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Making Minecraft Spherical

bowerbyte.com

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Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#2
The article doesn't describe the way to avoid the difference in rectangle size in a cubesphere, so let me.

The bad way: - Generate a cube - Subdivide each face using linear interpolation (lerp) - Normalize each vector to put it on a unit sphere

The good way: - Generate a cube - Subdivide using spherical linear interpolation (slerp) - done!

The cubesphere has lots of interesting geometric properties, particularly in texture mapping.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#9
Wonderful write-up of attempting to tackle this problem. I believe there must be a significant number of people who have played both Minecraft and Super Mario Galaxy, and had something like this sequence of thoughts - although you have followed it all the way to an actual demonstration, and written up your thoughts along the way so clearly.

The vertical distortion is the biggest issue IMO, there are a few reasonably satisfying ways to approach the horizontal tiling of each “shell”. For example, you can make your world a donut instead of a sphere, and now you have a perfect grid at each level! Of course, this introduces a level of distortion between the interior and exterior, so you also twist the donut once, and now you’ve both solved your distortion problem and invented the stellarator fusion device.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#10
I suppose the same shell trick could also work on hyperbolic maps too, right? I've wondered what Minecraft would look like on a hyperbolic plane, if you were to squeeze an exponential amount of terrain within a linear radius. It's a strange thing to say, but I think it's more "practical" than Euclidean geometry in the sense that every is very close to everything, but there's still plenty of room.
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