Dodecahedron Planets, easy implimentation.

[ardiel]

I agree with you but even with these proposals, they\'d still be glorified giant asteroids. That\'s why I don\'t care so much because it detracts from other stuff that could be worked on.



With the scale of objects in this game, for planets to rightly be called planets the way I typically think of a planet, they\'d have to span multiple sectors. As long as they\'re fitting in one sector they are still just big space rocks.

 

[Cboehme]

We want Tetrahemedritonabilahedron Planets, Flat planets aren\'t cool!


if anything, make planets more like Discworld, not Tetrahemedritonabilahedrons. Discworld is cool.

 

[doctorwhoknows]

What gravity pulls you then? is the gravity split along a voxel border or does it split a voxel in half? is there a 0G zone between the faces?

 

[Cboehme]

Just make the current planets bigger.

 

[legobeast247]

What if we all build a giant planet on a certain server.. or a private one for that matter.... and then just float around on it

 

[DuncanDonuts]

i say why not have a round planet? for gravity you can have deadzone in the middle say full of something that is hard to destroy (like a real planet has a solid ball of the iron at its center) with a planetblock in the middle that can only be destroyed if its the last block and once destroyed stops the planets gravity. which would be the center of gravity. the gravity doesnt fix you to a block face but just tries to pull you to the center but is stopped because you can\'t go through the blocks unless removed.some of you are probaly thinking that the gravity shift would make it weird, but if the planet is big enough then the shift would hardly be noticed until you get to a smaller radis as you dig down. but you wont be able to go to far because of lava which surounds the the core of hard material. and since you can pass through lava like a liquid it is you wont have to wory about wierd angles. and also planets dont have a real thick crust in real life so you wont be able to dig down far enough to have the angle you stand on the block to get to out of hand. say a plant with the diameter of 1000 and the crust around 50-100 blocks thick and the rest is lava while the hard center is around 50-20 in diameter. that would be 785456 blocks including the lava. the size would make it more realistic and the larger the better. such large planets would be hard to destroy like in real life planets arent very easy to destroy ( even with all our nukes we couldnt blow up Earth, kill all life on it yes but not destroy it). also what i think would be cool was mabye incorporate moons or something. im not a coding guy so i dont know what it would take to do this or how much memory and processing power it would take. but the planet wont move much as it revolves a star so i dont think it would lag much, exept loading the blocks might be a problem. but i think the reward would be worth the effort.

 

[doctorwhoknows]

Voxel issues

 

[ltmauve]

Not sure this was suggested here, but someone mentioned that the planets should loop - you can keep walking in a straight line and not fall off the edge, because you teleport to the other side without realizing it. The problem is when you build stuff on the edge. When you look at it from space you see that it is actually in two pieces. Also, it doesn\'t model a sphere. If you take a rectangle and curl it so that one pair of edges touch each other, you get a cylinder. When you curl the two other edges together, those are at the ends of the clyinder and you get a torus/doughnut. So the doughnut planet can be mapped in rectangular form and not experience any issues with the corners between sections, as opposed to all of the spherical suggestions.

 

[Lecic]

While donut worlds would solve a lot of the problems, what would it be like in the center of the donut? 0G?

 

[GROOV3ST3R]

 

[Raichor]

Untold Universe is a voxel game that seems to have mastered this.

-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq7FQ7rL4fk&t=1m50s

so it is possible.

The game dev explains:


Actually, planets are not spherical. They are planar, and the player will loop on X and Y independently (it\'s more like a torus). The spherical look is a pure graphic trick It also makes the night shorter on one direction than in the other.

From water level, you can dig 126 blocks down and build 100 blocks up. After this, for gameplay reasons, you wont be able to build in low orbit (from +100 to +300).

In space the planet is a real sphere and you can not interact \"directly\" with the ground, as you are really far from it. This is where you will be able to build large spaceships and fly them.

 

[Planr]

Raichor did you read Schema\'s news post about this

 

[SageOfThunder]

Although I think argueing about what planets should be like is silly since this is a game about space ships. I think that the planets we have now. With one solid face of terrain and an underneath more or less barren rock flats is perfectly fine. Ya there isn\'t gravity under the planet. But you can pretend that the south pole is those barren flats :P

 

[Saria]

i honestly dont see the whole problem with cubed planets where gravity shifts when you move from one face to the other. like what\'s hard about that again?

 

[Neostralie]

Discwolrd are cools, but they actualy lack of Elephants and Tortoise.

 

[generalBLT13]

Even if the problem of gravity was solved it would lag the hell out of most computers so I suppose an idea of when you land on a planet you can only see a couple hundred blocks ahead, this should be a fixed amount of range to make sure a player with a better computer doesn\'t have the advantage if sight during a planetary siege. To get to the stage of that you would need to enter the atmosphere. And from there onward it might work.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Can we just let this die now, please? Planets have a heck of a long way to go before anything is done to them, and dynamic gravity will take months with a dedicated team AT LEAST.

 

[plasmafire]

So This shape looks pretty good. it is almost entirely cubic faces, and appears quite round. Each of the cubic faces could actualy be a giant Square piramid with the sides composed of slant blocks. Perhaps to get around the fact that the triangular faces would end up just being voids, you could have them filled with a \"ocean\", which can be swum in.

As for gravity: Each face could have its own direction of gravity. when you are unambiguously (not in a corner, or at the core) in that face, it reorentates your personal gravity to its own direction, sort of like a automaticaly triggered Gravity unit. Untill those conditions are fufiled, your gravity just keeps going in the way it already was (except, of course, if you leave the planet, when it stops completely)

 

[NeonSturm]

I want gravity lifts. Please enable gravity units override planet gravity in certain area! (bigger with bigger gravity-unit grids?)

Gravity should be dependent on how many blocks a planet has (left), with the hard limits at \"jump on a single block\" and \"jump with JUMP_VELOCITY into space\"

You could need a ring of gravity blocks to set x/z size of that area and y will define the strength



On a double-disk, the center of a planet can have a lot of lava - if you take a fluid block (lava, water, etc) and

1. some fluid on top will fall down
2. a neighbour of a moved block looks on top of it and eventually move that fluid block to it\'s free side (or make place for it)

You can never get a hole without taking every fluid. And if you took every fluid, weird gravity shall happen and doom you!

Actually you may use the middle (everything from a flat layer to the next planet-block) as a Zero-G hangar.



I like the floating-island idea too. Everything that makes the bottom of a planet more interesting.





For collision handling with ships, I suggest that the closer the ship is to the planet-size, the less it is affected by gravity. Instead, planets even push bigger ships away due to their incompatible magnet field or some LAG-quantum-rule.

Or take the lowest/highest x/y/z block in ship-size/16^3m and create a wireframe around these coordinates for easier collision calculations.

 

[Miow22]

The biggest problem is gravity right?

...Not all planets have gravity, why do you need it?