Spherical Planets made out of unbend blocks

[DrWulfric]

I didn\'t take the time to read all of the posts in this thread, so i hope i haven\'t missed something important, but if you ask me personally i think it\'s actually not that difficult (from an outsiders perspective) to create \"seemingly spherical\" planets. Imagine you have cube shaped world. Now build mountains on it, use some \"dirt wedges\" and you can create 8 flat surfaces. this 8 flat surfaces are the basic foundation of your gravity. Every surface pulls you into the core direction (or let\'s say to the side where the core is), if you walk around an edge, and you\'re suddenyl on another one of the surfaces i mentioned earlier, gravity will pull you down in the direction it\'s ment to be (i hope it\'s not too confusig).

Imagine something like this (i\'m not really good with paint but i hope you get the point):

http://i44.tinypic.com/8yvomd.jpg



Of course you\'d have to add cubic blocks that could be placed on wedges... but well this\'d give ship designers also a ton of new possibilities. I don\'t know if this really works, but it seems simple.

 

[Alexander Prime]

First off, if this were a cubic planet and the edges and corners were sanded down as you said, it would have twenty-two faces, not eight. This doesn\'t really pose a problem in itself, but planets are not made of hull, they\'re made of soil and rock. Adding new wedges for all these block types just to make planets feel kind-of-rounder is far more junk than a game with mechanics like this needs.

I think a lot of people who try to address this issue are answering the wrong question. Of COURSE spherical planets can work. All you have to do is get rid of the blocks and make a damn sphere. The issue here is whether spherical planets should work; that is, whether a game like StarMade wants or needs anything as pointless as an approximated sphere made of meter-length cubes. Lots and lots of more game-appropriate alternatives exist, many of which have been mentioned in this very thread. I\'m especially partial to the lower-hemispheric planetary mass idea, since it neatly fixes the exposed ores problem without changing any game mechanics, and still allows gravity to work as expected.

With lots of work to do to make it happen, and not even the distant sihouette of a benefit to gameplay, I say we just put the screw-with-gravity debate to rest.



Forgive me for utterly ignoring OP\'s post. Beginning a thread with a list of \"Wrong Statements\" and that list with an ad hominem deserves none of my attention.

 

[Criss]

I agree. Its not about making planets look like planets. Its possible. we know its not hard. What the problem is is gameplay. Why the hell do I want to build on a curved surface. Nobody has mentioned that in any post I\'ve seen so far. What if I want to keep the same gravity as I walk around a planet, so that my build stays in a proper perspective. And to be fair it is alpha. The planets don\'t look anywhere near finalized as they do currently. Its not a priority. It\'s Gameplay > Graphics with this type of game.

 

[me2005]

Why the hell do I want to build on a curved surface. Nobody has mentioned that in any post I\'ve seen so far.



I\'ll present to you an example of round planets, using cubic blocks, with no bending and no wierd gravity:

Pytheas is a game/game engine which has, right now, round planets made out of blocks.


No curved surfaces to build on, no wierdness. It\'s like building on a Minecraft world. All you need is a transition from the sphere you see in space to the flat world you land on, which Pytheas also has nailed down so you don\'t notice it (as does Starmade when swithcing sectors).

 

[Pikapi]

I\'m for this!

 

[mou]

read this post that I made:

http://star-made.org/content/starmade-github

 

[Riftmaster]

between the two, so far as I can tell, is that the game you mention does not involve the possibility of digging to the planet core - it is this possibility (or rather, considering who we\'re talking about here, surety) that limits the functionality of a plane-bent-into-sphere planet. Not to mention all the other stuff I don\'t understand fully

 

[Criss]

Thats great and all, but if anyone has thought the most about this or has seen the most solutions for this this, it\'s schema, and he\'s basically already decided to go ahead with oreo planets. The people that post this stuff are the ones asking for cubic or sphereical planets. On top of that I also mentioned it was an issue with transition, not the actual planet itself.

 

[Jcewazhere]

The \"Oreo\"was my favorite of the suggested planet changes, though I don\'t mind them as they are now.



What is the diameter of the of the smooth planets in me2005\'s pics? I have a sad old core 2 duo and sometimes have trouble loading in the tiny planets, if I were to suddenly have to load a much bigger planet I\'m not sure my CPU could handle it.

Is the planet created similarly to the sphere generators for Minecraft? If so how do you build on the bumpy bits near 45 degrees? There\'s no way to flatten it if the corners of the blocks are all sticking into the air, digging out blocks would just expose more points. I\'m not saying the idea is bad, or commenting on how easy or difficult it would be, I\'m simply asking questions.



