I would still love the round world, I didn't really notice the distortion, or why it was so important until you pointed it out. PS: The long videos are great, keep em coming/
A ringworld would be a cool addition to the game! I am not going to add it now, but maybe in a far future update we can add a ringworld in another solar system or something!
I have an idea about both the distortion and edges... You could ghost the areas! Set the map generator to create a roughly uniform area which is mirrored along the edges and fades into the adjacent biomes. As soon as the player would approach the distorted area, simply have him teleported to the opposite side where he can continue his journey. Aside from the coordinates suddenly jumping, he couldn't tell that he just skipped a distorted area.
Also a very interesting idea! I had not thought about that. There could be 8 "waygates" or something on the 8 corners of each planet, that will teleport the player either to another waygate, or another planet. Very good idea indeed.
Hopefully I remember to upload my video on this subject this week. It should fix all of these issues, and the method is somewhat similar. It essentially makes the planet a flat plane, but it treats it as if it's a round planet. It also changes the surface area of the planet by changing the shape of the plane, so that it's closer to the surface area of a sphere. It sounds complex, but it's fairly simple and should be able to be done in only a few simple algorithms.
This is excellent. The 8 corners are a fine compromise for "spherical" planets, considering it'll be completely unlike any other voxel sandbox games. I also think the radiation idea is a great mask (unless you do figure out how to map it correctly) One thing I have been noticing is the worlds look somewhat bleak. Like they need more color! :) Thanks for the update Ben, can't wait for more!
I am not sure if I understood this correctly, but here's my idea: you split the voxel world into many small cubes and put them on the planet like plates of armor. These would have corners, but if the planet is big enough or "plates" small enough, it might just work.
I'm ok with solution number 2! I would be cool to have places of the earth with distortion and a mysterious backstory to why it happens. Besides, the distortion doesn't even look that noticeable from the video... As for the 8 world corners, well, it would be interesting to actually see the distortion on one of those... do they really break the game that much that they need to be made inaccessible? Unless it makes the entire game glitch out, I would still leave them open, and find an explanation like "a place where the space-time continuum is ripped and causes all types of shenanigans" ...or even make them act like portals to teleport the player between the several corners of the world!
Maybe on the corners you could have a separate pseudo plane that covers the corner with a raised outcropping that is explained by whatever lore that it holds the planet together and taking this out destabilizes the planet. Or you could even make it so that once you cover that vast, vast distance, that at halfway through, you are already on a second plane that is made of the information from the "corners" of the planet, making a taxi-cab circle out of the three sides that make up the edge.
Yes I think I will do this! Though the flat planet version will not go along with the story and so will probably be just a normal survival or sandbox experience, while the round planet version will give you space travel and story elements.
They will be two distinct games. Minecraft is a great game, and I hope that people will play both of our games! Minecraft's new biome update looks especially cool!
The second is not yet fullproof but might be a good solution for you. It involves making locally flat (Euclidean) regions, and then placing them next to each other. Each region is rotated slightly with respect its adjacent regions. Voxels at the edge of a region will not 100% line up with voxels from the adjacent region. At that point you can let them overlap a little, which will not be noticeable, or even better, have voxels be of varying size... to be continued
Would it be possible to make a lot of these things settings? I'd also like to know what you would do if we just kept the planets cubes (also setting). Though that might not work well being that if I make a tower at a 45 degree angle that it might look weird off one edge. I think the distortion and the 8 point error is a compromise. Having it look like the fabric of space is ripping would also be interesting. It's what holds these strange round alien planets together! Great ideas by the way.
Yea, no problem. I did a little research on this a while back and found that polygons near the center of the world were 18.5% distorted and ones near the edge of the faces were 35.6% distorted using vector normalization. Using those equations I found that polygons near the center were 2.02% distorted while polygons at the face-edges were only 12.12% distorted.
Well I will be able to add a waving effect to water using a shader effect, but as for true waves and flowing rivers, right now I just can't think of a simple solution for it. You are correct that it is for a similar issue that the waterfalls have, though even more severe since rivers are much more sprawling than small waterfalls.
