New idea for planet shapes.

[Iv121]

Not at all. The further you get from an object the lesser it is minecrafty , the more it is real, and this is where cubes look out of place. After 50 blocks in size the ship will look minecrafty but yet have a curved shape. At this point the cube begins to look out of place. You can either trust me at least once and avoid a lot of trouble, either do it and see for yourself it looks crap, either do it, look at it and say "It looks great !" and have the users whine about it.

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 decision?

Someone who knows more than we do.

Oh you have no idea how much I argue with those who know and I usually win when I do because when I go and argue with those who know I better be sure in what I argue about. While considering the settings of the regular world it doesn't matter what shape you choose, in space those are going to be the main decorations of your otherwise black and boring worlds. A weird hobby it is, to argue , either you win and satisfy your selfish desires, either loos and learn something new maybe for your next argument .

[Prototype]

I'm going to stop arguing here, it really comes down to what will cause the least problems.

To be honest, I think we should have the planets as cubes, but maybe the further away you get, the more it looks like a 2d circle, by taking an image of the cubes face, then overlaying a cut out of a circle, with the radius of this circle decreasing the further away you get.

Sound like a good enough compromise? if you disagree, please either preset the problems as simply as possible or sugget a better solution, and explain how we are going to do it, otherwise this will just end up as a useless long winded argument which end up nowhere.

And there is no winner in this argument here, only a solution.

[҉]

I usually win when I do

This may be why you still haven't shut up about this. Planets will be cubes, Iv. This is Minecraft. We've heard your talk about ships, and we aren't buying it. You want curvy stuff, go play EVE. You want blocky stuff, go play MC.

[Prototype]

Ok enough of the arguing, more of the helping please.

[fr0stbyte124]

Iv, I know you like spheres, but at the rate we're going that could add another 5 months to the development timeline before anything else could happen.
We can try to revisit it at a later point, but for now I would like to stick to only having Euclidean geometry.

[Iv121]

Alright it is pointless to argue against the whole community. You never listen to me and you never will (damn you never even read my story ) .

Anyway I did spend of my priceless time to make you this:

Spoiler:

I'm probably a total idiot to polish it and color balance it and make it as good looking as possible (at least you can't say I'm not fair) but I still believe a sphere would look better here. Anyway notice I DID MAKE THE BORDERS ROUND because looking at it without that was unbearable and cut my eyes. As a result it doesn’t look bad but it looks more like an abstract picture rather than a minecraft mod - in other words it looks out of place.

[Prototype]

Actually that looks good.

And IV, nobody has anything against you, you just have a habit of being a bit dramatic at times

But thank you, that's actually quite helpful

[Iv121]

I think that making this in minecraft will screw everything you wrote above because the edges are round. Without it this will look crap, with it you have to rethink all your border thing again.

[MineCrak]

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.

Ah yes, of course. I am referring only to the division lines in a standard 3D representation of a tesseract as applied to a 3D environment.

And the gravity would flip essentially right along that line without the line having a width, so there wouldn't be an intermediate square with undefined gravity, it would either go one way or the other.

Could there be a few dangerous "gravity traps" due to how terrain ends up in some cases and due to the propulsion method available to a player (walking without jetpack or car), definitely. But people would generally be able to see the "edge of the world" coming up so would know to be careful. It would just be a natural environmental factor that people would grow up learning to deal with in a universe of Minecraftian Cube Physics.

I love the idea of there being an aura-like effect along the gravity ley-lines!!! An aurora-borealus along each gravity tangent would be beautiful and even make a kind of minecratian physics sense.

I tend to think that a buffer zone would actually make things more unpredictable and difficult to deal with code-wise and person-wise, but I could easily be wrong. I'm trying to think of this in a way that would be as universally deterministic as possible in order to simplify the engine, but there could be room for some sort of extra mechanics to help deal with certain cases. * I would like to think that most small gravity traps could be dealt with by a person just by jumping, but perhaps a standard issue safety mini-grapling hook could be carried by everyone for gravity safety that would allow them to get out of most gravity traps?

-------

Another interesting thing that could be done, if desired, would be to use a center of planet solution that creates a "Hollow-Earth" type of environment.

Essentially, you envision yet another 3D tesseract within the inner cube of the initial planetary tesseract. At it's outer edge gravity would flip 180 degrees. Think of a box where gravity seems to push away from the center so that you can walk around on the inner sides but flip over if you go outside of the box. But the inner-most cube of this inner-extended tesseract would flip 180 degrees again causing gravity to pull into the center again.

