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

[MrNo]

Firstly, let me start out by saying that I think oreo planets are fine. We already have rediculous gravity, and can you honestly say it isn\'t fun to fall off a planet? I\'d like to see this game be as rediculously unreal as MC, and its various clones. I mean, really, it\'s a universe where everything is made of cubes AND it\'s the future. Didn\'t we throw almost all realism out the window when this game was first created?



Now: Currently, as I understand it, planets are rendered as an image based on planet type until you get some distance from it. At that point, the game starts actually rendered as blocks. So... why are you all talking about load screens? Why not just use this same method?

 

[Matthmatt]

Oreo planets should be implemented because they are the best shape that Starmade can handle. If you jump \"off\" the planet, gravity should flip once you pass the center, meaning you can travel from one side to the other easily. The other models all have several problems.


Anything with more sides than a cube is out straightaway due to overlapping blocks alongside the problems of a cube, and a cube would have extremely strange gravity at the corners, and building or mining near a corner would be incredibly wonky.



The \"floating island\" is probably the best alternative to oreos in this thread, though having one-way gravity on a shape that looks like it should have at least two directions seems strange. While you can fall \"off\" the oreo planets, you will still end up back on the planet, but having a bottom to the planet means you can fall through the planet, and falling out of a planet and potentially continuing to fall for a decent amount of time next to the planet seems very wonky.



The infinite planets just don\'t make any sense when you need to be able to leave the planet, so exiting the planet by flying up should have you flying out of a completely empty section of space if you travel far enough, while the terrain you were just on magically disappears.



While the \"loop around a flat planet\" sounds like it would work at first, people are all coming at this from a Minecraft perspective, and this isn\'t Minecraft. Starmade is all about building ships and flying them around through space, fighting in the ships, docking the ships in stations. Looping around a planet kind of breaks when you\'re in a ship that dips into a planet\'s atmosphere to avoid having to fly around it. You end up in a loop, and even if there is a boundary preventing you from looping unless you are close enough to the surface, a ship that is high enough would be able to see players seemingly teleport from one side to the other. Also, with the current size of planets, any shots fired could travel AROUND the planet, hitting the ship that fired them. Even if these are fixed, the Starmade engine currently cannot support simply \"loading the chunks from the other side ahead of you,\" because the whole planet is loaded when a single player gets close enough to the surface. Simply displaying it and teleporting you to the other side would be difficult, and would be immediately broken if more than one player was on the planet at once. The only way to feasibly accomplish this would require the game to load another \"world\" that is separate from everything else, and do this individually for every player on every planet, and there is simply no way a server can handle that.

 

[planeofsuck]

why didn\'t anyone respond to my solution? oreos that become thinner near the edges and if you go over the edge, you rotate 180 degrees so you\'re correctly orientated on the other side. this way you can\'t fall off, the planets have somewhat of a curvature and they can\'t be shot from below

 

[HaViC is Chaos]

That were to have gravity encircling the entirety of it is that in the current single-player, if you were to get stuck on said planet you have no way off. This could be fixed by implementing a save, and leave without saving function. Without this function if someone were to get trapped on a planet countless hours of work would be lost. In multiplayer this would not be an issue as you could just call for help.

 

[Jickalisnonsense Blackthorn]

I agree a square presents the problem that makes it either enjoyable or not and sureley a seemless flow of land is preferred. I think that in the atmoshpere of the game an oreo planet would work especially if its thicker (A LOT THICKER) Since the game focuses moreso on space and its battles then hell, why not have a super thick oreo. I mean IF someone were to re create teh game then by all means make a cube planet, but then in my opinion the game would have to focus more so on the player and his movement in the world. The gmae would be far more minecraft like. But since this game is set in space the Oreo solution is amazing and works. Keep the game to a theme, this game is space based lets make it feel that way.

 

[GaeasSon]

@Planetofsuck: I think nobody responded because your suggestion was simple and sensible. Simple-sensible suggestions get people to nod and say. \"Yeah that could work very nicely\". It\'s the crazy ideas (crazy good and crazy bad) that get the responses.


For example:

@Matthmat: Yes, it\'s all about the ships... but the point of a ship is to go somewhere and do something there. More than one person on a flat loopback planet wouldn\'t break anything. Let the server keep track of objective states (player locations, block changes, etc). Let the clients track subjective states like angle of sun in the sky, and what terrain is projected over the next hill.

@DivineEvil: on the subject of distortion and projection: If you have seperate maps for each hemisphere, you are still going to have wierd tearing effects as a player hikes along the equator... How about Tubeworlds? Just like we were discussing earlier, but simply disallow travel across the polar edges of the map. Have the client project a featureless white ice-cap when looking toward the pole from the edge of the map. Yes it would be annoying to hit an invisible wall in the terrain, but overall I think it might provide the best planet-like experience.

@HaViC is Chaos: Stranded on a planet with an actual gravity well? What if the crafting system allowed you to craft a minimal spacecraft from planetary materials?

 

[ante185]

You can make a hexagon with squares right? They\'ll have to over lap a little bit but that could be fine, abd with the hexagons (with some form of cone-ish shape under it) and some overlapping it would be easy to make something that got flat spots to build on and is sphere-ish

 

[GaeasSon]

it\'s the \"over-lap a little\" that makes for nightmarish game glitchiness. This and that overlap. The game engine naturally reacts violently to object mesh collissions. Suppose you try to mine a block where two blocks overlap. Which block did you mine? Place a block there. Which bit of map did you place it on? Build a structure spanning the map interface. Are you sure the planet is going to fold the same way next time or will half your building be a block to the left? Not saying it couldn\'t work, but there\'s pitfalls.