Indeed! Though I wasn't a very good math student in high school :P I only started really learning math in my Computer Science program in college, after I realized how useful it was for games :)
The 8 corner problem: How about making it an easter-egg? A feature to be hunted, not bug to be avoided. A spacetime rift detector can be made by the player, so that he/she can whip it out on time to time, to see if there is a timespace rift in the world in the area (whatever radius, perhaps it can point you in the right direction within 90 degrees at the extreme end, then 89, 88 etc as you get closer). When close enough you can make a stargate or something, and visit other worlds, and universes.
As for the corners, you may not want to put a lethal solution in place, I like the warp solutions where the player is teleported away. After all, a lethal solution is almost as bad as the game breaking. It would result in lost items that the player may not be able to recover, or even vehicles.
I like number one. Non-cubic voxels, distorted along with the cube, the whole cube. The eight corners are highly distorted and three upper faces make a hexagon
A: Thank you! I try to explain it as clearly as possible :P B: It would be quite visible as you get very far from the center cube faces, you would definitely notice it! C: It is totally possible! It would be coded completely differently than the current approach, and it would definitely be difficult for the edge transitions, but it is possible and It has actually been done before on a small scale. I would prefer not to do that though.
Of the solutions to the distortion suggested in the video, I vote the first one. Rectangular prisms in the place of cubes isn't a bad thing, though maybe it could be a slight issue for some people when building if they can't create perfect cubes. Though if they could I see no issue in my opinion.
The first and most robust is basically building the entire planet out of connected voxels. This means the orientation of voxels is rotated with respect to the sphere surface normal. So depending on your position on the surface of the planet the voxels you stand upon may not have a face pointing upward, but an edge or a corner. This may be undesirable for large voxels and I don't think its suitable for andromeda since your engine is based specifically on voxels with flat face on top.
The stargate-system the player put in place would then involve a fenced high-security area to keep people from wandering about and tripping over the bug.
Yes it will indeed make them look skinnier than they "actually" are. But due to the way that the mapping works, it would always look that skinny, even when standing on them. So it wont be like you will see a big change when you are close than when you are far away. The only distance is that when you actually walk across the feature, it takes longer than you expect. Its an interesting feeling.
A: You are better at explaining math than my math teacher. B: How non-cubic would distortion solution #1 look in normal gameplay? Barely visible, noticable, or obnoxious? If you could see the non-cubicness easily, i would probably go for option #2. C: Would an either optional or very rarely occurring cube-planet, held together by alien gravity technology, be possible? *further explanation in about 20 seconds, character limit*
I'll go back to the rubix cube example again :P. In your mind, take one of the stickers on a corner, and try to move it to the center. Then move all of the rest of the stickers on the rubix cube with it so that you are shifting everything. It cant be done due to the geometric properties of a cube.
I'm talking about a planet that looks like a cube from space, and has a real edge that you can walk across to another from one cubeface to another. Would allow for some crazy architecture, although i guess it would be near to impossible to code
Though it would be weird having to see 2 seams instead of 1, since there will certainly be a slightly visible seam between the two layers of far terrain. That sounds like an interesting experiment to do.
Also, have you considered using versors (unit quaternions) to record the player's vector rotation around the sphere for reverse-mapping back to cubespace? You'd have to scale the player's current velocity based on height, but that isn't too crazy. It'd also let you avoid (some) of the corner mapping problems, at least when it comes to determining transitions between the underlying grids, and not just for the player, but any particle in motion.
Ben Arnold, how abot the idea of a Ringworld? It would be great since there is no games about this novella at all! The Ring has simple shape, HUGE area surface with large variation of the biomes and spieces, exotic sky without a horizon.
I'm half way through the video and I get all of this, and i hardly know any math. This is very well explained... I don't know why you decided to make a joke.
It's all about presentation. A game is part book, part painting, part sculpture - in a digital form. Let the story set the world for you and the gamer will accept all in it as part of that world. In fact, if done right it can actually enhance the game rather than the opposite.
Maybe you can scale the radius of the sphere so that the area of the sphere is approximately equal to that of the cube. You may have some other issues and you may have to compress the cubes in the centre of a face then. Good luck figuring it out!
