Flat planets are absolutely horrible. An idea on how to make them round. changed

[Innocent Flower]

Plannets are detestable at the moment. The best way to mine them is to attack them from the underside, away from the evils of gravity and still in your ship. It's incredibly awkward and clumsy to fly within the gravity and it's awefuly depressing to find yourself falling out the bottom of a plannet.



1: make an entity in the middle of the the sphere. this would draw everything in from every angle and rotate them appropriately. (bonus- a stronger pull for bigger plannets, a weaker pull for smaller ones)

2: cover the middle with a small ball of magma or indestructible material. This is to stop you from weird flips when you get close to the center.

3: make corner/angled blocks to smooth the surface of the plannet. and by this i don't mean that the cube blocks should change size closer to the center, but that angled cubes should be placed on the surface to smooth it.

4: (the hardest part) make caves/canyons/ trees work for different angles.

 

[Skyve]

a French flash game (galaxy55) with a similar concept, but it\'s currently being remade/abandoned. What was interesting about it, is how the planets were done.

They had an indestructible core, like in the suggestion above, but the other blocks were not cubical but radial or conic, narrowing towards the center of the planet and rounding slightly. Look at the screenshots on their site to get the idea. The gravity worked like with a sphere.

All other, non-planetary, entities were made of regular cubic blocks like in this game. I wonder if their concept of planets, which is quite realistic and as a bonus avoids the gravity issues, could be applied to StarMade.

 

[Calbiri]

Schema has said he won\'t do 3d gravity on solid planets (maybe on gas giants/stars)
He does plan on putting normal planets back to back, kind of like an Oreo, he also mentioned improving the planar gravity of planets to something more dynamic (ei gradular increase, further range, and 2sided, so no falling \"under\" the planet)

 

[schema]

Believe me I thought very long about this step. Round planets in a cube world are just not really possible without tricks that backfire. The amount of complexity would go up so high to a point were I would have to spend every single resource on planets, and would basically have to design the game around planets.

As Calbiri said, the gravity is one example of stuff getting confusing.

Imagine a 16x16x16 structure out of blocks with central gravity. Even with angled shapes, standing on this would be awkward and confusing for players. a block only has 6 sides, a sphere has infinite.

Warping the vertices with a spherify algorithm would be possible (like the flash game), but the scaling would only work in a small range, since blocks would grow and shrink depending on the distance to the core.

I\'m going for the oreo approach for simplicity, and foremost: gameplay. Also with the oreo system, the planets will be somewhat round without confusing gameplay too much.

 

[DrJaska]

I was about to make a topic about this. Anyways, my idea for it had an indestructible core, too and blocks around it aligned to the surface. But in my idea the blocks aren\'t warped and shrink/grow with the distance to the center. Blocks would be so close that the top sides create a seamless surface. Depending on the distance to the core each layer would have a certain amount of blocks so there are no seams but blocks are not required to be shrunk or warped (The farther away the layer is from the core the more blocks it would have). If the core is big enough it would be barely noticeable (if at all) that the blocks go inside each other at the bottom side. The downside is that blocks would be shifted and not exactly on top of each other. Also there might be problems with building.

 

[Breakfast Buddy]

What about cube planets? When you reach the \"edge\" you just go to the other side.

 

[Brisarge222]

Honestly, it\'d be a lot cooler/trippy to have schema\'s idea. It\'d be nice to have the land somewhat lower in heighth as it got closer to the edge of the planet so you don\'t have exposed rock on the sides, and so its easier to see whats on either side. Or maybe a bit more higher up along the sides so it doesn\'t look like you\'d just fall off, mountains surrounding the outer rim would make it look very cool. We could, maybe.. have a backstory that explains why the planets are all flat. Some ancient alien race could\'ve made a boo boo on the galaxy , and destroyed every single planet in the galaxy with some kind of experimental techology on accident (or on purpose) and then was enslaved by the other races to rebuild every single planet, realizing the project was taking far too long, they redesigned the planets to be flat/oreo shaped. Not the best idea/story. Any other ideas?

 

[schema]

@Breakfast Buddy

The thing with cube planets is that it could be hard to determine where one side starts and where one sides ends.

With am indestructible core cube at a certain size it would be possible I presume, but then the maximum dimension of the planet is determined by only local y axis (you can\'t have wider area on one side, only build upwards).

It is an option, but I prefer the oreo way still.

 

[caingen]

The \'Oreo\' solution of schema\'s is a fairly good comprimise of playability. I would personally like them to be a bit thicker and certainly wider. Right now you get a single person to a planet and it would be good for a planet to sustain a small group of about 5-8 without them completely eating the planet at the first chance. And of course, that idea of an indestructable core is a very nice one, one that might be expanded by asking for planets to have a chance to respawn if completely depleted.

 

[cubes]

The problem here is that when flying in from the wrong angle, the planet looks like a wheel of cheese or a pancake. So why not try to fake a 3D planet?

