New idea for planet shapes.

[Prototype]

Alright that's it ppl ! We are going to win the market with it ! The game without loading screens ! Who cares what inside as long as you don't have to wait for it .

Pretty sure nobody is making any money from it, except maybe mojang

[Ivan2006]

Alright that's it ppl ! We are going to win the market with it ! The game without loading screens ! Who cares what inside as long as you don't have to wait for it .

Pretty sure nobody is making any money from it, except maybe mojang

Still, if we want FC to become the MMO Mac wanted it to be, we´ll need many users, leading to an "advertisment" campaign being useful.

[Iv121]

I was being sarcastic. I doubt people care if there are (or not) loading screens present.

[Ivan2006]

I was being sarcastic. I doubt people care if there are (or not) loading screens present.

I know you were.
It was obvious.
I answered to Prototype.

[Avenger_7]

I don't think it will work like that. Gravity probably won't be attached to blocks. It will be attached to planets, which are magic and which will continue to pull you down with the same acceleration regardless of how much mass they have.

I just noticed something...does this mean that by mining away an entire planet you can create a black hole?

[҉]

I don't think it will work like that. Gravity probably won't be attached to blocks. It will be attached to planets, which are magic and which will continue to pull you down with the same acceleration regardless of how much mass they have.

I just noticed something...does this mean that by mining away an entire planet you can create a black hole?

Planet cores will probably be bedrock, because that would actually sorta make sense and because it solves this kind of problem. If you mine an entire planet, you get a ~kilometre[sup]3[/sup] of bedrock.

[fr0stbyte124]

Gravity doesn't need to be Newtonian. It just needs to behave in the way players expect. In fact, if you drop a sand block while standing on top of it, you'll see that objects don't even fall at the same rate.

With the cube model, you could hollow out a planet if you wanted. I can't guarantee that it will be visible at max range, but it would work correctly. Of course, if you just want a gravity well with nothing attached to it, there are easier ways for us to do that than eating up terrabytes worth of terrain.

[MineCrak]

Sorry, I haven't read every page and post in this thread yet.

From a practical point of view, not physics realistic (or is it?) but yet intuitive enough while in-game, I suspect the following might be a simple and useful way to handle Cube-World gravity. I have a vague recollection of chatting with fr0stbyte about this in PM a long time ago, hopefully this is a clearer explanation of what I was trying to say back then:

Start with a Tesseract (4 Dimensional Cube) as a Gravity Model of a Cube-World:



This seems to me like an intuitive multi-dimensional harmonic solution for something like gravity.

Then either keep the inner cube, make the space within the inner cube have no gravity at all or inverse gravity, or completely get rid of the inner cube and instead extend the corner lines until they all intersect at the center of the cube. All of those options should be equally doable.

Just like with a spherical world make the center of the cube be the center of gravity and "project" the gravity "flip-points" along the Tesseract lines and do so consistently regardless of terrain. Infinitely easier than trying to calculate minute gravity variations due to terrain mass differences and such.

Gravity "Flipping" would need to extend both above and below the surface of the planet, all along the tesseract lines. The distance above any planet that this gravity affect would extend could depend on the size of the planet, some simple but consistent equation could be applied to every planet to determine the distance out.

In regards to gravity flipping beneath the surface;
Gravity would instantly flip 90 degrees in the obvious direction at the plane created by the tesseract lines. At certain inner-planet points gravity might flip 180 degrees depending on how the world-center gravity is dealt with.

In regards to gravity flipping above the surface;
Things can at first glance seem to be more complicated, but they don't need to be. Let me explain:

Always use the tesseract lines as the flip points, in this case extended out from the "surface" of the cube at an angle. There will always be a 90 degree flip one way or another (from the ideal plane) regardless of terrain. One would be tempted to see the problem in terms of flat planes extending straight out from the ideal flat surface of each side of a cube world, which would leave a huge cubic no-mans land between the sides as you go above the surface where gravity could not be determined. The extended Tesseract solves all of that, there is always an exact line/plane at which the flip will occur.
--- To visualize this just look back up at that image of a tesseract and think of that central/inner cube as being the outer cube of the planetary tesseract, with the outer cube in this case representing the extension of the planets gravity above the surface of the planets ideal planes.