The problem is that the closer you get to the poles, the more voxel terrain you are mapping to a smaller area, and the distortion eventually gets to a ridiculous level. With the current method, I think the worst distortion you will encounter is a ratio of 1.414, or 0.71 if you prefer the inverse.
thanks for responding! maybe you could have mobs that disobey any cheats and that one hit the player preventing them from going there. *like a mob spawn point/base*
I know this is unrelated but I'd really like to see a video concerning this: i've noticed that your rivers have still water, realistically, rivers have running water. It would really be cool if you could add that into the game, although, maybe thats the same the problem that you've been running into when trying to make waterfalls. Also, assuming that you figure out how to do this, would this allow you to make the largest bodies of water have waves and other cool realistic water effects?
but how would the terrain from this imaginary cube fit with the rest of the spherical terrain? Surely there would be a seam. Or more sliding there, which might actually work. We could draw an additional layer before the final round terrain that is far terrain based on the distortion experienced by the voxels. If it was small, it would move the obvious visual artifacts a bit further away from the camera while preserving the roundness! I'm not sure if that's what you meant but its a great idea!
Have you heard of mapping noise in spherical coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates? That could potentially solve your issue...but I don't know how it would apply to blocks. I'm working on a voxel world engine, but I use dual contouring instead of actual cubes, so spherical coordinates work fine for me...I've read about it in a few places too, I'll have to look around.
maybe you should break this flat grid. dismantle chunks. Start a spherical system. well ... It seems that you are doing a system plan, look for a spherical system. Is there any chance to create a spherical grid? the coordinates on a sphere, the center distance, distance from the zero point two circumferences that intersect with algulo 90 degrees at ground zero? I'm no mathematician, and I know some programming, so sorry if I have given an idea ridiculous. I really appreciate your work
I would prefer to keep the sphere concept, but this is definitely what I would do if I went back to infinite planes. This is what starforge does, if you are familiar with the game.
I'm not sure what you mean, because generating the planet as a sphere requires normalization of a cube face. If we squish the voxels so that they fit on a curved surface, they would have to be scaled in different directions, and would no longer be cubes.
note: we could be mapping chunks based on spherical coords, which makes the mapping works, but still leaves a non-linear mapping across seams. current guess is we "wing it", if the mapping process is deterministic, then it should mostly map the seam "consistently". rendering or walking across an edge would effectively involve "teleports" though, and logically, the mapping between chunks would not be 1:1.
Just thinking about this really quickly, would it be possible to solve all your problems if you consider your cubic surface being a limit approaching a perfect circle? A 2D example would be taking the number of sides of a geometric shape to infinity. This would allow you to model the planet as a "circle" but it would require the addition of non-cubic voxels that would somehow all fit together as you go towards the center of the planet.
I am 20. I started coding 3 years ago. I learned to code by using google, taking college CS classes, and lots of practice! I learned to make this game simply through experimentation while I was learning opengl. Also check out letsmakeavoxelengine if you want some good concepts on how voxel engines can work!
Hmm, you are good at explaining! I don't have the proper insight in math to give you a solution from that angle but I do have a question about it. Could you not morph the cubes surfaces to lean extremely slightly (unnoticeable) in the angle that the world bends and have the gravity dynamically change as the player moves along?
There is probably a way to do this with a shader, but I honestly have no idea the mathematics needed. I cant even figure out how you would do it on a 2d circle. You would need to move around all the vertices so that only the near ones are the correct spacing and the faraway ones are squished together, and the constantly warping planet might cause some visual artifacts that would be a bit jarring when moving at a rapid pace.
if you cant figure the corners out than maybe the further away you are from the spawn, the more difficult the enemies become until the point where it is impossible to advance close enough to one of the sides or corners without getting killed. the radiation idea can go along with it encase someone is ultra hardcore pro and makes it through.
The round planet system will probably be hard-coded and will be the only setting, except there will probably be a flat plane setting as well. I just don't think it would be wise to manage so many different planet types, it would be harder to fix bugs among other things.
