New idea for planet shapes.

[fr0stbyte124]

@Minecrack
I hosted them to imgur. They're just two white rectangles. The first one is 833x32, and the second is 85x32. You can make them in mspaint if you are curious. I kind of wanted to draw terrain onto them, but I should really be working right now, so words will have to suffice.

It would be awesome to work with Scott. I am a fan of his work. What I'd really like to see is more out-of-process tools for designing worlds like world painter, but with more emphasis put on the procedural generation aspect. Terrain generation really isn't my strong point, though. I've pretty much covered everything I know about it in that last post, but it would be a cool project.

@Iv
We'll be able to curve the edges of the terrain a little bit simply by playing with thresholds. I can't imagine water would be happy with anything other than a right angle, though...

Hmm, water's going to be interesting. I bet we could use the slopes water makes so it's always facing towards the center of gravity, but from space that is still going to look square unless we get really crazy with the curving and make the ambiguous region fairly large.


...You're going to make me reinvent hydrodynamics, aren't you.

[MineCrak]

I still don't see a reason for there to be an "ambiguous region" at all, but whatever works.



In this case the inner cube represents sea-level and the outer cube represents the maximum reach of the planet's gravity, with the gravity flips occurring along the lines/planes. The higher from sea-level you go the further "over" the sea-level edge you are able to go while still maintaining the same gravity orientation before eventually flipping at the edge line. But the angles and lines are still exactly the same all the way through without any ambiguous regions to deal with. There is always an "obvious" direction for the gravity at any coordinate so long as those lines/planes are always used.

It will make for some amazing views though.

[fr0stbyte124]

I still don't see a reason for there to be an "ambiguous region" at all, but whatever works.

Because grappeling hooks are silly, MineCrak. Because that.

[MineCrak]

I still don't see a reason for there to be an "ambiguous region" at all, but whatever works.

Because grappeling hooks are silly, MineCrak. Because that.

I guess I just don't understand how an ambiguous zone would work. Which way would gravity go in it? If gravity worked at yet another angle within that zone then it's not really a cube world, and how would that work underground? Just seems way more complicated and potentially cpu intensive especially if there are a lot of players & mobs having to be specially tracked in edge cases instead of just using deterministic rules.

Perhaps once I understand how an ambiguous zone could in theory work and what areas would be considered within such a zone.

[҉]

I guess I just don't understand how an ambiguous zone would work. Which way would gravity go in it?

That's ambiguous.

[fr0stbyte124]

I still don't see a reason for there to be an "ambiguous region" at all, but whatever works.

Because grappeling hooks are silly, MineCrak. Because that.

I guess I just don't understand how an ambiguous zone would work. Which way would gravity go in it? If gravity worked at yet another angle within that zone then it's not really a cube world, and how would that work underground? Just seems way more complicated and potentially cpu intensive especially if there are a lot of players & mobs having to be specially tracked in edge cases instead of just using deterministic rules.

Perhaps once I understand how an ambiguous zone could in theory work and what areas would be considered within such a zone.

The working theory is that since physically you are more or less standing on a 45 degree incline, either way you stand should count as the floor rather than neither in that trap scenario. When you jump, you will fall towards the true center of the planet, and whichever face you land on becomes your dominant orientation. The question is, can we make this controllable in some intuitive way? For instance, jumping would make you hit the wall at a more diagonal vector than simply walking off, so you would most likely switch sides. The other thing is how to indicate that gravity isn't straight up and down. I think tilting the camera subtly, as if you were leaning into the incline. would do the job. Since there is no natural way for the camera to roll laterally, this motion should be fairly noticeable and you should feel like you aren't standing straight up. Not 45 degrees, maybe, but perhaps half that so that you don't become completely disoriented.

Something like that. Ambiguous, but controllable.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

Could we just the surface of the planet as a net of a cube, then wrap it around when you can see the whole planet, with some sort of fill-in terrain at the corners on the space-view to prevent cut-off terrain?

[fr0stbyte124]

I don't see why we'd need to. The terrain generation can be made to turn corners. And the whole point of the cube planet in the first place is so we could work in a true volumetric environment.

[Dr. Mackeroth]

I don't see why we'd need to. The terrain generation can be made to turn corners. And the whole point of the cube planet in the first place is so we could work in a true volumetric environment.

I'm just worried the gravity won't work. I suppose I should see a working demonstration before making assumptions. Show us as soon as possible what crossing over the border would look like, please.