In a similar voxel system, for Roblox there is: https://web.roblox.com/games/4597506405/Gravity-Controller, my youngest son made a game based on it: https://www.robloxgo.com/game/4617217359/Gravity-Combat
Making Minecraft Spherical
71–80 of 130 posts
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#72Instead of having weird 8 points in the world where 3 instead of 4 quads meet at a vertex, for minecraft like game it would make more sense to have barrel-like mapping with ice caps being weird zones where you can't build on or you transition from barrel mapping to flat mapping for ice caps, so you have unbuildable ring just on the ice boundary.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#73All these squares make a circle.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#74I wonder if this is also how Eskil Steenberg's 'Love' worked. [0] It had a spherical 'block' world as well. [0]: https://www.quelsolaar.com/love/
I came here to also mention this game, it suffered from a bunch of gameplay issues but the tech was absolutely fascinating.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#75Eco: 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 arou…
I don't find it to be a problem as planning a route from A to B isn't done by looking directly for it, but by subconsciously referring to and plotting a path through landmarks along the way that aren't close to antipodal.
One of the worlds i played on had road planning from the start and a set of roadways covering the entire world in a 4x4 square grid. Pathing to point D was just a matter of going 2 blocks in one direction, and 2 blocks in an orthogonal to it.
In a world without such roadways, you'd look for landmarks such as oceans and continents instead.
Ultimately, you don't care if somewhere is antipodal or not because you never see the antipodes to where the globe is currently looking at without rotating the globe.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#76You 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…
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Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#77Wonderful 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…
Never played Super Mario Galaxy. How does it relate to this topic?
It has lots of little planets with their own gravity you can jump between.
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#78[deleted]
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Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#79I chuckled when I got to the Core and it was a cube
Re: Making Minecraft Spherical
#80You 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.
I think the outer wilds did this perfectly. I seem to remember falling towards the core and gravity just disappearing.