A 24 minute explanation? Awesome. *not sarcastic* *not sarcastic when saying that it was not sarcastic* But I think I'll wait until RUclips is done processing it so I can watch in higher than 360p :P
I was thinking idly that each face of the cube would hold a big circle rather than a square, which could map more nicely to a sphere than would square faces. basically, we pick the face that best matches the normal, then map the chunk coord orthographically onto the cube face. the corners of the face will then cease to exist. but, yeah, I am not entirely sure how to best deal with the seams. (to be continued)
for the eight corners you could make up something like "due to a subterranean anomaly that greatly affect the magnetic fields of the planet these eight regions are known to cause sever hallucination in those that approach" because magnetic and stuff you know something that appears alien to the explorers while explained with basic science knowledge.
i like the sphere world and to me the distortion is very small and not obtrusive to gameplay, you could map the world as a cube which would eliminate the normals and the distortion but not the corners, tho that'd make a big cube world with hard edges that the player has to jump around. i think that this entire sphere world thing is awesome tho and it must have taken you ages to figure out how to do this, good job!
well, a grass block is green on the top and sort of brown on the bottom, yeah? So a green hill in the heightmap will be green, and below that brown from the dirt on the block, and if the hill is steep enough, rock outcroppings start showing up. I guess there isn't anything to be done about it, except maybe make the sides of grass blocks green.
But where does the water come from? Where does it collect? How does the initial source replenish? How does the sink not infinitely overflow? How does it travel between loaded and unloaded chunks?
Perhaps you could 'rotate' the cubes blocks around (move the corners to the center of the face and vice versa), so the player is always technically in the center of the face, and thus no distortion? I'm not quite sure how to explain it though, i'd be glad to clarify if you don't get me =)
What you have said has been suggested before, it seems like it would work but unfortunately it is a bit tougher than that. The grid represents the discrete locations of the chunks. When you move that grid by shifting everything, you completely change the layout of the chunks. Meaning if you make a base and walk around the world or something, when you get back your base will likely be gone or obliterated because the chunks positions are screwed up. Its quite hard to explain, but try to imagine what happens at the chunks at the corners and edges as you shift the grid in different directions.
Will you also need certain gear to survive in places like high mountains, or cold places? maybe you can have a body temperature variable, in deserts when doing physical work it rises and in cold places it goes down if not clothed correctly, or is something like this best left for mods?
No everything should map just fine along the edges! I just need to program the ability for the program to derive chunks from different cube faces with arbitrary rotation. Once I have that, they will be popped onto a normal grid, just like in the infinite plane version of the game. So it will in no way break any physics properties or cause any weirdness in the voxels at the edges, other than the distortion of course.
My opinion: leave round objects for voxels. Make cube planets instead. It just won't feel natural otherwise and I pretty sure there is no simple way of solving your problems. (without rewriting all the code and such)
I've been curious about something... Since you say there will be different sizes and shapes to the planets, moons, and asteroids in the system...will EVERY terrain that you can land on be M class? Or will a few and/or most be unworthy for 'human habitation'?
There will only be a few habitable planets in the story solar system, but due to the customizable nature of the game people will be able to create and explore their own planets and hopefully solar systems as well!
So as I will now over-simplify it, here's the problem, the voxels are generated properly, but with a size ofset, but the far-away model they generate in accordance to, is not being distorted. So instead of fixing the size of the voxels, how about fixing the size of the other stuff? So the far-terrain and textures are willfully distorted the same amount as the voxels.
I have put some thought into it, and I know how the noise can map in 3d, the issue is placing the cubes properly unfortunately. Also I would like to see your engine!
Can you set the LOD terrain to scale larger the closer you get to the 8 vertices to combat the visual appearance of the chunks loading and sliding over what would normally be a smaller surface?
I am already storing the world space vector location of the player, and it is simple enough to reverse map it to cube space. The quaternions can be derived from the vector. I am not understanding how this would avoid any corner mapping problems though.
I'm not sure how it could be done, but would it be possible to shift the loaded chunks away from the corners to where what was the center of the face would become the corner and what had been the corner would become the center.
Ok then. The scaling of the player and blocks sounds nice but I don't know if I would like it. Also if a player where to enter into the rip in space and time then it would randomly teleport them somewhere. Maybe even underground! This would be a very interesting and cheap way to get to other planets. That is if you have the luck and make it out alive. How is that idea?
I'm not sure what you mean by circular cube face, since cube faces are squares. Also the seams between circles are much much harder to map over than the seams between cube faces, and I'm afraid I have no Idea how to do that. If you want to elaborate, feel free!
So, considering that surface area of the cube gets thinner as you approach the edges, does this cause the terrain features to appear skinnier (when viewed from afar, like from space) since it doesn't change the distance from the center of the sphere/the height of the features?
