Spherical Planets made out of unbend blocks

[Cool3303]

@Vanhelzing

I was talking about that the whole time... How I hate english

http://donatstudios.com/PixelCircleGenerator Here you can see how an circle of that size would look So for an 500Diameter Circle there would be an relative flat area (3blocks height difference) around 50 block

Also it would be a lot more interesting to make bases IN the planet

 

[Oblivifrek]

The plannet could have a molten core

 

[Chosen Mimes]

i will love you! forever!*throws kisses*

thanks!

 

[Chosen Mimes]

i\'m absolutely not against moons or bigger asteroids(with or without gravity).

but i\'m against throwing something new and unfinished out only to feed the whiners and complainers which don\'t know anything about what they are actually demanding

And i really would love to see those tasty oreo-planets xD

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Small idea:

Planets could have a 5x5x5 cube of unmineable \'core\' stuff, the same way bedrock works in Minecraft. It could stop the porblem of core gravity...

Not sure about the rest though...

 

[Chosen Mimes]

that with the size of the sphere increasing, the unusable area grows much faster than the usable area?

hm...looks like about 80% or even more of the planets surface is not useful for larger builds that require flat areas.

just think, people are building ships which are a few hundred meters long.

and so is it with buildings.

a planet this size is not only inpracticable but also very resource-greedy

even with flat planets(as of now) collisions with bigger ships can be fatal.
just think how the server would be trying to decide where this 500 block length ship gets pulled in towards the planet surface.

I too would like to see sphere planets, because they are undoubtedly cool.
But you can\'t just sweep away all difficulties by linking to a page where you can draw circles...

 

[Cooler_sk]

 

[me2005]

@Morhe: No, I understand the loading screen bit, I\'m pretty sure I even mentioned it. Starmade already has a similar effect, so I don\'t see how that\'d be a problem. The solution to mining lasers working? Mine from upper atmosphere, after the screen has loaded, rather than from orbit. You can still fly around the planets when in-atmosphere, it\'s just harder because you\'re now fighting gravity.

@Jcewazhere: If your machine can run Minecraft, you can load those planets in Pytheas, in orbit they are just spheres. I\'m not positive, but I think the one pictured is several kilometers in diameter; whatever it is it feels appropriately huge. The world\'s surface is just like am Minecraft world, and loads seperately.

 

[schema]

I know that central gravity is easy, but that\'s not the point! Also I never said that making the planets round would be the hard part. The point is that you would be angled to the blocks, which basically makes walking and building on planets pointlesss except on the cubish positions.
Imagine a single cube with central gravity. it doesn\'t matter how much more cubes you add to it, the fact that if you are on certain points of the spherical gravity you will be orientated in an angle to one of the six possible faces won\'t change.





The point for gravity transition is also not only that it happens suddenly, it\'s also not very easy to define what gravity goes where, and if that is done, it has to be done in a way so the players are not confused.



As for the solution with the flat world: I already talked about it in the dev update. It\'s already hard to make sector changes work. For the ship to change context there are some things that are disadvantages.

- Ships can be bigger: what to do when half is in the planets context and half is not?

- The context changes makes ships and ground not visible from space (since that\'s the whole point: to obfuscate that it\'s flat). And the same goes for interaction (shooting, mining) (without a huge amount of special cases and performance, which basically doestroys the simplicity of the system to a point where it doesn\'t really give any advantage at all),

 

[me2005]

@Schema - Thanks for replying!

- Sector changes - The way Pytheas does it, the ship changes from \"space\" to \"atmosphere\" space, and I think there are some heat type effects; in any case, the atmosphere becomes white instead of the starry background there is in space. That being a critical factor might crush it, and if that\'s so, I\'d understand.

- Ships are entities, aren\'t they? Can\'t a ship just *never* be half-in, half-out? Could the atmosphere-space auto extend to envelop a ship, even if you can\'t build that high?