How this could be used would be to have a mostly/partially hollow center where people could live on the inner upside down surface of the planet with the core of the planet always being directly above them. If they climbed/flew "up" "Core-ward" enough past the tesseract threshold line gravity would flip and they would be pulled all the way into the core. At the Core you could have a massive cube ocean of Lava, or something even brighter/hotter like plasma which would act like a sun for the inside of the hollow planet with an air gap between it and the reversed gravity inner livable surface.

Gravity lines even in this special case would still all fall along 3D tesseract lines and boundaries, which should make it possible to keep using the same fundamental algorithms for Cube-World Gravity at every step.

I would LOVE to have a Hollow-World environment to play in like this!! It would be a great place to add dinosaurs and such too.

[Prototype]

Well worlds will be cubes, nothing else would really work, but if you really are a cubophobe, and cubes bother you to the point where you have to stop playing and rage, I suggest a option to overlay a cut out of a circle over the world when you go to space, that way it won't look like a cube

[fr0stbyte124]

I tend to think that a buffer zone would actually makes things more unpredictable and difficult to deal with code-wise and person-wise, but I could easily be wrong.

Quite possibly. But untill we try any of this, we'll have no way of knowing. I should try to publish a testbed and let the audience work out what works best. I guess before that, I should see how it works in gravity-craft nowadays.

Another interesting thing that could be done, if desired, would be to use a center of planet solution that creates a "Hollow-Earth" type of environment.

Essentially, you envision yet another 3D tesseract within the inner cube of the initial planetary tesseract. At it's outer edge gravity would flip 180 degrees. Think of a box where gravity seems to push away from the center so that you can walk around on the inner sides but flip over if you go outside of the box. But the inner-most cube of this inner-extended tesseract would flip 180 degrees again causing gravity to pull into the center again.

How this could be used would be to have a mostly/partially hollow center where people could live on the inner upside down surface of the planet with the core of the planet always being directly above them. If they climbed/flew "up" "Core-ward" enough past the tesseract threshold line gravity would flip and they would be pulled all the way into the core. At the Core you could have a massive cube ocean of Lava, or something even brighter/hotter like plasma which would act like a sun for the inside of the hollow planet with an air gap between it and the reversed gravity inner livable surface.

Gravity lines even in this special case would still all fall along 3D tesseract lines and boundaries, which should make it possible to keep using the same fundamental algorithms for Cube-World Gravity at every step.

This sounds completely insane and impossible to build.
I really want to try it now

[MineCrak]

This sounds completely insane and impossible to build.
I really want to try it now

Yay!

Oh yeah, regarding corner gravity: 99.99% of the time it would be completely deterministic. A player will almost always be at least very slightly more to one side than another when they go over it so they would then just flip towards the side that they are even slightly closer to. It should be very rare that they would be 100% perfectly centered while going over, and in such a rare case using a "quantum" 50/50 decision to determine which way they flip would be justified and even intuitive. It would just represent that in reality you are never really completely centered, only approximately centered, and the random flip choice under those circumstances would just represent that the degree to which they are really slightly to one side or the other (even if not easily measurable) does still exist and gravity will figure it out. I don't see any problems with this at all.

[fr0stbyte124]

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?

Minecraft terrain generation is done using a 3D perlin noise generator. By adding noise on different scales and normalizing the results, you can produce large consistent features with self-similar finer details. This is done a lot in procedurally generated worlds because it can create acceptably natural looking terrain, and more importantly it can be created at any point without any knowledge of its surroundings save for the seed value. The drawback is that the noise parameters are terribly unintuitive, and it takes a lot of trial and error to get something to look nice.

Most games use the 2D version and create heightmaps for terrain, and then alter the properties of the terrain based on elevation and slope. Minecraft uses the 3D version, with some weights to favor botom-heavy structures. Essentially you are generating a density at each point, somewhere between 0 and 1. If the density is above a certain threshold it becomes rock, and below it becomes air (the threshold changes with elevation). Water and block types are added afterwards in a decoration process, and then caves using another noise generator and finally procedural mineshafts and villages and fortresses (which are procedural, but I don't know the specifics). Biomes affect the hilliness of terrain as well, but I am not positive what parameter it is adjusting. So far as I can tell, hilliness is the only thing affected..

To make terrain wrap around a specific shape, like a cube, it is as simple as adjusting the rock threshold to where you want your groud to be. The noise itself has no understanding of "up", or even dominant axes.
Another thing you can do if you are joining two maps with differnt seeds (or wrapping a flat world around like the cylinder model), is overlap the density maps a distance, and blend the density where they meet with a weighted average (probably scale the overlap differently for each octave). So long as all the noise octaves have the same parameters, the resulting density map will be indistinguishable from a continuous map.