Hey Ben, something that's been bugging me for a bit. In your heightmaps, say you have a grassy hill. In the distant render, it's going to show up as green. But in the voxels, it's green, and brown, and even a bit of gray in there too.
Unfortunatly if you display cubes on a sphere with the goal of them fitting perfectly on the sphere, it is impossible. Where would your method be allowing distortion? And how would you know where the chunk boundaries are? If I am at 100, 90, 120 on a world with radius 100, what are the coordinates of the chunks that are loaded and saved? This is important to be able to know, or the world will not be persistent and probably would not be able to be stored at all.
Hmm...all I think of at the moment is drawing a small circle using paint, zoom in, use that as the 'bedrock' and add single pixel layers surrounding this 'bedrock'. Maybe you could obtain inspiration from this concept?
I would still love the round world, I didn't really notice the distortion, or why it was so important until you pointed it out.
PS: The long videos are great, keep em coming/
A ringworld would be a cool addition to the game! I am not going to add it now, but maybe in a far future update we can add a ringworld in another solar system or something!
Yes you will! And you are right, people wont actually do it, but the fact that you can just makes it feel more real!
I have an idea about both the distortion and edges... You could ghost the areas!
Set the map generator to create a roughly uniform area which is mirrored along the edges and fades into the adjacent biomes. As soon as the player would approach the distorted area, simply have him teleported to the opposite side where he can continue his journey.
Aside from the coordinates suddenly jumping, he couldn't tell that he just skipped a distorted area.
Also a very interesting idea! I had not thought about that. There could be 8 "waygates" or something on the 8 corners of each planet, that will teleport the player either to another waygate, or another planet. Very good idea indeed.
I agree, and that will change eventually! Thanks for your continued support Spaceybog :)
That makes sense, this way there will be no more conflicting nodes!
Hopefully I remember to upload my video on this subject this week. It should fix all of these issues, and the method is somewhat similar. It essentially makes the planet a flat plane, but it treats it as if it's a round planet. It also changes the surface area of the planet by changing the shape of the plane, so that it's closer to the surface area of a sphere. It sounds complex, but it's fairly simple and should be able to be done in only a few simple algorithms.
This is excellent. The 8 corners are a fine compromise for "spherical" planets, considering it'll be completely unlike any other voxel sandbox games. I also think the radiation idea is a great mask (unless you do figure out how to map it correctly) One thing I have been noticing is the worlds look somewhat bleak. Like they need more color! :) Thanks for the update Ben, can't wait for more!
I am not sure if I understood this correctly, but here's my idea: you split the voxel world into many small cubes and put them on the planet like plates of armor. These would have corners, but if the planet is big enough or "plates" small enough, it might just work.
I'm ok with solution number 2!
I would be cool to have places of the earth with distortion and a mysterious backstory to why it happens. Besides, the distortion doesn't even look that noticeable from the video...
As for the 8 world corners, well, it would be interesting to actually see the distortion on one of those... do they really break the game that much that they need to be made inaccessible?
Unless it makes the entire game glitch out, I would still leave them open, and find an explanation like "a place where the space-time continuum is ripped and causes all types of shenanigans"
...or even make them act like portals to teleport the player between the several corners of the world!
Right now I am leaving the 8 corners problem in. You will be able to go to them tomorrow!
Ben Arnold Nice! :D
Maybe on the corners you could have a separate pseudo plane that covers the corner with a raised outcropping that is explained by whatever lore that it holds the planet together and taking this out destabilizes the planet.
Or you could even make it so that once you cover that vast, vast distance, that at halfway through, you are already on a second plane that is made of the information from the "corners" of the planet, making a taxi-cab circle out of the three sides that make up the edge.
Yes I think I will do this! Though the flat planet version will not go along with the story and so will probably be just a normal survival or sandbox experience, while the round planet version will give you space travel and story elements.
That sounds very promising! I will have to test it out soon to see how well it works.
ALL THESE SQUARES MAKE A CIRCLE
a sphere actually
That is also a possibility but I like the idea of the danger and unknown factor.
They will be two distinct games. Minecraft is a great game, and I hope that people will play both of our games! Minecraft's new biome update looks especially cool!
