New idea for planet shapes.

[Iv121]

Yes, that's been the plan since forever. However, there are some impossible to avoid issues with it, like distortion and seams which require teleporting around and concealing. It's much more complicated to render, and will necessarily warp as you change altitude. You won't be able to dig too deep or build too high without terrain looking significantly wider or narrower than it should, respectively.

This cube model can work in real space and therefore solve all those problems, which would be amazing if we can make it work.

I know you hate loading screens but it might be the best solution here. You can also do clouds that abstract your vision and stuff so that when you close that much you are moved to a flat plain without noticing. BTW coding a cube will be no less nightmare in the corners.

[Prototype]

Loading screens are inevitable, it's just a matter of how long it takes to load.

[Error]

I want spin gravity on mah ship. Beyond that, I find the normal walk-off-an-edge-and-auto-reorient works best.

[Laserbilly]

I don't think I ever weighed in on this idea on the old forum, but I LOVE the idea of square planets in futurecraft!

I don't have any experience with programing, but I feel like this might be easier to implement. My thoughts on gravity orientation are that you outline the planet-cube with a bedrock frame like this:



and the only way to switch orientation is to walk around the outside of the frame or (if you've dug a tunnel to China) through a buildable elevator entity.

Is this helpful or should I just keep my ideas to myself?

[Laserbilly]

This brings up two issues that I can think of.

1. Digging

Spoiler:

If a player on a Side A orientation is digging near the Side A/C border and digs down and out through Side C, he could make himself fall off the planet.

My proposed solution is to make all the blocks (air/water included) between the bedrock borders unbreakable/impassable unless you're on that side's orientation.

2. Gravity Oriented Blocks (half-blocks, beds, sand, gravel, and water)

When a player switches orientations, are the blocks supposed to switch too? How will that effect half-blocks being rendered and what will that do to water flow? Will it start to spill down and wreck the crops you just planted?

For the half-blocks, I think it might just be best for them to be able to be placed vertically too. I think sand and gravel's gravity function could just be turned off. But I have no idea what could work for water...That one's all yours.

[Iv121]

For the original idea it doesn't feel right to limit you with bedrock borders though some limit will be needed.
For 2 the answer is it will screw them up. Frost mantioned it already, water redstone and stuff ...

The planet should fit the theme you are working with. Unfortunately for you Laserbilly the theme you chose for futurecraft is closer to realistic. Cube planets will have hard time to fit in. Just replace the sun I used in my signatures with a cube and you'll see what I'm talking about. As you know already I'm against free roaming on planets because we simply won't have the resources for that. Unless performance and stuff will be significantly improved in Futurecraft (I mean SIGNIFICANTLY like 4 times better which will be quite hard) and even then you will need A LOT of servers to host all those planets which is far bayond our budget. People will want to have their own systems and not planets anyway, you can play regular minecraft if you want a planet. I said already that I imagine a planet as a hub. We can build a city and stuff and then allow players to dock with it.

Additionally if let's say we have 30 systems to give plenty of space for our space adventurers to do their bloody business and like 4 planets per system, we get 120 planets. THATS A LOT OF HUGE MINECRAFT WORLDS. People will spread too thin and it becomes a single player rather than multiplayer experience. To overcome this players will gather in specific areas which mean 99% of the planet is unused and totally useless, which brings us back to the hub model. Maybe you could have similar restricted areas on the planet where players can wander and build but not whole planets. It is nice and ambitious to go huge but it is sometimes pointless Like building a 1km x 1km square castle to host a 1m x 1m throne.

Reducing the planets to specific areas upon landing will not only significantly simplify the code but also solve us many other issues yet feel exactly the same for the player.

[fr0stbyte124]

Hmm, that's true. One thing we've never really addressed is how to balance freedom of movement with the ability to actually find things. The only way players will stumble into one another on a regular server is to keep the area relatively confined. If the entire world is open, and if there are frontier worlds out there with no player activity whatsoever, it's going to be a pretty lonely existence. Resource management aside, We want players to interact with one another in a manageable amount of space without making them feel restricted. One advantage we have is tremendously fast transportation and presumably better communications and detection ability. It's possible we could take advantage of one of those elements to let people spread out more without isolating them, closer to the real world. I'm not against the planetary hub idea but I want to make sure that whatever we do doesn't feel like a restriction or a shoehorned in game mechanic, like Spore. We can almost definitely hub transportation between systems via the stargates.

