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Making Minecraft Spherical

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Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#42

Post by RA2lover »

reactordev wrote: post #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 yo…

My understanding is Space Engineers takes the "blocky sphere" approach mentioned early in the post, works around the "walk along its surface" part of the problem by making gravity direction point towards a fixed point, and bypasses the "trying to build 'upward'" part of it by not allowing voxel construction. It doesn't use a quad-sphere at all.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#43

Post by Tremeschin »

Earlier versions of the now abandoned Seed of Andromeda [0] [1] had planet-scale voxels with physics! I remember causing huge avalanches with explosions, or watching many pools of water flowing downhill [2] myself, it had so much potential..

There was a dev blog or two I couldn't find in Wayback except a YouTube video [3] on how they mapped the sphere to voxels. Not that one would notice much local effects at these scales (Flat Earth illusion), but Blocky Planet showcases the other end of the extremes, where Distant Horizons' curvature option or some other rounded world shaders out there could never achieve! (+Outer Wilds vibes)

[0]: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210416224527/https://www.seedo...

[2]: https://youtu.be/qCoyNH6y7CU?t=529 + at 9:23

[3]: https://youtu.be/bJr4QlDxEME

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#44

Post by durhamg »

I made a planetoid Minecraft demo back in the day, but I left the planet as a cube. Each cube had a defined gravity direction, so you could rig it so that no matter what face you were on, gravity pointed "down". Having gravity be a customizable per cube allowed for cool things like having the center of the planet have reversed gravity, so if you dug too deep you'd find a cavern and could walk on the inner surface of the planet , effectively upside down. Or you could have two planets near each other and build upwards until you entered the others gravity well. I also added portals, so you could even jump through a portal fast enough to get thrown up to a neighbouring planet.

Obligatory awkward demo: https://youtu.be/PDZGzL4GRF0?si=K9vfMhbcg5Vvd1_A

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#46

Post by card_zero »

I tried making spherical grid planets before, and keep on wondering about the best compromises. Looking at the description, your version presumably has:

Certain blocks corresponding to the corners of the cube, where despite anti-distortion efforts the blocks will have one corner at 120° instead of 90°,

Triplets of blocks at these locations, where turning twice gets you back to the first block,

Blocks that get smaller as you mine down, and then suddenly double in size,

Somewhere, down at the core, a regular polyhedron (what shape is it? Must be a cube) made of pyramid blocks that all come to a point in the center.

OK who's fucking downvoting me for thinking about geometry? If one of these assumptions isn't true, go ahead and tell me.

Re: Making Minecraft Spherical

#49

Post by mrtracy »

RA2lover wrote: post #38

Eco: 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.

It's an elegant rendering trick, but if their worlds are represented as a torus, then I expect this would make rotation on a spherical globe view unintuitive.

One example of this: I would expect each location would not have a single antipode (opposite coordinate) but would instead have three. If you were to start at location A, rotate travel 180 degrees along the latitudinal axis to location B, then 180 degrees around the longitudinal axis... on a sphere you would expect to be back at location A, albeit upside down. But on a torus, you are in a completely different location, which is the 'C' antipode. Rotating 180 degrees latitudinally from here will bring you to point D, the last of the antipode set.

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