- This is definitely true, a simple solution for not knowing where ships are would be to just point at the planet if a player/ship/object is in its space, and then readjust the nav to the planet\'s space when in its atmosphere. Orbital bombardment & etc. wouldn\'t be a thing though without special-case weapons. I\'d argue that mining laser & etc. shouldn\'t be used for orbital operations anyway, and that they should need to be used from in-atmosphere, but again, this could be a breaking issue.

I would like to say, those round block planets are beautiful looking, even if they cause weird player interactions.

 

[MichaelSeph]

Round blocks are not (nice) blocks, that\'s defying the definition of \"blocks\" itself.

 

[Morhe]

That was a reply to me2005, not you.

 

[Cool3303]

Standing angled on a planet surely is a big deal but Building a gravity block would alow you to exploit it so whats the problem?

 

[MarshalPicturesProductions]

i know java. i have edited my game, but just because there were a few \"optical gimmic\" things i wanted in. if i could make a spherical planet, i would not send it to schema, because, like you said, he has more important things. but the reason im not making my own game is because i first off dont want to and secondly, im on here, so if i find something that if i do on the files, and it fixes some bugs or adds something awesome, ill notify schema. but you\'re right, shema has more important issues like fixing bugs and making this game be more awesome.

 

[Criss]

Because you\'re still trying to build on a blocky spherical surface. The solution that everyone wants is to build on a flat surface but make the planet appear round, which apparently means no one has imagination because there is already the indication that planets are larger and rounder than what they actually are when viewed from a distance. I\'d also like to ask why a gravity block change the gravity of a planet...

 

[Riftmaster]

...thread. The discussion, while it may have occurred before, is now seen for the first time by me.



It appears that the issue here is:

Creating a planet that looks like a sphere from space or high enough off the ground, looks flat from ground level, has equal gravity over the entire surface (that supports the illusion of flat ground, like a real planet), projects a spherical gravity well into space, and is made of cube-shaped blocks which can be removed down to and including the planet\'s core..

This is impossible.

Everything is possible in that sentence, until you hit the \"made of cube-shaped blocks\" part.

Once you add that, the whole thing falls apart.

Cube shaped blocks require that either the planet does NOT appear flat in some areas (where it requires you walk over the corners of cubes)...

OR it requires that you not be able to drill to the planet core - because at some point you WILL run into the issue of a sphere requiring block shapes that are NOT cubes.

--------------------------------

THEREFOR

I suggest that planets be made so that you CANNOT drill down beyond a certain point (a point at which drilling further would force encounters with non cube-shaped blocks) - at that point, you must use weapons to destroy the planet core, which will explode and create a shockwave that will damage any insufficiently-shielded ship - but afterwards you can collect whatever remains (and if you do not, possibly it will turn into asteroids).

The problems I foresee:

This will take alot of coding, and thus, time.

This will require that planets become MUCH larger (I\'m talking they take up a goodly portion of a sector or something), in order to allow for a large enough surface that it will seem flat (and allow for bending the flat surface around the sphere). More coding. IF it is even possible without demanding instanced planets, due to potential server issues caused by such technique (I think someone mentioned before)...more coding.

This will in turn require a rework of the sector system, I think. MORE coding



You see the trend here.

More.

Coding.

Which, if you are not aware, equals time. Time spent on building a specific and non-space system (planets) in a game which is FOCUSED on space, and spaceships.

Planets large enough to allow for flat-seeming ground while actually on a spherical surface would change a vast number of things about the game - players could in theory spend vast amounts of time on a planet, creating mining vehicles or something, and selling the ores to space-born-players.

Or something...



So basically, I don\'t think creation of spherical planets should be a serious focus of the design team at the present time.



IMO.

 

[Alexander Prime]

Does that look about right?

 

[Cooler_sk]

Glad you did that picture and explanation, now i dont have to draw it

 

[Morhe]

I envy your MSPaint skills.

 

[Alexander Prime]

Just a $50 drawing tablet and a copy of MyPaint.



Also, I couldn\'t help myself.