Some thoughts on the new planet dynamics.

[RoyalWolfe]

I was thinking about the latest news going on the old site, and a lot of exciting stuff is happening. new changes are going to be making it very fun for the game.

the one thing that caught my mind most of all is the new planets coming soon. we are finally getting some planets we can actually build some decent bases on. for good and bad that is going to change a lot of the game. the fact that they are happening is overall a good thing. it makes a purposeful reason to start tapping down roots in a given game's setting whether it be for a faction home, or just to shield ones personal property from the AI enemies.

this also gives us some new gameplay options as well. if schema really does decide that planets are going to be important, ten some other things are going to need to change as well. I was personally thinking we may need to consider what planets could mean for future of the game. I personally wasn't too sold on the non instanced planets myself, but that seems to be where things are headed, as such I won't debate this here, you can go to the general topic section and do so if you like.

if we do go for this non instanced dice shaped planet, then it means we need to know what we can do with them. for example will we be able to totally Terraform or change the planets? if so then how? and by how much? Can we even if we like, perhaps build our own planets, or planetoids?

all of this may be pause for much larger ideas in the future and that is where id like to discuss. what do you expect from the new dodecahedron planets? and what would you like to see supported?

I would also like to start off by asking if we can build planets, what about posting them to the community contents section of the new site?

 

[Ithirahad]

Before we start worrying about fancy features like building your own planets, I'd like to hear that these planets are definitely going to get a lot bigger. These planets, though a lot prettier, are also really, really tiny... You should be able to build an entire city (Or two villages, or one massive military base, etc.) on one face without running into the edges.

 

[RoyalWolfe]

I can put you a bit at rest there I did ask schema himself about that in the chat room the day the announcement. at least i think it was him, maybe calbiri did? Anyway, He told me they will be of various sizes. and some will range in the size to allow you to do just that.

 

[Mowa2]

Before we start worrying about fancy features like building your own planets, I'd like to hear that these planets are definitely going to get a lot bigger. These planets, though a lot prettier, are also really, really tiny... You should be able to build an entire city (Or two villages, or one massive military base, etc.) on one face without running into the edges.

There are several problems with getting "huge" planets.

Under starmades save file setup big planets take up HUGE amounts of diskspace and server memory, the volume of planets increases massively everytime you slightly increase the surface area.

Furthermore, starmade's rendering system is not very great at rendering lots of blocks/physics with large objects

In the current state of the game, having huge planets is simply not viable

 

[Zedrackis]

The current planets are very small. That said, the scale of the universe in general is also extremely small. Whole solar systems are only 1500m x 16 wide, and there is current no such creature as deep space. In the context of the current layout planets seem just the right size. However I would like the scale of star-made universes in general increase.

 

[marcus87]

I think big planets don't have to have necessarily huge amounts of cubes. For example the thickness of the planes could be restricted to maybe 100 or 200 blocks? That would save some memory.

In the middle of the planets are the planet core´s, so they simply had to be bigger.