This is a great demo. I love the laser, just destroying an entire voxel planet was pretty fun.
Making Minecraft Spherical
31–40 of 130 posts
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#32I had a bit of fun playing with the orbital mechanics of it. First soaring around the planet core, then around the planet itself.
At one point I flew far enough into space that I passed the star objects and everything got dark. That was a bit disquieting.
Very cool little game!
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#33My favorite Spherical Minecraft-like gamedev project is PlanetSmith [0], which uses hexagonal voxels (and a few pentagonal voxels). The devlogs are very well produced and I highly recommend checking them out.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#34I could access the site a minute ago, but now I get "ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR". It works again.
> Not currently, but I may make it public later. The current state of the code isn’t the cleanest, so my sense of pride prevents me from sharing it.
Felt that.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#35Earlier 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.
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.
Newton worked this out in what is now know as the shell theorem. If you have a hollow spherically symmetric body, then any point inside of the body experiences no net gravitational force. In contrast, points outside of the shell experience the same force as if the body were a point mass.
For ideal (spherically symmetric) planets where a point is underground, you can divide the planet into 2 regions. The shell of the planet "above" the point has no net effect, while the shell below has the full effect, resulting in the gravity falling towards 0 as you approach the center.
In practice, planets are not actually spherically symmetric, but are close enough for it to be a good approximation.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#36Wow, Minecraft X Outer Wilds… I should really finish Outer Wilds. It’s incredible and super fun to explore the solar system but I find many of the challenges quite difficult to navigate with the zero g thrusters.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#37Huh, I submitted this article last week when it came out and it didn’t get any attention at all.
This demo is super cool! I’ve been dreaming about a game with an engine like this for the last 5 years. Super happy to see people experimenting with it!
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#38Eco: Global Survival (https://play.eco/) bypassed the distortion problem entirely by using an undistorted flat voxel grid, but rendering the globe view as a torisphere.
It still has the tradeoff of making travel close to the center take longer than it should on a sphere (worked around by limiting diggable height), but i find it a more elegant solution.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#39I wonder if it is possible to avoid "digging deep" problem by first building a cube out of voxels and then applying the type of distortion that turns the cube into quad sphere not just to the surface of the cube but also to the insides of the cube. I don't know how to explain it better, perhaps I should try to write some code, lol
It seems like the easiest way would be if you hit immutable lava at some point.
Just like in real life. Wait a sec...
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#40A torus would have been easier.