The second is not yet fullproof but might be a good solution for you. It involves making locally flat (Euclidean) regions, and then placing them next to each other. Each region is rotated slightly with respect its adjacent regions. Voxels at the edge of a region will not 100% line up with voxels from the adjacent region. At that point you can let them overlap a little, which will not be noticeable, or even better, have voxels be of varying size... to be continued
Would it be possible to make a lot of these things settings? I'd also like to know what you would do if we just kept the planets cubes (also setting). Though that might not work well being that if I make a tower at a 45 degree angle that it might look weird off one edge. I think the distortion and the 8 point error is a compromise. Having it look like the fabric of space is ripping would also be interesting. It's what holds these strange round alien planets together! Great ideas by the way.
I think the Geiger counter is a great idea for the 8 corners
I agree, we should use a solution that adds to the mystery of the solar system!
Yea, no problem. I did a little research on this a while back and found that polygons near the center of the world were 18.5% distorted and ones near the edge of the faces were 35.6% distorted using vector normalization. Using those equations I found that polygons near the center were 2.02% distorted while polygons at the face-edges were only 12.12% distorted.
Well I will be able to add a waving effect to water using a shader effect, but as for true waves and flowing rivers, right now I just can't think of a simple solution for it. You are correct that it is for a similar issue that the waterfalls have, though even more severe since rivers are much more sprawling than small waterfalls.
Indeed! Though I wasn't a very good math student in high school :P I only started really learning math in my Computer Science program in college, after I realized how useful it was for games :)
The 8 corner problem: How about making it an easter-egg? A feature to be hunted, not bug to be avoided. A spacetime rift detector can be made by the player, so that he/she can whip it out on time to time, to see if there is a timespace rift in the world in the area (whatever radius, perhaps it can point you in the right direction within 90 degrees at the extreme end, then 89, 88 etc as you get closer). When close enough you can make a stargate or something, and visit other worlds, and universes.
As for the corners, you may not want to put a lethal solution in place, I like the warp solutions where the player is teleported away. After all, a lethal solution is almost as bad as the game breaking. It would result in lost items that the player may not be able to recover, or even vehicles.
I like number one. Non-cubic voxels, distorted along with the cube, the whole cube. The eight corners are highly distorted and three upper faces make a hexagon
That is an interesting idea, that concept might work well! Though I don't understand your second idea i think.
It would probably be kind of cool! You would be able to make interestingly shaped buildings farther away.
A: Thank you! I try to explain it as clearly as possible :P
B: It would be quite visible as you get very far from the center cube faces, you would definitely notice it!
C: It is totally possible! It would be coded completely differently than the current approach, and it would definitely be difficult for the edge transitions, but it is possible and It has actually been done before on a small scale. I would prefer not to do that though.
Of the solutions to the distortion suggested in the video, I vote the first one. Rectangular prisms in the place of cubes isn't a bad thing, though maybe it could be a slight issue for some people when building if they can't create perfect cubes. Though if they could I see no issue in my opinion.
The first and most robust is basically building the entire planet out of connected voxels. This means the orientation of voxels is rotated with respect to the sphere surface normal. So depending on your position on the surface of the planet the voxels you stand upon may not have a face pointing upward, but an edge or a corner. This may be undesirable for large voxels and I don't think its suitable for andromeda since your engine is based specifically on voxels with flat face on top.
Whatever you do, please keep the round world. I love the idea :D
The stargate-system the player put in place would then involve a fenced high-security area to keep people from wandering about and tripping over the bug.
Yes it will indeed make them look skinnier than they "actually" are. But due to the way that the mapping works, it would always look that skinny, even when standing on them. So it wont be like you will see a big change when you are close than when you are far away. The only distance is that when you actually walk across the feature, it takes longer than you expect. Its an interesting feeling.
A: You are better at explaining math than my math teacher.
B: How non-cubic would distortion solution #1 look in normal gameplay? Barely visible, noticable, or obnoxious? If you could see the non-cubicness easily, i would probably go for option #2.
C: Would an either optional or very rarely occurring cube-planet, held together by alien gravity technology, be possible? *further explanation in about 20 seconds, character limit*
I'll go back to the rubix cube example again :P. In your mind, take one of the stickers on a corner, and try to move it to the center. Then move all of the rest of the stickers on the rubix cube with it so that you are shifting everything. It cant be done due to the geometric properties of a cube.
