The size of a planet

Tau wrote:

I'd have to say I'm with Vinyl on this one, worlds ought to be at least a kilometer or so on a side.

Also:

Buggy1997123 wrote:

-stuff-

BUGGY YOU'RE BACK!

Yeah, I thought progress had stagnated, but I ofc still have the old forums faved so I thought I might as well stop by and see how its going. Funnly enough, I didn't actually ever fav the new forums, I always just followed the link here. Anyway, glad to see its still lively around here, I should be more active now that I know stuff is happening.

You are right in that 5000x5000 is too big but in the same time anything smaller would look comical near oe of these dreads that float in space there ...

500x500 is *tiny*. Try mapping out an area in MC that small and running around in it. It's smaller than the ancient Minecraft Classic maps. 1000x1000 isn't that much better. Remember than a zoomed-out map in vMC shows a 2048x2048 area. Those maps aren't that big. Again, craft a map and try running around to fill it out. It's a large area, yes, but it isn't huge, and it's a lot less terrain than you'd cover in a normal vMC save. I think that should be an absolute minimum size, and bigger would still be much better.

Iv121 wrote:

You are right in that 5000x5000 is too big but in the same time anything smaller would look comical near oe of these dreads that float in space there ...

Most ships don't even break 700 blocks.

3000x3000 would be fine. The main focus is space.

I tried making a 2km long ship, and I can safely say that there wont be any floating around

Tiel made this huge one that was 36 km long.

I think it was Jedi, actually. It was his very, very, very, very, very long and thin one.

Commander Error wrote:

I think it was Jedi, actually. It was his very, very, very, very, very long and thin one.

I hope you are talking about the Bestine

Prototype wrote:

Commander Error wrote:

I think it was Jedi, actually. It was his very, very, very, very, very long and thin one.

I hope you are talking about the Bestine

Yes.

And I see my attempt at humor has fallen flat on it's arse. Again.

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

Well to this day I have a 600m long ship, if I actually set on it I bet I could make a 1km long one but even 600 is enough and smaller planets will look quite small with one of these floating around, imagine a ship 1/3 size of a planet ...

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

The toothpick of the gods...

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

Did you just copy+paste it for 4 hours?

Laibach wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

Did you just copy+paste it for 4 hours?

//stack >9000

Prototype wrote:

Laibach wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

Did you just copy+paste it for 4 hours?

//stack >9000

I built a segment ten blocks long and copied it. Then I copied that, and then that, until I had a segment six kilometers long. Then I copied that until Minecraft crashed, and then built ends onto it.

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Prototype wrote:

Laibach wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

Did you just copy+paste it for 4 hours?

//stack >9000

I built a segment ten blocks long and copied it. Then I copied that, and then that, until I had a segment six kilometers long. Then I copied that until Minecraft crashed, and then built ends onto it.

So you copy and pasted it for four hours

In any case, that's the exception, not the rule - the Bestine is hardly combat effective anyway. 1000 or so would be the maximum length, assuming things don't go south and it has to be 600 or 400 (something I wouldn't mind, tbh, ships bigger than that tend to look absurdly impractical)

Comrade Tiel wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Prototype wrote:

Laibach wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

Yes, that was me. 36 kilometers long and 19 meters wide.

Did you just copy+paste it for 4 hours?

//stack >9000

I built a segment ten blocks long and copied it. Then I copied that, and then that, until I had a segment six kilometers long. Then I copied that until Minecraft crashed, and then built ends onto it.

So you copy and pasted it for four hours

In any case, that's the exception, not the rule - the Bestine is hardly combat effective anyway. 1000 or so would be the maximum length, assuming things don't go south and it has to be 600 or 400 (something I wouldn't mind, tbh, ships bigger than that tend to look absurdly impractical)

Nah, the pasting only took maybe 20 minutes. It took longer to build the segment in a way that I was happy with than to copy it.

Iv121 wrote:

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

-there will be distortion and improperly mapped areas because it is impossible to project a rectangular mesh onto a sphere.  We might be able to do it but it will necessarily be more restricting.

-it will take longer to develop and make the math much more difficult.  1:1 spacial representation will always be the simplest.