Let's see, if we took a more realistic approach to energy use, large ships would stay parked in orbit, and transportation in-gravity takes a lot more power. You would want to use something like space elevators to move resources off planet. We could use that as a planetary trade hub, not restricting the player to using it, but most people with business there would gravitate to the area and set up shop along the trade routes. That said, I don't want a space elevator or a station to be a default part of every planet. They should be a major investment for whomever runs the place, as well as a sign that they've made it to the big leagues.

Also, I don't think 4x improvement is terribly unrealistic. Just look at the memory footprint on a server. Most of the stress is client-side and comes from naive resource handling (in the algorithm sense of the word. Not saying Notch is a noob), which is precisely what you are going to see major improvements to.

Of course I wasn't talking about any of that stuff. Let's focus on the controls at the edge of planets for the time being. I'm still not positive this model will work.

[Iv121]

Oh yea and when it comes to space elevators I'd prefer to pick the less realistic better looking cities :P, adds more variety over a giant tube that can collapse at any moment going to outer space. Basically by having the restricted planet world we only need to handle transition between space and a let's say round planet to a plain world.

[fr0stbyte124]

I'm thinking more along the lines of discouragement or path of least resistance, rather than out-flat restriction. It would be handy for caching terrain to have everyone start in the same area, but I don't think it will be reliable enough that should be banking on its availability.

Something to keep in mind is so long as the server has sufficient memory, tick cost is predominately based on the number of active entities/tile entities and not the amount of terrain in memory. Some blocks have counters and other meta data, but in the bigger scheme, those operations are fast and cheap. In fact, the main source of lag in a client is not in simulating these blocks but re-rendering their parent chunks wholesale whenever there is a change. Our rendering pipeline can do partial in-place updates when there is no change to geometry, so block lighting, texture changing, etc. So with that being the case, the server cost will primarily be from entity management, player or otherwise. I'm hoping better multithreading can help with that.

Getting off topic again, but one thing which just occured to me might be worth doing for general entity physics is to load collision data into contiguous blocks of unmanaged memory, and then use calls to native binaries so we can do stuff with SSE. Come to think of it, we could dedicate an entire thread to moving data to and from the SSE engine, and then use it for tons of stuff. OpenCL would be the other alternative, but it doesn't play nicely with shaders on older cards; they compete for resources and real-estate on the gpu.

[Shadowcatbot]

To avoid the dig from A to C and fly off of the world, Just place invisible "gravity lines" that move from the planets center block out to the farthest corners passing these lines should automatically fling you around to be oriented with that sides gravity well, As for water it should just bend around and the same physics should apply.

[Talon93]

does this mean I can't make Dyson Sphere... Er... I mean Dyson Cubes.

[fr0stbyte124]

To avoid the dig from A to C and fly off of the world, Just place invisible "gravity lines" that move from the planets center sphere out to the farthest corners passing these lines should automatically fling you around to be oriented with that sides gravity well, As for water it should just bend around and the same physics should apply.

If the orientation is too abrupt, you could end up in a situation where the floor you are standing on is considered a wall regardless of which surface you are standing on. It's all a matter of degree, and I need to figure out what degree will work the best. Ideally, I'd like players to be able to walk on either surface near the edge, but do so in a way which won't be completely disorienting.

does this mean I can't make Dyson Sphere... Er... I mean Dyson Cubes.

On the contrary, the sphere model would have prevented you from making a continuous structure all the way around a planet. The cube model has no such restriction.

[Talon93]

To avoid the dig from A to C and fly off of the world, Just place invisible "gravity lines" that move from the planets center sphere out to the farthest corners passing these lines should automatically fling you around to be oriented with that sides gravity well, As for water it should just bend around and the same physics should apply.

If the orientation is too abrupt, you could end up in a situation where the floor you are standing on is considered a wall regardless of which surface you are standing on. It's all a matter of degree, and I need to figure out what degree will work the best. Ideally, I'd like players to be able to walk on either surface near the edge, but do so in a way which won't be completely disorienting.

Yea, I think I will just stick around the middle of a face, not the corners

[Shadowcatbot]

You do realise if we go with a cube planet there will always be that one dirt house on the corner of the planet 3 dimensions FTW!

[cats]

Why not just have six squares like this

Spoiler:

that are faces of the cube from orbit? When you walk from one square, you just end up on the one adjacent. Then we don't have to worry about flippy gravity or warping of the landscape. I know we were trying to avoid restriction by bedrock, but this might just be a lot easier. About nukes: Why don't they just make a shallow crater at the 'splody point, then affect the top layer of the surrounding terrain? Then we can have those beautiful glasslands and planetary siege.