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Making Minecraft Spherical

bowerbyte.com

11–20 of 130 posts

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#11
You should definitely have a look at space engineers. They have a similar spherical problem with their voxels and I don’t think they went half as far as you did when implementing “orbital bodies”.

As someone who is rather keen on space, gfx, and the algorithms that render them. Kudos. The problems were known to me, which is why I didn’t attempt it, however - the distortion correction, the chunking, I’m thinking if you just limit how far down you can dig (half way to the “core”) it will be fine. You won’t run into those tiny squished blocks that make up the core.

It’s also important to call out the quad-sphere. This is what makes it doable. Naive devs may just map lat long to sin cos spherical coordinates and call it a day, not realizing that their poles are jacked up. The cartography problem. I’m really glad to see that called out as people don’t realize WGS84 sucks for mapping a sphere.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#12

You should definitely have a look at space engineers. They have a similar spherical problem with their voxels and I don’t think they went half as far as you did when implementing “orbital bodies”. As someone who is rather keen on space, gfx, and the algorithms that render them. Kudos. The problems were known to me, which is why I didn’t attempt it, however - the distortion correction, the chunking, I’m thinking if yo…

Not allowing excavation to the core solves weird gravity issue as well. Astroneer had super weird gravity at their planet core. You can get stuck oscillating there.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#13

You should definitely have a look at space engineers. They have a similar spherical problem with their voxels and I don’t think they went half as far as you did when implementing “orbital bodies”. As someone who is rather keen on space, gfx, and the algorithms that render them. Kudos. The problems were known to me, which is why I didn’t attempt it, however - the distortion correction, the chunking, I’m thinking if yo…

Not allowing excavation to the core solves weird gravity issue as well. Astroneer had super weird gravity at their planet core. You can get stuck oscillating there.

If you really wanted to go for realism, there would be NO GRAVITY at the core. :P

As you dig down you would get lighter and lighter on your feet.

Any mass you are below (within the sphere of Earth) will exert a gravitational pull in one direction, while the mass above you (also within the Earth) will exert an equal and opposite pull.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#14

You should definitely have a look at space engineers. They have a similar spherical problem with their voxels and I don’t think they went half as far as you did when implementing “orbital bodies”. As someone who is rather keen on space, gfx, and the algorithms that render them. Kudos. The problems were known to me, which is why I didn’t attempt it, however - the distortion correction, the chunking, I’m thinking if yo…

Not allowing excavation to the core solves weird gravity issue as well. Astroneer had super weird gravity at their planet core. You can get stuck oscillating there.

That actually sounds pretty close to what I would expect to happen IRL. After all the mass is mostly all around you at that point and depending on how far you are towards the core you might build up speed, overshoot the target and then do it all over again.

But hollow planets are hard to come by so this is just my imagination, I'm sure someone has worked out exactly what would happen.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#15
This is SO fun! You have the foundation for a cool voxel-y interplanetary game if that's your jam. I had fun "getting into orbit" and watching my velocity increase at periapsis and decrease at apoapsis, then descending and landing with the rocket power button ([Space]). I would love a Minecraft + Kerbal Space Program fusion game and most of the pieces for it are already here. :D

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#16
Flying up too high becomes quite interesting. Eventually you hit the point where you're missing the ground and end up on an upward spiral... essentially falling up. You have to go backward to find a place where you can start falling down back toward the ground.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowing excavation to the core solves weird gravity issue as well. Astroneer had super weird gravity at their planet core. You can get stuck oscillating there.

If you really wanted to go for realism, there would be NO GRAVITY at the core. :P As you dig down you would get lighter and lighter on your feet. Any mass you are below (within the sphere of Earth) will exert a gravitational pull in one direction, while the mass above you (also within the Earth) will exert an equal and opposite pull.

That's how it's implemented in the game!

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowing excavation to the core solves weird gravity issue as well. Astroneer had super weird gravity at their planet core. You can get stuck oscillating there.

If you really wanted to go for realism, there would be NO GRAVITY at the core. :P As you dig down you would get lighter and lighter on your feet. Any mass you are below (within the sphere of Earth) will exert a gravitational pull in one direction, while the mass above you (also within the Earth) will exert an equal and opposite pull.

Yeah, I'm mostly aware of that. Weird didn't mean 'wrong' in this case, just weird for a terrestrial-bound human. :)

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#19

Flying up too high becomes quite interesting. Eventually you hit the point where you're missing the ground and end up on an upward spiral... essentially falling up. You have to go backward to find a place where you can start falling down back toward the ground.

This could be fixed by adding a barrier at a high enough altitude. A firmament if you will. This would allow the minecraft map to appear round, when we all know it's really flat...

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you really wanted to go for realism, there would be NO GRAVITY at the core. :P As you dig down you would get lighter and lighter on your feet. Any mass you are below (within the sphere of Earth) will exert a gravitational pull in one direction, while the mass above you (also within the Earth) will exert an equal and opposite pull.

Yeah, I'm mostly aware of that. Weird didn't mean 'wrong' in this case, just weird for a terrestrial-bound human. :)

There’s all sorts of weird physics in the universe ;)
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