length. That means 500*1000 block area for four elephants to be built on, and it's obvious the turtle is longer than it is wide but still is pretty wide.
I might regret this scale later, but this is the plan I'm going with for now. I think I'm ready to build a turtle, starting tonight. ... Why can I hear a doom chorus in the back of my mind?
Additional edit to this: that d20 link above actually states its reach as 6,666, which we can say is its effective width.
Since we adopted the 10,000 into a 1,000, we're essentially working at a 1:10 scale to the one mentioned in that wiki, so there's no reason why we cannot have the Turtle be 666 blocks wide. Bigger than half, less obviously half the size, and seems plausible. And, we have the classical number of the beast in there, and it is a beast, therefore, that's its number. QED.
Also, this link is AMAZINGLY useful for projects requiring knowledge of the scale of things in the game like sectors, how big a system is, how big a planet's diameter typically is, and I recommend all of you use it if you intend to build anything like a Discworld. http://star-made.org/content/graphical-size-comparison#comment-60222
Considerations I'm still planning:
1. Would it be rad if the Disc itself was a turret/docked ship, so it can rotate around the central axis of the Turtle?
2. Could it be feasible to exploit turret mechanics and how things attach to create a slowly rotating sun around the Disc?
3. Moon. What am I going to build the slightly burnt moon of? Also, moon dragons.
4. How thick do we want the disc to be, and what do we want inside it? Simple rocky terrain or hull or what
5. Ankh Morpork: The city of Ankh Morpork, due to the scale, will be a densely packed city of grey hull and a river. Might not actually be something one can walk through due to the small scale for V1 of the Discworld. If this one works out, then the V2 will be bigger and more habitable.
6. Klatch: A desert of sand. Temples, blocky houses, etc. Rather easy, actually, in a voxel system.
7. Lancre: Very steep mountains smaller than Cori Celesti. Gnarly. Grassy and rocky though, and little to no habitable land when seen from above, with villages being of wood and thatch in valleys
8. Oceans: Ocean floor is simple enough, just sand, dirt and whatever I can get for seaweed and animals if there's room. The water's going to be a pain to place down, but the non-expanding nature of Starmade water means that one can concievably build permanent waves on the water. Also, I want to make a Rimfall, the water that leaves the Disc then evaporates and becomes rain on the Disc (partially assisted by magic), so all around the Disc there's a waterfall.
9. Cori Celesti. I'm going to need to rewatch the Hercules Cartoon episode where he climbs up to Morpheus' cave-home to get the blanket of sleep. ... Disney was weird. But, that was Mount Olympus, and thus is a good thing to base on. Possibly a game-table at the top of the mountain?
04/10/2013 08:49
didn't have time to make a post last night, so here's my log of what happened.
TURTLES ARE HARD.
Decided to stick the core in the center of the Turtle, then build out from there.
It's going to take a long time until I'm done. The plan is for the turtle to be the engines and power systems, and no empty gaps, thus making it run a bit easier on people's computers. Might fill up any space left over in it with power tanks.
12:43 08.10.2013
So it turns out Turtles aren't just flat. Who knew?
Drawing out some stuff in Paint whilst at work to try and work out how the shell should curve, and looking up some stuff online to get an idea of how the shell should be patterned.
I'll use SMEDIT to shift the location of the Core at a later date, for now... I've got nothing to show except a bit of grey hull as a scaffold and a core.