Say if we take a render of the pancake planet from the top save it as an image, then render it as a billboard so that it always faces the player.

Wrap the image in a 3D sphere. When things collide with the sphere, it\'s teleported onto the planet, movement data is stripped so that the object simply drops down.

When players and ships get close enough to the planet, cut in some \"entering atmosphere\" animation, load the planet and teleport them somewhere within skybox of the planet. Have a minimum teleporting-in radius for players, so when we try to fly to the horizon, the edge of the planet doesn\'t simply drop off into space. Then when damage happens, the planet image has to be updated somehow.

Possibly too resource intensive for the game? There\'s also the problems of drilling through the pancake, how to show player ships and structures on the fake planet, walking off and building structures beyond the edge of the planet.

 

[Frankess]

Schema, what about this solution?



You got planet surface on which you can normaly walk, and you got nice round bottom. This way planets will more resemble real ones and you could still have good simple gravity on them.

 

[Adveksi]

You had to think about gravity what is able to support all directions of planet. I suggest with 6 direction of gravity around it. I don\'t talk about circular force field, but the cube kind. And make it to look more realistic if players would turn with the gravity when walking otherside of planet.

like this: http://randomi.fi/k/?v=multidirectiongr.png

and this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wc5v1caZW0

I don\'t see these feature\'s to hard to make. but its your choice Schema. ps. sorry my bad english ^^

 

[schema]

@Adveksi

The gravity block will support that.

The problem with using that on a cube planet is, that the system would have to determine what gravity to apply automatically. http://randomi.fi/k/?v=multidirectiongr.png imagine you are at the top leftmost position of that planet. Would the gravity be up, or left?

 

[Valido]

Physics in this game is not realistic at all... why are you complaining about something fun and characterful like the planets?

The flat planets are quirky and fun and don\'t need an explanation because in this universe they just are.

Double sided would be even more fun. Maybe making them thicker just so there are more resources would be nice.

I like the round bottom ones, but that does then beg the question why have all the planets been snapped in half.

 

[Breakfast Buddy]

Yeah, after thinking about it, flat planets would be best to fit the world.

Would the sides reflect night and day? as in, when it is night on one side the other is day? seems like righ now only the sky changes, with the ground still being lit.

 

[Calbiri]

even now planets have day/night on each side, it also changes (the atmosphere effect bassically spins centered on the planet) sit around long enough, youll see the sunset, then the sunrise

I rather like the oreo concept, (although that half orb planet pic is a great looking idea too)

with the 2 sided oreo planet, you can sandwich all the good ores near the cream of the oreo, except on the sides, you wont need any mysterious \"unbreakable blocks\"

it would be nice if the planet sprites seen from sectors away always faced the observer, or were sphere shaped (like the atmosphere sprite, but a bit smaller), until you got 1 sector away, then the sprite vanish\'s (with the new soft border) and the planet oreo loads in.

Then theres 1 last conecpt for \"oreo\" planets... you can make the planet spherical, but only using Oreo gravity... this would be like the current 2sided planet idea, except having a large rounded top/bottom hill (leaving rooms for giant crevices, chasms, flatlands, whatnot.... Anyways, thats my pet idea, the spherical shaped, oreo gravity planet with room for more terrain variation :D

 

[Adveksi]

Its simple its like 4 triangle-filled square, and I didin\'t know gravity block can support more than 1 direction of gravity?

here is example: http://randomi.fi/k/?v=answeryourquesti.png

sorry it taked so long to answer, because I was sleeping ^^

 

[Calbiri]

Adveksi, its where 2 gravity feilds meet, theres going to be unwanted interplay (where your lines connect to the planet in that diagram) also, keep in mind that with the planets being minable/buildable you cant simply have a locked in gravity location... imagine if you took a square chunk off the corner of your diagram, then stood inside that missing area, whcih was will gravity pull you??

Now look at it in 3d, imagine the same chuck missing from the corner of a cube, and you stand inside, wich of the 3 gravity feilds will you favor? picking any 1 of the 3 directions will still make you look... wrong, and theres no real way to have the game pick wich 1, so youll get all 3, and you shouldnt blend them like that it causes nasty things to happen, and you generally get stuck to falt surfaces while trying to walk/slide/fall across their surface

 

[Valido]

Fixed planetary centre points to which you are attracted would work too. No boundaries, just an: accelerate to wards block.



Yes that will mean a hollow planet would pull you towards the centre and if you mined half the planet flat you would have a massive drop to the planets core. It would work.

As I\'ve stated though, I like the flat planets.

 

[Adveksi]

bacause gravity only pull ship cores and players. so you can only be on one side of gravity at the time. and second, any of these gravity areas isn\'t one above the other. so like \"you generally get stuck to falt surfaces while trying to walk/slide/fall across their surface\" thinks can\'t happend.