Here are some examples of how the flipping would be experienced above "sea-level", the "ideal-plane" of the planet:

If a player were to step forward along a side of the cube at sea-level on it's edge (where the tesseract angle hits the surface) their gravity would flip 90 degrees once they walked past the cube that the tesseract angle intersects with.

If a player were traveling along terrain higher than sea-level then they would actually remain oriented in the same gravity direction for a greater distance outwards than if they were closer to sea-level. The higher above sea-level you go the larger the surface area of that particular gravity orientation is, this will be true for all sides and can easily be seen when looking at the model of a tesseract. So if there is a big "bump" or mountain on a vertex then a person climbing it would have to go further out before reaching the gravity flip point, but that point/plane is still perfectly consistent the world around, along the tesseract lines.

Corners:

If a player is slightly to the left or right when hitting a tesseract corner then they flip 90 degrees in that direction when going over that corner. If they are "perfectly" centered when going over that corner then just do a simple 50/50 random function to decide which side they flip to, call it a quantum function.

Hopefully this helps.


[EDIT]

In regards to space ships in orbit around a planet but still within it's gravity field:

There could be a gravatic pull/push that occurs when a ship starts to cross over the gravity tesseract line. Once a part of the ship crosses over a gravity junction the ship could be made to temporarily accelerate in that direction, possibly preserving it's relative angular momentum, then perhaps slow down to it's initial speed once the flip is complete. Other possibilities exist, experimentation will be key in determining how to handle this.

[fr0stbyte124]

I think when you are saying tesseract, you are referring specifically to that cross-section. The full 4-dimensional shape is much more complex and doesn't really lend itself to this problem, so far as I can tell.

But what you said seems like it would work pretty well, and wouldn't be too difficult to implement, rendering issues aside. However, at the corners, we need to have something more deterministic than a random flip.
Also, it'll be a bad case if someone gets stuck on one of the cube's ley lines (as good a term as any for it), but the terrain joins at a V, instead of the normal /\. As a person walks on either side of the boundary, the gravity pull will say they are standing on the wall. There is no stable state. That's why I think there needs to be some sort of buffer, in which you can retain your orientation for a distance even after crossing the line, though preferably they should be able to pick whichever side they like in that buffer zone.

Hey, what do you think about having some sort of aura which shows up along the ley lines as you get near? I think that would go a long way towards making the gravity shifts be less confusing.

[Iv121]

Just keep in mind that in my opinion cube planets will look quite bad on futurecraft.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

Just keep in mind that in my opinion cube planets will look quite bad on futurecraft.

No. Weird bent sphere would would look quite bad.

Fr0st, how do you plan on handling terrain generation over the corner?

[Iv121]

Really ? We should all build flying cubes then . I'll Photoshop a picture for you to see for yourself.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

Really ? We should all build flying cubes then . I'll Photoshop a picture for you to see for yourself.

There's a difference between flying cubes and cuboid planets. In a game where no curves exist, a spherical planet makes nosense. That's right: nosense.

[Iv121]

Example of nonsense:

Spoiler:

I'm sure you saw this signature already. I will make another example with a cube so you can see what true nonsense is (if you can even use this term in design)

[Prototype]

This discussion has been had, cube planets are better, less complex and still fit the feel of minecraft, is the minecraft moon a circle?

Who made that descision?

Someone who knows more than we do.

Although we could have planets render as circles, by taking the image of one face of the planet, and cutting off the corners, but that would be inconsistent with the way the planets work, so I say just have cubes.

Also not everyone builds ships like yours Iv, and a square doesn't make that much of a difference, and doesn't look out of place, considering you built that in minecraft.