The size of a planet

That's sorta the point. It's designed as such to be folded into a sphere - they meet at the lines along those seams.

...That'd not work.

Tiel+ wrote:

That's sorta the point. It's designed as such to be folded into a sphere - they meet at the lines along those seams.

Well right Tiel I get it , take an orange and peel it, you will get what you see right on that image, however it is not consistent flat land, the transition between a standard MC plane and a sphere becomes impossible unless you turn it into a fake backdrop like I suggested , not necessarily representing the actual surface.

With alterations to the image you can use that peeling of our planet and having an actual flat land, or even better, make the backdrop regardless of the original planet. I mean yes I won't put Earth-Like Terrain onto Mars, however if you look at Mars from space you will hardly notice terrain. Make it reddish, add some terrain to the picture purely for texture, it will look identical to an image you would have generated from the surface. Moreover you will be able to use again that same texture for any other planet that looks similar. This is especially valid for gas giants where even true terrain will look simply one colored ball .

Desdenova wrote:

...That'd not work.

Care to give an explanation?

I'd remind you the idea cats and you will see why. You get a sphere, as you close to it, it slowly deforms until you get a planet, you open that image you posted, that peeling until you get exactly what you see on it, and what do you see ? A bunch of terrain with holes in the middle, exactly waht you see on the image.

Iv121 wrote:

I'd remind you the idea cats and you will see why. You get a sphere, as you close to it, it slowly deforms until you get a planet, you open that image you posted, that peeling until you get exactly what you see on it, and what do you see ? A bunch of terrain with holes in the middle, exactly waht you see on the image.

Well no, the edge of one part would have to lead into the edge of the next part. . . That would mean retarded poles though.

See you cannot warp a rectangle around a sphere without cutting parts of it, these parts are missing parts of the world that you will not see , these are the holes in between. By connecting them side to side again all you get is the original sphere again.

Just stick with a flat world that loops when you walk around it, Then warp it into a flat sphere when in orbit. It's not going to look perfect, And their is not going to be a way to do it perfectly, So lets just stick with the best plan that requires the least effort.

MercurySteam wrote:

Desdenova wrote:

...That'd not work.

Care to give an explanation?

Pretty much what Iv is saying.

_Shadowcat_ wrote:

So lets just stick with the best plan that requires the least effort.

*cough*dark ages*cough*

Desdenova wrote:

MercurySteam wrote:

Desdenova wrote:

...That'd not work.

Care to give an explanation?

Pretty much what Iv is saying.

_Shadowcat_ wrote:

So lets just stick with the best plan that requires the least effort.

*cough*dark ages*cough*

I'm sorry but I'm pretty certain computers are a hell of a lot better then slaves, Their much smarter.

_Shadowcat_ wrote:

I'm sorry but I'm pretty certain computers are a hell of a lot better then slaves, Their much smarter.

Wait, are you talking about NPCs there? Or is this a metaphor I'm not yet getting?

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

How is that any different from a cube?

OK, hypotheticalationalishing time.

You are standing on a face of a 16x16x16 cube world. The cube world is 'normal', that is, it is just a single chunk, with anything that has a specific direction normally(I.e. grass, flowers) modified to face toward the center(so each face looks like a normal flat world would) and mobs and other moving stuff modified to fall toward the center, but only in one of six directions(so, they don't look like the are leaning, or start sliding, if near a edge).

So, you as a player, stand near a edge. Until you cross it, you stand and fall 'down' normally, and are 2 blocks in size in the x dimension, and 1 block in size in the y dimension. So you walk over the edge, what happens? You fall perpendicular to your previous 'down', and are 1 block in size in the x dimension, and 2 in the y dimension. Sure if its just a normal edge you might run into a little bit of clipping issues and that's it, but what if there is a flat wall going up from the edge, do you just smack your face onto it, fall back down, then return to your previous orientation? And since these invisible transition planes would logically extend out from the surface of the cube (and look like a X if you look at a side of the cube from a distance) what if you pillared up, then leaped toward the transition so you crossed it mid fall. You'd fall past it, transition so that you fall back over it, transition so you fall over it again, and repeat until you hit the ground, or exited the game due to the nausea of rotating your view 90° every second. And what if you dug straight down a few blocks from the edge? When you transitioned, would your head immediately teleport into solid rock because your 1x1 tunnel straight down is now technically straight sideways, and your 2 blocks tall?


A distorted cube(a flat world visually distorted into a cube) would have none of these issues, because the edge is merely a visual distortion, and the world is actually flat and thus works normally. The distortion would look bizarre from say, underground if you were to, say, dig out a big chunk along the edge, but at least you don't have heads teleporting into solid rock. A sphere would have these same issues, but far less apparent. You then have the issue of the impossibility of distorting a flat object into a seamless sphere, however. You could use the suggested odd spikey-looking layout, but I sure as hell would not want to deal with transitions on that, since we'd be trying to bend and seamlessly glue together square blocks, and the poles... yikes.

