terrain generation

this is more a question than a idea BUT. a minecraft world is 4-7 times bigger than earth. it fills loads of terabytes. so do you have to chose where to land your spaceship or is it only already discovered parts that are landable. if not you will face another problem because the world file would be huge

Technically speaking, the current minecraft engine is infinitely generating, meaning 4-7 is actually infinity times the size of earth.

Now, on practical terms, yes, the biggest MC maps will get 4-7 times that of earth and are not practical at all as they are very large files.

We plan to limit the size of planets to around 40km. Frostbyte has an idea of how he would like to do it and we've had the discussion. 40km is a huge distance in the game but it will also limit the size of the server maps to a practical size and will also present the challenge of finite resources.

ectrimble20 wrote:

Technically speaking, the current minecraft engine is infinitely generating, meaning 4-7 is actually infinity times the size of earth.

Now, on practical terms, yes, the biggest MC maps will get 4-7 times that of earth and are not practical at all as they are very large files.

We plan to limit the size of planets to around 40km. Frostbyte has an idea of how he would like to do it and we've had the discussion. 40km is a huge distance in the game but it will also limit the size of the server maps to a practical size and will also present the challenge of finite resources.

40km sounds good for example it can hold 40x40 cruisers with is 1600. then there would be more than 1 server. so there is room enough for making new ships without it being seen

Well yes, the premise of future craft will be the ability for a player to move from server to server, there will be restrictions of course, but once all is said and done, the idea is to be able to build a fleet or just your single ship, then move between the planet and a space realm. From the space realm you'll have the ability to move to a server that is connected. You'll be able to move yourself, your ship, and anything on the ship between the servers.

As for being able to build ships without being seen, that's something that is to be determined by the players ability to mask their activities.

I'd suspect that the well established players will find a way to build a space shipyard into the side of a mountain or into the ground, keeping their visibility to a minimum. Dumb little kids will inevitably build their super dreadnought in the middle of a grass field then cry about someone sneaking in and blasting it, but they'll learn, or they'll quit.

The thing I think people don't realize is how large the scale is for what they are planning, I really doubt you're going to see a whole lot of 1km long ships, they're huge, slow, lumbering targets if you ask me.

I think you'll see some, but for the most part I think the 10-15k volume-block range ships will be the most common since they're large, but can be built in a timely fashion.

Again, this is all speculative and we'll have to wait and see how it really plays out.

40km? I was personally thinking more along the lines of
100km. But hey, just what I thought.

Okay, Ectrimble, people aren't really going to be building "private"
ships, as the material costs are enormous. You might see people building
private frigates, or diplomatic ships (this is using the current system of
ships, not the new one), but not a private dreadnought. Also, if you were
paying attention to what been going on in... *classified*.

But I do agree, assault ships will be rare. Only for the most advanced servers
would an assault ship be created. Though they might be a target, they have a
LOT of life, they can withstand a direct hit from a MAC cannon. Well,
currently, we'll just have to see how it goes.

Dr. Mackeroth wrote:

40km? I was personally thinking more along the lines of
100km. But hey, just what I thought.

Okay, Ectrimble, people aren't really going to be building "private"
ships, as the material costs are enormous. You might see people building
private frigates, or diplomatic ships (this is using the current system of
ships, not the new one), but not a private dreadnought. Also, if you were
paying attention to what been going on in... *classified*.

But I do agree, assault ships will be rare. Only for the most advanced servers
would an assault ship be created. Though they might be a target, they have a
LOT of life, they can withstand a direct hit from a MAC cannon. Well,
currently, we'll just have to see how it goes.

This topic brings out a question of mine. Would this mod be able to support mercenaries/traders/bounty hunters?
What I mean by that is would this mod support people in small sized ships going around and taking and selling resources? Or maybe someone hires someone else to catch someone for them? I bet a lot op people, not just me, would love to see this in this mod.

Dr. Mackeroth wrote:

40km? I was personally thinking more along the lines of
100km. But hey, just what I thought.

Planet size is negotiable. I was just eyeballing it based on what I thought size would look good for continents. Pull out too far and the world looks like random crap. Of course we won't know for sure until we try it so it's all sort of a moot point.

Quote :

Okay, Ectrimble, people aren't really going to be building "private"
ships, as the material costs are enormous. You might see people building
private frigates, or diplomatic ships (this is using the current system of
ships, not the new one), but not a private dreadnought. Also, if you were
paying attention to what been going on in... *classified*.

But I do agree, assault ships will be rare. Only for the most advanced servers
would an assault ship be created. Though they might be a target, they have a
LOT of life, they can withstand a direct hit from a MAC cannon. Well,
currently, we'll just have to see how it goes.

It's fine if they're tough to get, but we shouldn't make it prohibitively hard to make those kinds of ships by yourself, especially if we expect them to get in fights. That will just discourage people from wanting to keep playing, not to mention people who play offline because of crummy internet.

GemCollector wrote:

This topic brings out a question of mine. Would this mod be able to support mercenaries/traders/bounty hunters?
What I mean by that is would this mod support people in small sized ships going around and taking and selling resources? Or maybe someone hires someone else to catch someone for them? I bet a lot op people, not just me, would love to see this in this mod.

It's been brought up once or twice. Certainly it's worth exploring further.

Fr0stbyte: I was thinking that perhaps on single player, the
player could receive "shipments" of resources or technology, to aid
in ship construction.

This topic brings another question of mine out. How many planets and stars would generate per server? Hundreds? Thousands? What would be too much for one server to handle?

To my knowledge, Frost feel free to enlighten my answer, but I believe a server will contain a single world and a space dimension. Thousands, even hundreds of worlds would... well... not happen, the server would have to have dual 8 core processors and 1TB of ram not to mention a 12 TB raid just to store that much data. Bit exaggerated, but you see my point.

Doc. My thinking on space ship size/scale comes from a bit of "research". By reasearch I should say "going out and seeing how big stuff is.

Have you by chance made a 100x100x50 square? That's 500k square blocks. That's huge, but by the game standards it's not really that large and from what I can tell about how well the game renders on my PC, it's well within any limitations.

Now my thinking as to why big ships wont be as common as some might think is because of the resources needed to make them.

What I think we need is a generic kind of space metal, like a copper/iron alloy that makes special ship blocks or something of that nature, where basically instead of 9 ingots = 1 block, it would be more along the lines of 1 ingot of alloy = 1 ship block, and the alloy is just 2 ingots. This would allow us to spawn our space metals in the quantities that will be needed via natural generation. Obviously we don't want just one "space ship block", so making a variety of mix and match alloys would be something to consider, but I think if we can figure out a way to increase resources avalible without unbalancing the economic system, big ships could become a common sight.

That's just my 2 cents though.

I sort of figured building factories would become the norm for handling ship production. Set it up like buidcraft or something to automate ingredients A and B getting processed into material C and then used to fabricate component D, E, and F. That's the only way to handle the volume of material we are talking about. And for the sake of argument, we grant people who have specialized for materials manufacturing the ability to do process the stuff much more efficiently, like macerators on steroids, then that sort of person would be rather valuable for a group building a fleet.

Same for miners who can pull more ore out of the ground and actual ship builders who can reduce the cost of components made from those materials.