Will planets get bigger in the future?

[DreamingOfRoundPlanetsAndNoBlocks]

Ok, I get the limitations of the engine. I personally dislike Java and dont know why schema went the Java route for a voxel game myself but in any case, whatever engine you use, I don't see how anyone could come up with legit round planets. Unless some genius from outer space comes up with a great idea, dodecahedron planets seem like the best we can get for now. In 10 years im sure the problem will get solved and we will get next level shit, but for now even tho I hate the awkward transitions from face to face, i can deal with it.

My question is: Will they get bigger in the future? By big I mean, that you would need at least 10 real life minutes to walk across an entire face of the dodecahedron. This way it would at least give you the ilusion that you are on a flat feeling terrain, and not on a small asteroid where you constantly see the edge of the world. When survival features such as stamina, mobs, points of interest and so on are added, it will take even more time to inspect an entire face of a planet, so you feel you are on a real flat terrain and not constantly stumbling upon the face-gravity transition.

We are still on alpha and back in the time I got hated on by complaining about oreo planets, I got told they looked good and we couldn't get any better, then finally we got dodecahedron planets. I just want to have hope that planets will get bigger and will not stay as small asteroids.

 

[jayman38]

Someone on the official team will have to speak to this to provide actual facts, but I suppose that with all the bug-hunting and engine-improving that the dev team does, we'll eventually see lower-lag, larger-plate planets in the game. It's just tricky to figure out those improvements, so it will be a long time coming.

 

[Keptick]

Cool isn't it? That's a 392 radius planet I found on Elwyn. I'd say that it has over 30 million blocks (considering that a 170 radius planet I mined had 10 million) and dropped my fps to 3 while looking at it.

It's not a software issue, it's mostly a hardware issue. Oh btw, you can set planet size in the server configs. Do it for your single player if your really want gigantic planets.

But don't come here complaining after your computer has a spontaneous combustion

 

[Midian357]

You can already adjust average planet size in your server settings. I had made mine huge at one point but even being near it would cause me lag with 8gigs of ram dedicated to the game client side and a 50 person server with just me on it.

 

[ToyotaSupra]

I like that you can mod the size, but even default planets lag too much. Needs optimisations.

 

[Keptick]

I like that you can mod the size, but even default planets lag too much. Needs optimisations.

Considering that they can be tens of millions of blocks it's understandable :P

 

[ToyotaSupra]

Considering that they can be tens of millions of blocks it's understandable :p

Could use that trick they used to use in the ps2 days, can't remember what it it but it loads the surface only (like ~10 blocks deep) the loads the rest if the player investigates further. There must be something that they can do, because planets suck right now solely due to lag. Doesn't matter what PC you have it WILL LAG no matter what. Can't go on like this.

 

[Mr.Steam]

By big I mean, that you would need at least 10 real life minutes to walk across an entire face of the dodecahedron. This way it would at least give you the ilusion that you are on a flat feeling terrain, and not on a small asteroid where you constantly see the edge of the world.

I understand why you want to feel like you are on a bigger planet for immersion reasons. But from a gameplay perspective why do you want a bigger planet?

I already get lost on the larger planets and have a hard time finding my base with all the sides to explore. Comparing it to the typical FPS level size it seems good. Big enough to hide and sneak around, yet not so big that you can't ever find the enemy.

 

[jayman38]

You are probably thinking of the term "Occlusion Culling". It's a software trick to reduce the effective amount of geometry that need to be rendered and/or calculated. Unfortunately, while Occlusion Culling would be a simple matter for showing the planet, once someone fires a penetrating laser that can cross not only multiple blocks, but even multiple plates, all bets are off.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occlusion_culling

 

[aceface]

i have a pretty decent pc (r9 280x and 6 core amd cpu with 8gb ram) and i cannot load any planet bigger than r=80 before going below 60 fps.
planets should be bigger, but if they become bigger they HAVE to render differently. for example like in this video here;
having an atosphere blocking all the details, and only rendering the pretty details when within the atmosphere, and when you are withing the atmosphere there isn't a lot of chunks to load.

however, I AM COMPLETELY AGAINST MAKING THE CURRENT PLANETS BIGGER!!!
I don't go near them now because they are lag fests - making them bigger will just make it worse.

 

[DreamingOfRoundPlanetsAndNoBlocks]

Yes lets hope for that.

Personally would cope with less amounts of planets put together, if it helps with rendering big planets.

I understand why you want to feel like you are on a bigger planet for immersion reasons. But from a gameplay perspective why do you want a bigger planet?

I already get lost on the larger planets and have a hard time finding my base with all the sides to explore. Comparing it to the typical FPS level size it seems good. Big enough to hide and sneak around, yet not so big that you can't ever find the enemy.

I dont know, planets feel tiny to me. When im on top of a mountain I see the edges from every side and its like im on a floating island. Kills inmersion.

 

[AtraUnam]

Occlusion culling would be nice. Personally I still think spherical planets are still a possibility this is an artificial universe after all, we just need to stop basing our ideas around the rules in the real universe (warping the plane too look like a sphere, loading screens ect...) and make up some new ones. Admittedly much easier said than done.

I'm gonna go try and invent some new rules of geometry, I'll get back to you guys as soon as I can.

 

[Mered4]

....Occulsion Culling is already in the game......

He uses it to only render things your camera can see, instead of everything in the sector.

 

[PizzaPress]

Loading(not just rendering, but loading) only the top chunks would be nice. Then something(Perhaps similar to the ray-trace algorithm? Dunno.), could figure out where the surface-accessible caves are, and use that to load the necessary underground chunks, continuing one after the other.

 

[DreamingOfRoundPlanetsAndNoBlocks]

Hopefully in the future we can get this + terraforming + building all in one:

 

[JonasWalker]

On a side note after some tweaking in the server file I somehow managed to get a planet with a listed radius of 1k blocks* during testing. Never crashed but was not able to get the entire planet to load at once. :D

*Assuming I read the radius/hp float correctly.

 

[KiloZulu]

I personally like the planets the way they are. This is a voxel game and there should be a level of "blockiness." They need to do something to improve the performance of the planets they do have. Frame rates drop into single digit territory whenever I land on one, and the gravity is so strong that you can't take off once you get there.