Could we have it so no matter which face of the pseudo-cube you fly down on, it always is the actual, loaded face? Or maybe you can't cross faces of the cube on foot, but have to fly to get to them.

Buggy1997123 wrote:

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

How is that any different from a cube?

OK, hypotheticalationalishing time.

You are standing on a face of a 16x16x16 cube world. The cube world is 'normal', that is, it is just a single chunk, with anything that has a specific direction normally(I.e. grass, flowers) modified to face toward the center(so each face looks like a normal flat world would) and mobs and other moving stuff modified to fall toward the center, but only in one of six directions(so, they don't look like the are leaning, or start sliding, if near a edge).

So, you as a player, stand near a edge. Until you cross it, you stand and fall 'down' normally, and are 2 blocks in size in the x dimension, and 1 block in size in the y dimension. So you walk over the edge, what happens? You fall perpendicular to your previous 'down', and are 1 block in size in the x dimension, and 2 in the y dimension. Sure if its just a normal edge you might run into a little bit of clipping issues and that's it, but what if there is a flat wall going up from the edge, do you just smack your face onto it, fall back down, then return to your previous orientation? And since these invisible transition planes would logically extend out from the surface of the cube (and look like a X if you look at a side of the cube from a distance) what if you pillared up, then leaped toward the transition so you crossed it mid fall. You'd fall past it, transition so that you fall back over it, transition so you fall over it again, and repeat until you hit the ground, or exited the game due to the nausea of rotating your view 90° every second. And what if you dug straight down a few blocks from the edge? When you transitioned, would your head immediately teleport into solid rock because your 1x1 tunnel straight down is now technically straight sideways, and your 2 blocks tall?


A distorted cube(a flat world visually distorted into a cube) would have none of these issues, because the edge is merely a visual distortion, and the world is actually flat and thus works normally. The distortion would look bizarre from say, underground if you were to, say, dig out a big chunk along the edge, but at least you don't have heads teleporting into solid rock. A sphere would have these same issues, but far less apparent. You then have the issue of the impossibility of distorting a flat object into a seamless sphere, however. You could use the suggested odd spikey-looking layout, but I sure as hell would not want to deal with transitions on that, since we'd be trying to bend and seamlessly glue together square blocks, and the poles... yikes.

But, would it blend?

-snip-

Well compared to sphere planets cube planets are ugly, poorly fitting the style we set for the game.

Deforming a cube into a sphere is out of the question, right?

Deforming a cube into a sphere and expecting it to work like a sphere at ground level is out of the question, yes.

Hold on, where did I put that link...here we go.

Ben Arnold is doing round planets for Seed of Andromeda.  Because I don't want to draw out diagrams, I'll let him explain the problem.

Iv just thinks it'll look goofy.

I know, but everything looks goofy from one perspective or another.

Take a look at ships ppl build for example, though they look pixelated from the distance they still they look smooth.

Iv121 wrote:

Take a look at ships ppl build for example, though they look pixelated from the distance they still they look smooth.

However, they only have one down, one up, they are not suspectible to the problems the concept of a planet out of cubes has.
You can't compare that.

I’m talking about design currently not about actual implementation. I already told you the actual implementation like 100 times already, in order to make it you have a planet mesh and a planet world, the world is flat and all that happens is that the player is teleported to the correct relative co-ordinates on it depending on where he enters the atmosphere ... It is entirely possible and mostly a design choice between the perks of a cube and a sphere planets.

Fine, we'll do this again.

I distort the cube into a sphere like this


Now I want to land on this spot on the planet.  From orbit it looks like any other spot because that far up you can do whatever the hell you want.



Now I am down on the surface.  What do these three square chunks that border one another on two sides look like?  And what about the ones beyond the corner?  What do I do with them?  Once chunk out from the corner the perimeter makes a 4x4x4 equilateral triangle, and so on as far as the eye can see.

Anywhere else on the sphere is fine, but once you get within line of sight of those corners, there is nothing I can do to hide that.

If you mean a completely flat projection, if you follow the contour of the flat map, it's not going to match all the way across.  You can make it match for any single position, but only if you don't move from that position. If the map is rectangular, up at the poles chunks either converge to a single point or there is a disk which rotates much more slowly than your change in longitude. If the map bulges along the equator, you end up displacing chunks which were previously aligned when you were at higher latitudes because you are injecting more and more chunks into the seam. No amount of shader tricks is going to make that not look freaky.

Again, none of that matters from space, but on the surface it's just not possible to do so long as Minecraft is made of squares.