New Planet Speculation Thread

[Valiant70]

Auburn has done work with non-cube voxels... what if they're going to make an entire planet out of dedecahedronal voxels!? That would require a new framework... probably not in the game yet... and if the noise algorithms work anything like I think they do, there shouldn't be a problem converting them from one kind of voxel to another. That would certainly be "quite a unique way of doing it."
[doublepost=1492192529,1492192222][/doublepost]Wait a second... They wouldn't tile up properly so that would require an alternating pattern between dodecahedrons and... the heck is this thing called? I don't even know.

 

[Whiteboy904]

I was going to post this in my own thread, but seeing as how there is a planet conspiracy thread already.... :D

View attachment 40952

View attachment 40953

It seems to me that a plate system is being used here, the plates are being warped to appear spherical in nature. We can see warped "plate" systems in physical real world objects, as well as in game development. Here's a few examples:

Source: Determining if a spherical triangle is visible - Math and Physics - GameDev.net

This is the most likely approach they have taken. We already use a plate based system, simply curving it a little can create more "spherical" like planets.

oml is this going to turn into something about the earth being flat... :D

 

[Ghent96]

Bad news for all of you, Schine was trolling us with an April Fool's joke ;p sorry, mateys! Some of you might say it was a Reverse April Fools... maybe, but still a trollish move, and it wasn't made in Starmade.
They probably made that video with a procedural terrain generator in minecraft then either imported to starmade or just made it looks like space. There's no curvature, it's an illusion.

The only good thing that can happen for planets at this point is to finally give up on the false hope of dodecahedrons or anything like them, and return to the cookies of long ago. They were larger, less laggy, more stable, 1 single entity, and much more user-friendly to build on (and off of). We tried telling this to Schine 2 years ago, but true to form they refused to listen. If... no, "when" we finally go full circle, now, (pun intended) I'm going to laugh myself into a drunken pirate stupor.

 

[Ithirahad]

Bad news for all of you, Schine was trolling us with an April Fool's joke ;p sorry, mateys! Some of you might say it was a Reverse April Fools... maybe, but still a trollish move, and it wasn't made in Starmade.
They probably made that video with a procedural terrain generator in minecraft then either imported to starmade or just made it looks like space. There's no curvature, it's an illusion.

Auburn has not been working on nothing. That terrain generation, if nothing else, will be in the game, and they seem to be set on changing the 'structure' of planets as well. Check DukeOfRealms's recent posts...

 

[Reilly Reese]

Bad news for all of you, Schine was trolling us with an April Fool's joke ;p sorry, mateys! Some of you might say it was a Reverse April Fools... maybe, but still a trollish move, and it wasn't made in Starmade.
They probably made that video with a procedural terrain generator in minecraft then either imported to starmade or just made it looks like space. There's no curvature, it's an illusion.

The only good thing that can happen for planets at this point is to finally give up on the false hope of dodecahedrons or anything like them, and return to the cookies of long ago. They were larger, less laggy, more stable, 1 single entity, and much more user-friendly to build on (and off of). We tried telling this to Schine 2 years ago, but true to form they refused to listen. If... no, "when" we finally go full circle, now, (pun intended) I'm going to laugh myself into a drunken pirate stupor.

MUSHROOM FLEET SALT INTENSIFIES

 

[Valiant70]

MUSHROOM FLEET SALT INTENSIFIES

Salted mushrooms?

HUNGER MECHANIC CONFIRMED!

 

[GRHayes]

The following is something I am using myself.
It is pretty easy to implement. The two terrain strips can be generated using a height map. The surfaces that are the same color are matching. They wrap around the sphere like 2 C shapes.
The cubes aren't perfect cubes however the larger the planet and the more you have in the circumference the more cube like they become.
Basically the top of the cube is slightly larger than the base of the cube. The next cube then sitting on it matches the top of the previous cube.
There is an alternate method one can use for building things like cities. designate a number of cubes that are at the same elevation and set them as a build surface in short it creates a plain out of them perpendicular to the radius of the sphere. Good for building stuff like cities.
Anyways the sphere doesn't need to be made super huge to make use of this. It would require current game sectors to be made a good bit larger to fit on in 10K should do it. The nice part the design works well with Octtrees.

 

[johno1928]

Instead of making starmade's planets round, they will make all real planets dodecahedrons.
Heed my prophecy

 

[Amadeus]

There does appear to be a slight curvature to the planet

 

[Valiant70]

Thread rez! The universe update is coming in the next... few months? Maybe? Anyway let's get some new theories rolling.

The following is something I am using myself.
It is pretty easy to implement. The two terrain strips can be generated using a height map. The surfaces that are the same color are matching. They wrap around the sphere like 2 C shapes.
The cubes aren't perfect cubes however the larger the planet and the more you have in the circumference the more cube like they become.
Basically the top of the cube is slightly larger than the base of the cube. The next cube then sitting on it matches the top of the previous cube.
There is an alternate method one can use for building things like cities. designate a number of cubes that are at the same elevation and set them as a build surface in short it creates a plain out of them perpendicular to the radius of the sphere. Good for building stuff like cities.
Anyways the sphere doesn't need to be made super huge to make use of this. It would require current game sectors to be made a good bit larger to fit on in 10K should do it. The nice part the design works well with Octtrees.