Pytheas looks nifty, I gave it a thumbs up. Oi yet another indev game, let\'s see I have Minecraft (which is technically released but I still count it, especially with mods), Kerbal Space Program, Starmade (obviously) and Cube World I guess that\'s only 4; that\'s not too bad right?

 

[Morhe]

What you don\'t seem to understand is that Pytheas essentially is using a cleverly-disguized loading screen to get around the fact that you can\'t interact with a warped cubic worldspace from an un-warped cubic worldspace.

In starmade, you can mine blocks on a planet\'s surface from space, wheras in Pytheas you can only mine blocks when you are on the planet\'s surface and the worldspace has been un-warped. Essentially, you don\'t seem to understand what you are actually suggesting... namely a system that would require mining lasers to somehow transition and translate between the universe\'s strait-edged worldspace and the warped-cube worldspace of the planet\'s surface.

That is why you see people without any sort of programming experience on the site saying, \"It would be easy to just do X\", while those who program by profession or extensively as a hoby are saying, \"It can be done, but it\'s probably not worth it.\"

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser men so full of doubts.”
? Bertrand Russell

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Why not add spherical non-gravity planets for now? Moon has no gravity, Sceema could add that to shut up the idiots for now, and then work on other stuff.

I mean, for goodness sake this game is ALPHA! As in just reletivley stable. This isn\'t official release yet! If Shceema ignores the idiots like MC team then I see this game going far. I see it going far anyways tbh.

 

[Nootau]

Moons have them :|

 

[Chosen Mimes]

strategy to just give the (ohi i\'m the chat, do you have time to talk our lord and saviour...)

where was i again? it(OH HELLO THERE! it\'s\'a mee! the chat again, haven\'t seen you in a while, pal!...)

okay this is getting awkward.

we shouldn\'t just give the trolls what they want. if they even get the smallest of all breadcrumbs (and be it just a big grey ball of grey rock stuff) they won\'t stop posting \"I-NEEDS-DIS\"-threads.

it\'s not only about the greedy people but also the quality of the game would suffer if schema would add something completely useless like said big balls of rock-stuff without gravity.

 

[Alexander Prime]

Step 1: open the chat user list.

Step 2: change your status icon in the top-right corner to \"Offline\". The chat closes.

Step 3 (optional): apply liberal portions of your favorite discretionless ad-blocking software to make it go dead bye-bye forever.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

They\'re gonna whinge no matter what. And moons might be nice, obviously later on in development. they could just be modified asteroids or

*Damn chat, I see what you mean now*

something. They don\'t have to be big grey balls of grey rock stuff, just something to add variety. Anway, Schema seems to know what he is doing so I guess he is smart enough to know what is balanced and fun and what is overpowered crap.

*Breaks out the javascript blocker*

 

[Cool3303]

A lot people want that this works like Minecraft,i don\'t Just to clarify this I basically want gian\'t spheres made out of cubes without any bending and warping which have an correct gravity.

Of course those constructs wouldn´t be very practical yeah everything you wouldn´t build on the corners would look extremely weird (because you would stand at an diferent angle than the house).The point is you still can build a little House on an corner whiich looks fine.And If you don´t like that you can still build a station on the planet and use their gravity without problems.

The other really good thing about it would be that I would see Planets from Space which is F***ing awesome.

See my point is not that it would be good but It would be easy to implement (schema would just have to change gravity and the world gen)

And to all that Scumbags who want me to code it and give it Schema. I can´t code yeah I am a noob are you happy now.BUT I just can´t code because I would have no idea where to start and I also don´t get along with Eclipse. I however already looked at code and therefore know how hard it is to implement things.Oh and I got Common Sense

 

[Criss]

I\'m not suggesting anything at all. I\'m agreeing with Schemas oreo idea, which in terms of how the game will before and after it is implemented will be a very little change. Planets already have a fake sphere around them to let players know its a planet. Why people would want to build on a sphere, or why players REQUIRE a warped planet surface, in order to achieve a level of immersion is beyond me. If you simply want to build on a flat surface, then what\'s the point of warping terrain or changing the shape. It\'s an unnecessary complication.

 

[Criss]

Thats a lot easier, but who wants to build on a non-flat surface. Not to mention the planet is probably too small for anything large on the surface to look decent.

 

[MichaelSeph]

I like how planets are for now... 2 sides would be more optim, but I make good uses of both upper and bottom part of a planet.

 

[DziNeIT]

https://github.com/thehutch/Cubiverse/blob/master/src/main/java/me/thehutch/cubiverse/components/GravityComponent.java

That\'s a gravity implementation for spherical planets made of cubes. Is it really that hard?