 

[me2005]

Cube planets could be cool if they were workable; I\'d like those better than the oreo planets as the game takes place in a 3-dimensional space. Flying around, something with dimensionality would look better. It\'s like looking at paper cutouts of planets vs. a proper diorama using spheres. Since everything in game is made of cubes, cubes could be quirky and unique.

Sphere planets would be better, and Pytheas has them right now. He takes a flat map with cylinder-wrapping (north/south wraps to oppsite north/south, east-west wrap) and then roughly projects that onto a sphere when above the planet. When you cut through the atmosphere loading-sequence, you\'re above a planet that is flat and you can no longer see the edges or space, until that you\'re above a sphere. The problem is that attacking the planet from high-orbit (where it still appears spherical) isn\'t easy and may not even be possible.

 

[spazz1219]

some of us already have an issue with planets, and i was reading we may need oxygen soon anyways, so why make the lag eve worse and REQUIRE that we land on a planet, if that happens i see many users leaving

 

[Mr_Burkes]

so on starmade why not when we enter a planet we get to a loading screen that wil take uss to a minecraft like world that is endless


... I mean, that would be cool and all, but how would ground-to-space combat exist? If the world was endless, then how would spaceships attack the bases on the ground? I mean sure, you could just teleport people to the other side of the planet if they fall off but stil...

 

[me2005]

some of us already have an issue with planets, and i was reading we may need oxygen soon anyways, so why make the lag eve worse and REQUIRE that we land on a planet, if that happens i see many users leaving


Who said you\'d be required to land on a planet? You could fly by them as now if you wanted.

I suspect that adding a loading sequence/atmospheric effect between space and planet would significiantly reduce any lag felt near/on planets now. The trouble now is that you\'re near a huge entity and all the other entities are probably still loaded. Making it a flat map would basically just use MC\'s setup while in the planet\'s atmosphere, and would unload everything else while you\'re there. There wouldn\'t be any single huge entity, since the planet could be brokent up into managable chunks and fogged out based on your machine\'s capabilities.

 

[Armyslayer]

I love the oreo idea, however, lets say you try to make an underground base and you mine out the center of the planet. Won\'t the 2 sided gravity keep pushing you to the center until your stuck? How would you get out of this?

 

[shadowcrusnik]

Oreo planets are best! They don\'t take too many resources, they give the game a unqiue and hilarious feel, and they are the most functional.

 

[Criss]

I\'m kind of shocked by the number of people that still try and tell Schema how to make the planets a cube or something, when Schema already said he would be using another method. Also, just use youre imagination? Is it really such a massive deal that its flat? In real life can you see the curve of the earth when standing on it? No. Why do you need to be convinced that the planet is a sphere when its still going to seem flat and have a horizon as you experience it in the real world...

 

[GaeasSon]

@Vanhelzing for me it\'s really mostly the falling off into space. Is it horrible? no. Am I gonna die or not play the game? no. Do I think I see a way to handle the game that would make the game more enjoyable, at least for me? yes

Planets are a tricky thing yo approximate, simulate, or even waive a conceptual hand at. We\'ve all got opinionsabout what will be the least jarring to our suspension of disbelief... but one sided disk worlds don\'t seem to be doing it for us.

 

[me2005]

I don\'t like them because they don\'t feel right when flying around. If they were thicker cylinders or even cubes with gravity on just one face or something, maybe that\'d be ok, but as it is they\'re like paper discs hanging out in an otherwise 3D space.

It\'s like we\'ve got a model for the science fair that, instead of using balls for planets, used paper cutouts from a poster. Leave them on a poster and they\'d be fine, but since we can move around them they look really bad. It\'s not just that, but from a gameplay perspective they could provide both visual and protective cover if they weren\'t discs.

I\'d almost rather have no planets than have disc-planets. Turn the discs into some kind of station-habitat or asteroid or something instead.

 

[GaeasSon]

Considering the range and passion of user preferences, the thing to do is probably to set an option in the server settings for disk Oreo square cube or whatever. Then maybe leave a hook in the code for a plugin for mor extravagant world systems like my round-flat idea... Or heck. Maybe even an interface to a specialized instance of mcpc.

 

[me2005]

the thing to do is probably to set an option in the server settings for disk Oreo square cube or whatever.


That seems like a pretty huge thing to leave as a server option - you\'re talking possibly rewriting portions of the engine to impliment planets differently.

 

[GaeasSon]

But I don\'t think so for anything done in the existing engine. The biggest difference between a disk Oreo and cube is the shape of the grav field. Disks are one field. Oreos are two disk worlds bottom to bottom with a layer of bedrock between. Each still has a single flat fieldcubes are trickier because they would require 6 pyramidal fields each pulling toward the plane transverse its apex. All of these should be achievable with minor tweaks to the existing engine. Then just have the admin choose which worldgen algorithm gets called on sector creation. You could even create square \"halo\" worlds like this.

Hmmm. I think I could even build reasonable proof of concept microworlds with no game engine tweaks. Just build the world parts as discrete undocked but physically interlocking structures with gravity blocks.