---
Of course, that's assuming we want worlds generated exactly like vanilla minecraft. We have a unique opportunity here in the fact that planets are finite in size, and can be at least partially generated offline. If we had a good model for it, we could try adding more realistic climates (i.e. warmer at the equator, arid behind mountains) and erosion effects. Even if we don't do it immediately, we can work on terrain generation later on in the process. We might even want to commission some world painters out there to make a few custom planets for us.

Alright it is pointless to argue against the whole community. You never listen to me and you never will (darn you never even read my story ) .

Anyway I did spend of my priceless time to make you this:

Spoiler:

I'm probably a total idiot to polish it and color balance it and make it as good looking as possible (at least you can't say I'm not fair) but I still believe a sphere would look better here. Anyway notice I DID MAKE THE BORDERS ROUND because looking at it without that was unbearable and cut my eyes. As a result it doesn’t look bad but it looks more like an abstract picture rather than a minecraft mod - in other words it looks out of place.

Keep in mind that planets won't be perfectly square, except at sea-level. It will have just as much terrain variation as a vanilla map, and at the 5km diameter scale, which I am strongly recommending (and is still going to be rather hard to pull off even on powerful graphics cards), those terrain features should still be somewhat visible.


This is a visual indication of the scales we are dealing with. If the width is 5km, or the diameter of a cube planet, then the height is 192m, or the vanilla height limit above sea-level. Most of the time 80m, or less than half what is shown, is the max height of natural terrain, but it can go up to 128. Naturally, this is not our height limit, but most people would consider that to be pretty huge already, standing there in person.

But to do things like mountains, you can't just shoot straight up. You have to build up gradually over an extended area, so even if the slope is not that steep, we could still end up pretty high above sea level (with some parameter tweaking).

*edit*
Also for perspective,

This is how much of the world you can see from sea level on far-draw in vanilla minecraft. That's 16 chunks (16x16x256 blocks) in either direction. That's also 262,144 m^2 area, disregarding height. An entire 5x5x5km world would have 600x that much surface area, and a much larger sky cap (around 5.5km above the surface) . That should give you an idea of the challenge present in drawing a planet. Gotta pull every trick in the book just to get some entry-level rendering.

[MineCrak]

I love reading your posts fr0st, I always learn so much!

btw: Regarding terrain:

I suspect that when the time comes [url=http://www.minecraftforum.net/user/630108-scottkillen/]ScottKillen[/url] would be more than happy to assist with Terrain code and generation.

Not only has he gotten the ExtraBiomesXL code open sourced and improved greatly upon it, but due to my [url=https://github.com/ExtrabiomesXL/ExtrabiomesXL/issues/225#]proposal[/url] he has recently merged EBXL with the open source Terrain Control, this hasn't been released yet. Terrain Control is the modern continuation of the old BTM/PTM and has improved greatly. The combination of the two will make pretty much everyone's Terrain dreams for Minecraft come true, and will all be completely open source!

In any case; from personal conversations I know that Scott is very interested in Cubic Chunks scale Terrain and Biome manipulation and loves the idea of Cube Worlds. I have a feeling that one way or another, especially with your (fr0st) in depth Terrain generation knowledge, that Terrain is something that will be satisfactorily handled when the time comes.

[EDIT] fr0stbyte; for some reason the pictures in your post before this one are not coming through for me.

[Iv121]

Keep in mind that planets won't be perfectly square, except at sea-level. It will have just as much terrain variation as a vanilla map, and at the 5km diameter scale, which I am strongly recommending (and is still going to be rather hard to pull off even on powerful graphics cards), those terrain features should still be somewhat visible.


This is a visual indication of the scales we are dealing with. If the width is 5km, or the diameter of a cube planet, then the height is 192m, or the vanilla height limit above sea-level. Most of the time 80m, or less than half what is shown, is the max height of natural terrain, but it can go up to 128. Naturally, this is not our height limit, but most people would consider that to be pretty huge already, standing there in person.

But to do things like mountains, you can't just shoot straight up. You have to build up gradually over an extended area, so even if the slope is not that steep, we could still end up pretty high above sea level (with some parameter tweaking).

*edit*
Also for perspective,

This is how much of the world you can see from sea level on far-draw in vanilla minecraft. That's 16 chunks (16x16x256 blocks) in either direction. That's also 262,144 m^2 area, disregarding height. An entire 5x5x5km world would have 600x that much surface area, and a much larger sky cap (around 5.5km above the surface) . That should give you an idea of the challenge present in drawing a planet. Gotta pull every trick in the book just to get some entry-level rendering.

No I mean the mountains add texture, ok, but the planet itself should bend on its corners as I made in the screen