The size of a planet

I generated a full-scale map sized to one face of a planet, so that we can get an idea of the scale we are dealing with.


Currently, a planet face is 5000x5000.  The image above has a scale of 1px = 4 blocks, so every chunk is 4x4 px in this image.  The max size the renderer will handle is 8192x8192.  I generated a world to that size for my own testing, and it takes up 1.26 GB on disk.  We'll have to work on that, too.

Moral of the story is, this sucker is seriously huge.  Starting at one edge, it would take you a full day and night cycle walking in a straight line to get to the other side on foot.  I can't believe we ever seriously considered 20km.  The other thing this brings up is that even with more mountainous terrain than you normally see here, at this scale the vairations in terrain are very smooth.  I may need to take further advantage of this for distant rendering.

If anybody wants the full sized 8km map, I can host it, but it's 29MB in size.

Let's keep in mind it is not just 5000x5000, bur rather 5000x5000x5000 and that it has at least x6 more spaces to walk on , it is huge, needlessly huge actually as I said before there is no way you will use up so much space, yet for realism planets are supposed to be that huge ... So now that we see it fake planets anyone ? as for the world linked to them you can play with the size to find the exact one that suits your needs and it will also look much more tidy and pretty.

Iv121 wrote:

Let's keep in mind it is not just  5000x5000, bur rather  5000x5000x5000 and that it has at least x6 more spaces to walk on , it is huge, needlessly huge actually as I said before there is no way you will use up so much space, yet for realism planets are supposed to be that huge ... So now that we see it fake planets anyone ? as for the world linked to them you can play with the size to find the exact one that suits your needs and it will also look much more tidy and pretty.

Please just bloody shut up about this. We've been over it too many times already, and you're still the only person who thinks it's a good idea. All you are doing is annoying the rest of us by bringing up issues that should have been laid to rest months ago.

Oh for the love of god don't do this to this thread as well... -.-

Imho that size will be more than sufficient. Good job.

Iv121 wrote:

I didn't bring it up, YOU bring it up

Er, no, actually, that's nonsense. Yours was the first reply to this thread, and you specifically said "As I said before" "now that we see it fake planets anyone?" That is clearly and intentionally attempting to revive the previous discussion, which is, in fact, what the term "bring it up" means. This sentence that you wrote isn't even an argument—it's a flat denial of what is rather obviously the truth. You have stopped attempting to support your points and reverted instead to apparently accusing me of making your post, and with that any argument you may once have had has lost all credibility whatsoever.

Concerning the generation of the landscape, what happens if there's a mountain at a planetary edge? And how are gravity and biomes going to work eventually?

So are we still going with an actual cube landscape or are we going with a flat one that appears as a cube from space?

@MercurySteam
Yes, but this exercise has made it pretty clear that we can't simply pre-generate even the surface of planets the current way it is done.  We'll need to focus even more on procedural generation than I though.

@Saravanth
It's easy enough to bend the noise function over the edge.  It would be cool to have more organized biomes.  Still working out how gravity will operate.

@Iv and LJS
Stop bickering like an old married couple, and someone tell me what this fake planet thing is.  Is this about the spherical distortion?  Because that would be much harder to render. Actually, that's not quite right. Distorting a cube to a sphere could probably be done with a little forethought, but it would still be functionally a cube, complete with edge of the worlds. There's no getting rid of that without introducing artifacts everywhere.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

@Iv and LJS
Stop bickering like an old married couple, and someone tell me what this fake planet thing is.  Is this about the spherical distortion?  Because that would be much harder to render.  Actually, that's not quite right.  Distorting a cube to a sphere could probably be done with a little forethought, but it would still be functionally a cube, complete with edge of the worlds.  There's no getting rid of that without introducing artifacts everywhere.

Iv continues to insist that we shouldn't actually have planets in FC. By 'fake planet', I believe he means that planets should just be pictures of spheres that we can't interact with in any way.

How about this- We 'wrap' two ends of the map together (Equatorial) to make a cylinder, and then project that onto a sphere. We can walk equatorially all the way around, but north and south are locked- you can't go past the map borders (Insert something of Polar Tempests or something). When we go down, no matter how deep, it remains square- no deforming. It looks like a sphere from afar, but acts like a normal map in which you go back one way once you reach the end.

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

@Iv and LJS
Stop bickering like an old married couple, and someone tell me what this fake planet thing is.  Is this about the spherical distortion?  Because that would be much harder to render.  Actually, that's not quite right.  Distorting a cube to a sphere could probably be done with a little forethought, but it would still be functionally a cube, complete with edge of the worlds.  There's no getting rid of that without introducing artifacts everywhere.

Iv continues to insist that we shouldn't actually have planets in FC. By 'fake planet', I believe he means that planets should just be pictures of spheres that we can't interact with in any way.

What, like Starmade?  Lol, that's not happening.

Quadraxis wrote:

How about this- We 'wrap' two ends of the map together (Equatorial) to make a cylinder, and then project that onto a sphere. We can walk equatorially all the way around, but north and south are locked- you can't go past the map borders (Insert something of Polar Tempests or something). When we go down, no matter how deep, it remains square- no deforming. It looks like a sphere from afar, but acts like a normal map in which you go back one way once you reach the end.