I'm talking about a planet that looks like a cube from space, and has a real edge that you can walk across to another from one cubeface to another. Would allow for some crazy architecture, although i guess it would be near to impossible to code
Though it would be weird having to see 2 seams instead of 1, since there will certainly be a slightly visible seam between the two layers of far terrain. That sounds like an interesting experiment to do.
Also, have you considered using versors (unit quaternions) to record the player's vector rotation around the sphere for reverse-mapping back to cubespace? You'd have to scale the player's current velocity based on height, but that isn't too crazy. It'd also let you avoid (some) of the corner mapping problems, at least when it comes to determining transitions between the underlying grids, and not just for the player, but any particle in motion.
Ben Arnold, how abot the idea of a Ringworld?
It would be great since there is no games about this novella at all! The Ring has simple shape, HUGE area surface with large variation of the biomes and spieces, exotic sky without a horizon.
I do think it would be cool to make it eerie and unknown! Maybe some alien technology.
I'm half way through the video and I get all of this, and i hardly know any math. This is very well explained... I don't know why you decided to make a joke.
It's all about presentation. A game is part book, part painting, part sculpture - in a digital form. Let the story set the world for you and the gamer will accept all in it as part of that world. In fact, if done right it can actually enhance the game rather than the opposite.
OH and it's part ONE! I love you.
Maybe you can scale the radius of the sphere so that the area of the sphere is approximately equal to that of the cube. You may have some other issues and you may have to compress the cubes in the centre of a face then. Good luck figuring it out!
Thanks I have not seen this, it might be quite helpful! It seems like it sort of moves the distortion around a bit to make it more uniform.
I can't wait to see! That sounds great!
Ahh we could make the screen black out and then move the player back the opposite way and attribute it to the hallucinations! Good idea!
The problem is that the closer you get to the poles, the more voxel terrain you are mapping to a smaller area, and the distortion eventually gets to a ridiculous level. With the current method, I think the worst distortion you will encounter is a ratio of 1.414, or 0.71 if you prefer the inverse.
thanks for responding! maybe you could have mobs that disobey any cheats and that one hit the player preventing them from going there. *like a mob spawn point/base*
I know this is unrelated but I'd really like to see a video concerning this: i've noticed that your rivers have still water, realistically, rivers have running water. It would really be cool if you could add that into the game, although, maybe thats the same the problem that you've been running into when trying to make waterfalls. Also, assuming that you figure out how to do this, would this allow you to make the largest bodies of water have waves and other cool realistic water effects?
but how would the terrain from this imaginary cube fit with the rest of the spherical terrain? Surely there would be a seam. Or more sliding there, which might actually work. We could draw an additional layer before the final round terrain that is far terrain based on the distortion experienced by the voxels. If it was small, it would move the obvious visual artifacts a bit further away from the camera while preserving the roundness! I'm not sure if that's what you meant but its a great idea!
Possibly! I don't see why not. We will see in the future.
Have you heard of mapping noise in spherical coordinates instead of Cartesian coordinates? That could potentially solve your issue...but I don't know how it would apply to blocks. I'm working on a voxel world engine, but I use dual contouring instead of actual cubes, so spherical coordinates work fine for me...I've read about it in a few places too, I'll have to look around.
maybe you should break this flat grid. dismantle chunks. Start a spherical system. well ... It seems that you are doing a system plan, look for a spherical system. Is there any chance to create a spherical grid? the coordinates on a sphere, the center distance, distance from the zero point two circumferences that intersect with algulo 90 degrees at ground zero? I'm no mathematician, and I know some programming, so sorry if I have given an idea ridiculous. I really appreciate your work
I would prefer to keep the sphere concept, but this is definitely what I would do if I went back to infinite planes. This is what starforge does, if you are familiar with the game.
Thanks! Unfortunately the issue is not the total area of the cube vs total area of the sphere, it is the change in area at specific points.
I'll do a big exploration video after the biome editor is done and people like Sebastian start adding a crap ton of crazy biomes to the world!