This is still a distorted cube, sadly. It's unlikely to be used because of the points where only three squares join instead of four.
[doublepost=1512935214,1512935180][/doublepost]

There does appear to be a slight curvature to the planet
View attachment 41597

I'm pretty sure that's a hill.

 

[Amadeus]

Thread rez! The universe update is coming in the next... few months? Maybe? Anyway let's get some new theories rolling.



This is still a distorted cube, sadly. It's unlikely to be used because of the points where only three squares join instead of four.
[doublepost=1512935214,1512935180][/doublepost]

I'm pretty sure that's a hill.

If it is it's one big ass hill

 

[JinM]

If it is it's one big ass hill

It's likely that this curvature comes from a high fov setting, and is not related to the surface being rounded.

 

[AtraUnam]

Conspiracy time:
The planet in the gif does appear one way or another to be curved, additionally the pre-release contains a radial gravity chamber, now radial gravity has never been in the game before, even current planets use a series of seperate plate gravities. These two things lead me to suspect that new planets at will the very least be rounder if not fully round.

 

[Valiant70]

Conspiracy time:
The planet in the gif does appear one way or another to be curved, additionally the pre-release contains a radial gravity chamber, now radial gravity has never been in the game before, even current planets use a series of seperate plate gravities. These two things lead me to suspect that new planets at will the very least be rounder if not fully round.

Doesn’t radial gravity only work on ships, not players? It might be the same for the planets.

 

[AtraUnam]

Doesn’t racial gravity only work on ships, not players? It might be the same for the planets.

It does indeed, however radial also sounds fairly useless for anything BUT planets, also the reason it doesn't work on astronauts is because they aren't coded like other entities, however it would be a very simple and cheap vector calculation to make gravity work for astronauts on a sphere.

 

[Valiant70]

I'm pretty sure curved blocks were shot down multiple times, so I doubt we'll see anything like that. Some of the hints in the "surprise update" 1-block planet thread really make me wonder though, since Auburn's curved voxel planet model starts with a single block in the center.

 

[Amadeus]

Is it possible that with Auburn's projects in addition to game optimizations that planets could be large enough to make the effects of curved blocks less noticeable? This of course assumes a sort of "core" or "bedrock" system to stay away from the obvious distortion closest to the core

 

[Valiant70]

Biomes:

There will be biome-sets for each base type of planet. A traditional desert (for example) will not pop up on an alien or ice planet. It will not fit there, no matter how much effort you put in the landscape generation.

This allow a wide range of possible biomes, density, vegetation and resource richness per planet. - AndyP

Multiple biomes confirmed!
[doublepost=1525801366,1525800696][/doublepost]

Planet size: As large as possible, keeping CPU, disk and ram usage at an acceptable level for single player and servers. The preview gif was (IIRC) made with a 1500 bock diameter setting consuming more than 10 gigabyte of RAM.

We knew they would be as large as possible. Now we get an idea of the performance impact kilometer-scale planets have in their early development state. Hopefully planets this size will eventually become practical at least for higher-end servers.

There were tons of improvements on that since then, but the final practical use size depends on cat magic and how well the demand can be scaled down by smart loading and saving invisible part of the mass being skipped in the generation, transfer and saving to disk.

I knew smart loading and unloading would be needed to increase planet size beyond a certain point. There are still a lot of tricks Schema can pull. We shouldn't get our hopes too high for actually having practical kilometer-scale planets, but at least we know it's something that might be possible if the computers cooperate with the cat enough.

The new planets consist of parts, but they have completely different shapes from the previous concept and remove the need for the ugly hard angle change that we have now.

This was one of two possibilities based on the April Fools day teaser last year. Teaser referred to "a cubic sphere representation that looks like one cube block, but, if you squint and tilt your head slightly to the left, actually kind of looks like a sphere," which could have referred to the dodecahedrons, but apparently actually refers to something else. If Schema's letting anyone talk about this, it probably means he has a pretty good idea of how the shape will work by this point. Either that or he's finally listening to us and talking about things farther ahead of time. Heh. Either way, it's cool.

Scaling down memory usage is one big problem that we put a lot of work in. There are further upgrades possible to further trim down memory usage to acceptable levels. We managed to create a chunk system that can dynamically compress chunks without read performance loss as low as 32kb (down from 1mb) per chunk in the most optimal case. For graphics we are planning to add another LoD system for the blocks to drastically increase fps for not only planets but also other structures.

Yep, LoD system. We all knew this was coming though, and the April Fools teaser from last year hinted strongly at this.

If these planets are going into the universe update, my guess is that we're going to be waiting a while. The work that will go into the planets alone sounds pretty involved, not to mention all the other stuff Schema's been talking about putting in the universe update.

 

[EricBlank]

I wouldnt doubt if the planets made of a series of single-chunk cubes at slight angles to each other or something. Or larger rectangles, same deal. Thats the best i could envision anyway.

 

[MacThule]

Biomes should be fun. Next outrageous player demand - terraforming!!

Regarding scale: I think there may end up being a difference between RAM needs for generating a planet when discovered for the first time, and RAM needed for loading an already extant planet that comes into view.

Because the generation is going to involve setting all the interior layers as well as what the player sees, the outer layer. Once all that is set though, he specifically mentions optimizations based on not loading what isn't seen. If they can effectively use LOD and other tricks, then loading multi-kilometer planets would may not be a serious challenge for most people with 8g or more RAM.