Actually, that's nearly exactly what I had recommended back when we started.  There's still a thread on it somewhere on this forum.  The only difference is that version had the cylinder caps as a visitable area you enter via teleportation.  In the end, it started becoming more trouble than it was worth, too many special cases and artifacts, plus, we still have to deal with arbitrary gravities in space.  We may still try the spheres before the end, but I would prefer a literal spacial representation from a rendering standpoint.

Are you kiddin like starmade ? That's ugly, and as I see nobody bothered to read, here I am writing it again: You have a mesh made out of blocks , a picture doesn't matter, but the second you get close you warp to a standard mc plane and the second you get up into the atmosphere you get back to space, simple ,easy to execute, elegant and good looking. Allows for roud planets in a cube world, speeds up the release of the mod as this is the exact part Frost is stuck on as far as I remember from his logs.

Can't you just make a separate thread for your ideas instead of spamming everything else about them? That way you'd finally see the forum's thoughts about them clearly once and for all.

My idea was similar to Iv's. In essence, we keep the normal MC plane, but in space, we take that map and project it onto a sphere, dealing with deformation as needed.


The map would be like the Civilization IV or V maps- Can go across left right, but not up down. We can't really do up and down, because merely wrapping the map like that would make there was only 1 hemisphere, as we would come up realistically come up 180 degrees away.

Wait, so let's say we keep that wrapping idea. We split the map like so;



The world wraps perfectly left-to-right, along the equator. However, the weird happening things is with the poles. So what do we do?

When we approach the poles, the game engine calls up that you are approaching 90 Deg. South Latitude at 90 Deg. West longitude. it begins placing the chunks from above 90 Deg South Latitude from 90 Deg. EAST longitude past that line, at least, only rendering those but not simulating them. One the player crosses that line, it instantly teleports them to the correct corresponding latitude (90 Deg East in this case), and it doesn't need to render since it was already rendered, and the chunks behind them stop simulating but remain rendered. That way, we avoid visual artifacts, the polar tempests, and whatever else we may run into.

How do we wrap it well, though? Simple. We force the generator to make the chunks at 90 Deg. South and North be at the same height of eachother, and free of caves, and the same biome (presumably ice), but making sure it still matches the borders of other chunks.

How are space-ships handled? They are teleported once all players pass the marking line.

Pets or followers? Teleport behind the player a few seconds or so after he crosses the line.

Anything else that may be a problem?

Oh, and the map is projected onto a sphere for space-view.

Yeah an improvement on my idea. Again I believe frost can calculate the required distortion for the image and if not I think ppl won't mind if it has a premade image attached to it. As a result it will quite speed up the development process and although we want a quality work we still want to complete it during this decade ...

You have no real information about how much longer it will take if it's approached as is. And besides, it probably doesn't matter, but I for one would mind spherical (not to mention DISTORTED) planets with premade images, loading screens and unaccessable poles.

Other than that, any idea on how many planets a solar system/server can handle?

Depends on what you gonna do with the planet, if you gonna put 5000x5000x5000 cubes not many because just one face of it weighted 1.2GB for Frost ...

How about divide 5000x5000 into a cube instead of a massive 5000^3.

No, no, less than 1000² per face would be a bit too small, now wouldn't it? I'd say for big planets 4000³ would be the bare minimum to provide the feeling of a relatively big planet, the player shouldn't get from one edge to the other too quickly...

Iv121 wrote:

I think ppl won't mind if it has a premade image attached to it

Speak for yourself. I would mind that very much.

Iv121 wrote:

Depends on what you gonna do with the planet, if you gonna put 5000x5000x5000 cubes not many because just one face of it weighted 1.2GB for Frost ...

Pretty sure his post said this was 29MB, not 1.2GB. That was the 8192x8192 one.

Vinyl wrote:

How about divide 5000x5000 into a cube instead of a massive 5000^3

Because that's tiny. That would be a planet less than 300 blocks on a side.

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Vinyl wrote:

How about divide 5000x5000 into a cube instead of a massive 5000^3

Because that's tiny. That would be a planet less than 300 blocks on a side.

Each face would have 4,166,666.67 blocks on the surface.

Vinyl wrote:

Prototype wrote:

Vinyl wrote:

How about divide 5000x5000 into a cube instead of a massive 5000^3

Because that's tiny. That would be a planet less than 300 blocks on a side.

Each face would have 4,166,666.67 blocks on the surface.

833² per face. That IS tiny.

The big map is a 29MB png.  The Minecraft world the image was generated from is 1.2GB.

Spherical distortion is much more difficult than flat.  You get to avoid changing the direction of gravity, but I don't think it is worth the problems it will cause.  It certainly won't reduce development time.

The interior of the planet will be procedurally generated as it is explored.  Anything else would be orders of magnitude too large to deal with.  I thought at least pre-generating the surface would be alright, but it looks like even that might be too large to be practical.  However, if we assume most of a world will remain natural, we can procedurally re-generate a lot of the world data, like elevations and biomes, quite quickly.  Take a look at amidst for an example of this.

Code:

   5000^3 = 125,000,000,000
6 * 5000^2 =     150,000,000

*Edit*
From an engine standpoint, the next useful reduction in size is 4096^3, including atmosphere. That's 1/8 the current volume. Personally, I think that's probably too small.

Apropos biomes, how much will the code for biome generation differ from the one in minecraft?