-there's no reason we can't make planets smaller. The current scale was simply eyeballed as a satisfying size to support continents. A fully generated 3D world will be too big to be usable at any scale. We have to rely on at least partial procedural generation.

-gravity is about the only objective benefit of the projection strategy. But we need to deal with reoriented entities anyway because of space, so we can't simply ignore it.

I think spherical worlds would look cool, too, but I don't know that they are worth the trouble they bring.

Again I will explain: - Because the planet is merely an image it can look like anything we want, maybe even nothing near the original, like colored in beautiful atmospheric colors, making a purple planet if the terrain is generally purple for example, you gonna argue that is hard ? That is harder for me as the guy who makes these pictures to make them look cool and that is quite easy to do.

Actually, that's a good idea. We can make planets much, much larger (like, planet sized), and then just put flat artwork over them that fits the planet's type. We won't need funny stretched spherical planets, nor broken-corner cube planets.

This would be so much easier the game wasn't made of cubes.

Or we could make the planets large enough that the distortion wouldn't be noticeable, and we can have a flat project (no mountains or 3D features to keep it simple).
Like this picture:

Spoiler:

But that's exactly the problem.  There will always be a discrepancy between how the world looks on a globe and how it looks on the ground.  For any single area you can match one to the other perfectly, but no matter where you do it and no matter what shape the projection takes, you will end up with a seam somewhere that you can't hide.

fr0stbyte124 wrote:

But that's exactly the problem.  There will always be a discrepancy between how the world looks on a globe and how it looks on the ground.  For any single area you can match one to the other perfectly, but no matter where you do it and no matter what shape the projection takes, you will end up with a seam somewhere that you can't hide.

Unless we make planets flat!

Just kidding! I think a flat projection of the terrain onto a sphere (actually, if it's a flat projection, perhaps a cube will be better?) is the simplest idea to implement and doesn't require 4 dimensional topography and deferential calculus, and would reduce the distortion.

So, you simply make the world generate as the net of cube, then take a birds-eye image of each face and project it onto the corresponding face of the cube. And the terrain would look flat from space anyway so who cares!

If it's a cube, three sides will converge at a point.  Nothing sharing the topology of a sphere can be represented on a uniform grid surface without tearing or seams, and that goes for cubes, cylinders, and dodecahedrons.  If your world is naturally a cube, it's going to have 90 degree edges somewhere, and these edges cannot simply be relocated when you get too close.  It would be easy enough to deform it from up in orbit, but you're sure as hell going to notice the edge of a planet when you are standing on it.

Ok, so both primary proposed methoids have serious issues:

Spherical planets
Pros: easily made from a simple distortion of trivially easy to make flat worlds
Cons:distortion causes nonsensical geometry, literally impossible to map without seams due to geometry of a sphere

Cubical planets
Pros: fairly easy to create(effectively a bunch of cubic chunks in a cube shape with grass and trees growing sideways or upsidedown on parts of it), easier to handle as a 3d object(via the virtue of actually being a simple 3 dimensional lump of cubes as opposed to a effectively 2 dimensional flat object distorted into a sphere), no nonsensical geometry
Cons:hellva wonky gravity at the edges and core


So...

*lightbulb*

We take the best parts of both, and leave the bad parts behind.

Flat world, bent to form a cube.

Bam.

No seams, no confuzzlizing gravity, fairly easy to create. The only issues I can think of is that you still have to handle a 2d world as a 3d one, but I imagine it'd be easier than an outright sphere. You'd also still have to handle joining the edges, but I can't imagine it'd be harder than the edges on a sphere. You'd also get some bizzare geometry, but it would probably only be noticable at the edges.

Edge gravity would be fine, since you'd be walking over a apparently-curved actually-flat surface. And its completely possible distort a flat object into a seamless cube.

Heck, someone with decent shader knowledge could literally have a working mockup made of this by tommorow. The GLSL shader mod is quite capable of distorting stuff like this.

How is that any different from a cube?

What if we make the flat terrain so that it would conform to a sphereif it were folded?
Like this
We would get minimal noticeable seams and dat sexy sphere.

Problematic, see when the world is flat you will see the image you have there, but what will you do with the gaps in between ? They do not exist on the sphere world ...