Rejected PLanet Idea

[xxpowerofsoundxx]

I realize schine has their own ideas about how to proceed with planets, And im sure its been thrown out there before, but why not instance the planets?

Hear me out. A big issue with instancing planets is what? not being able to mine them to oblivion, and not being able to orbitally bombard them. But it seems like with an instanced planet lag would be reduced since its not part of the overall universe thats turning and moving so flying a large miner into the atmosphere could easily work.

as for bombardment, i was thinking why not add something along the lines of cross instanced fighting? WOuld it be possible. to have a ship in orbit, with a massive gun, fire at a "Planet" then have the beam transferred into the instance and strike? and vice versa for orbital defense?

instanced planet coul easily be MASSIVE and mor like a real planet, with huge jungle (im thinking kashyyk here) deep tunnels, lava chambers and so on.

as far as seemless transition goes just make the entry and exit point FAR away from the actual surface of the planet so it doesn't try to render any blocks on approach. then when your in the instance and falling toward the planet the blocks slowly take shape.

add a map feature like voxel map, which is a minecraft mod, that can be accessed while on the planet or in orbit with the planet selected. the map would be how battleships target their weapons.

and as for the world borders just do like pac man, starbound, that old snake game. where you step through one side and pop out the other. But im sure theres a way to wrap the graphics so it looks seamless while your on it. (there a tardis mod for oblivion that has a staircase inside and it seemlessly moves the character back to the start or the stairs with no stutter at all, I spent 5 minutes runing up the stair before i realized i was going no where.)

I'm not a coder and have no experience with games other than playing them. Just thought id throw the idea out.

feel free to LOL at me :P

 

[Keptick]

Instanced planets have been suggested too many times in the past for me to count. The official answer is that Schema wants the players to be able to interact with planets from space, or planet>space.

In short, it'll never happen. Or at least not with Schema's current final vision of the game.

Edit: Just to make it clear, I don't personally disagree with the idea. I think that proper instanced planets would be really nice. There's just a lot of problems with it. For example, what happens if I try to get a huge ship into the planet dimension?

 

[xxpowerofsoundxx]

My suggestion is that the entrance point be far above the actual planet surface roughly 6 to 7 million blocks high to be specific. so your giant ship. unless its a few million blocks long. wouldnt add up to much. im talking about planets that are more like earth sized. thousands of miles across.

but still just an idea. planets are still in development anyway. I cant wait to see what the devs come up with

 

[jstenholt]

Larger planets are definitely a must. But I don't think instancing is the way to get there. I'm confident that the devs will figure out a solution that makes everybody not that angry.

 

[Valck]

I think instanced planets could work, if you would somehow map the "inside" of the instance to the "outside" and vice versa, so you could see what's going on in space if you're down on the surface, or what's going on at the surface if you're in orbit.
Wait...
You'd have to calculate the whole planet to display it; that doesn't sound like it would be different from what we have now...
Hum.

But wait... if this kind of "mapping" would take place, it might actually give an opportunity for optimization.
Like, you wouldn't have to render the whole planet all the time, from all sides, but could instead render those chunks that are actually loaded, get the rest from a cache, and map them onto an "atmo-"sphere in whatever detail is suitable to maintain a balance between performance and information. That cache could possibly be client side and reduce network traffic as a side effect.
The same could be done in reverse as well; generate low resolution chunk maps of the ships in space around the planet that only need updating when a significant percentage of blocks in a chunk changes, and cache them; again, client side could work, and could even be useful in general - if a ship is 20km away, you don't need to see every individual block anyway.

schema has probably thought about most of this, but it couldn't hurt asking, maybe the story of "why u no instance" would make a good blog post, or sticky thread...