- Joined
- Feb 17, 2012
- Messages
- 1,552
- Reaction score
- 2,604
Hello players!
First of all I'm sorry if that joke caused any annoyance or frustration. We basically tried to do an April fools joke without lying by telling the truth in a very odd way. Calbiri acted on my behalf. I told him to make a news post about the new planes as fishy as possible. And he just did the right amount of ambiguity. We were never against round planets, we just had to wait until the right concept came along.
But here are the facts: New planets are in fact coming!
They are dodecahedrons. After I saw that excellent forum suggestion forum by Raichor I was sold on the concept. It may have been an idea that has been pointed out before by other people (and thank you all for suggesting), but he did an amazing job to list all the pros and cons in a very impartial and logical way. The only problem that was really hard to solve was the seam between planet segments. The solutions for that in the post weren't fitting enough for a game. Developing extra exceptions for the seems would bring a lot of problems with it. Since the concept itself was brilliantly simple, I didn't want to have a complex solution for one little detail. So the solution is to just overlap the blocks, which has zero impact in performance and even does look cool.
The core of the planet will most likely be liquid, and entering it will have similar effects as going into a sun. The core will have a high number of regenerating hitpoints, and maybe there will even be certain weapons that are only effective against planet cores (*cough* death star *cough*). Blowing up a planet will result in the segment blowing of the surface.
The planets will rotate just like they do now, and a spherical atmosphere has already been implemented. Also the gravity already works, but there are still some issues to handle.
Also there are some other features already implemented that I will announce soon. The first exclusive look at the test build will probably be at the charity stream.
But enough of the explanation, here is the video showing it (you can't see that video in the launcher, only when going to the site):
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema
First of all I'm sorry if that joke caused any annoyance or frustration. We basically tried to do an April fools joke without lying by telling the truth in a very odd way. Calbiri acted on my behalf. I told him to make a news post about the new planes as fishy as possible. And he just did the right amount of ambiguity. We were never against round planets, we just had to wait until the right concept came along.
But here are the facts: New planets are in fact coming!
They are dodecahedrons. After I saw that excellent forum suggestion forum by Raichor I was sold on the concept. It may have been an idea that has been pointed out before by other people (and thank you all for suggesting), but he did an amazing job to list all the pros and cons in a very impartial and logical way. The only problem that was really hard to solve was the seam between planet segments. The solutions for that in the post weren't fitting enough for a game. Developing extra exceptions for the seems would bring a lot of problems with it. Since the concept itself was brilliantly simple, I didn't want to have a complex solution for one little detail. So the solution is to just overlap the blocks, which has zero impact in performance and even does look cool.
The core of the planet will most likely be liquid, and entering it will have similar effects as going into a sun. The core will have a high number of regenerating hitpoints, and maybe there will even be certain weapons that are only effective against planet cores (*cough* death star *cough*). Blowing up a planet will result in the segment blowing of the surface.
The planets will rotate just like they do now, and a spherical atmosphere has already been implemented. Also the gravity already works, but there are still some issues to handle.
Also there are some other features already implemented that I will announce soon. The first exclusive look at the test build will probably be at the charity stream.
But enough of the explanation, here is the video showing it (you can't see that video in the launcher, only when going to the site):
Thanks for playing StarMade,
- schema