I'm not sure what you mean, because generating the planet as a sphere requires normalization of a cube face. If we squish the voxels so that they fit on a curved surface, they would have to be scaled in different directions, and would no longer be cubes.
note: we could be mapping chunks based on spherical coords, which makes the mapping works, but still leaves a non-linear mapping across seams. current guess is we "wing it", if the mapping process is deterministic, then it should mostly map the seam "consistently".
rendering or walking across an edge would effectively involve "teleports" though, and logically, the mapping between chunks would not be 1:1.
Just thinking about this really quickly, would it be possible to solve all your problems if you consider your cubic surface being a limit approaching a perfect circle? A 2D example would be taking the number of sides of a geometric shape to infinity. This would allow you to model the planet as a "circle" but it would require the addition of non-cubic voxels that would somehow all fit together as you go towards the center of the planet.
I am 20. I started coding 3 years ago. I learned to code by using google, taking college CS classes, and lots of practice! I learned to make this game simply through experimentation while I was learning opengl. Also check out letsmakeavoxelengine if you want some good concepts on how voxel engines can work!
Hmm, you are good at explaining! I don't have the proper insight in math to give you a solution from that angle but I do have a question about it.
Could you not morph the cubes surfaces to lean extremely slightly (unnoticeable) in the angle that the world bends and have the gravity dynamically change as the player moves along?
There is probably a way to do this with a shader, but I honestly have no idea the mathematics needed. I cant even figure out how you would do it on a 2d circle. You would need to move around all the vertices so that only the near ones are the correct spacing and the faraway ones are squished together, and the constantly warping planet might cause some visual artifacts that would be a bit jarring when moving at a rapid pace.
if you cant figure the corners out than maybe the further away you are from the spawn, the more difficult the enemies become until the point where it is impossible to advance close enough to one of the sides or corners without getting killed. the radiation idea can go along with it encase someone is ultra hardcore pro and makes it through.
The round planet system will probably be hard-coded and will be the only setting, except there will probably be a flat plane setting as well. I just don't think it would be wise to manage so many different planet types, it would be harder to fix bugs among other things.
A 24 minute explanation? Awesome.
*not sarcastic*
*not sarcastic when saying that it was not sarcastic*
But I think I'll wait until RUclips is done processing it so I can watch in higher than 360p :P
I was thinking idly that each face of the cube would hold a big circle rather than a square, which could map more nicely to a sphere than would square faces.
basically, we pick the face that best matches the normal, then map the chunk coord orthographically onto the cube face.
the corners of the face will then cease to exist.
but, yeah, I am not entirely sure how to best deal with the seams.
(to be continued)
for the eight corners you could make up something like "due to a subterranean anomaly that greatly affect the magnetic fields of the planet these eight regions are known to cause sever hallucination in those that approach" because magnetic and stuff you know something that appears alien to the explorers while explained with basic science knowledge.
i like the sphere world and to me the distortion is very small and not obtrusive to gameplay, you could map the world as a cube which would eliminate the normals and the distortion but not the corners, tho that'd make a big cube world with hard edges that the player has to jump around. i think that this entire sphere world thing is awesome tho and it must have taken you ages to figure out how to do this, good job!
This already happens! The issue is not the angle of the blocks, but the surface area of the blocks when translated from the world cube to the sphere.
I just put this video in the background n listen to your voice while playing a game ^^
you could use the 8 points in the worlds as a part of the Seed of Andromeda backstory
well, a grass block is green on the top and sort of brown on the bottom, yeah?
So a green hill in the heightmap will be green, and below that brown from the dirt on the block, and if the hill is steep enough, rock outcroppings start showing up. I guess there isn't anything to be done about it, except maybe make the sides of grass blocks green.
But where does the water come from? Where does it collect? How does the initial source replenish? How does the sink not infinitely overflow? How does it travel between loaded and unloaded chunks?
Perhaps you could 'rotate' the cubes blocks around (move the corners to the center of the face and vice versa), so the player is always technically in the center of the face, and thus no distortion? I'm not quite sure how to explain it though, i'd be glad to clarify if you don't get me =)
What you have said has been suggested before, it seems like it would work but unfortunately it is a bit tougher than that. The grid represents the discrete locations of the chunks. When you move that grid by shifting everything, you completely change the layout of the chunks. Meaning if you make a base and walk around the world or something, when you get back your base will likely be gone or obliterated because the chunks positions are screwed up. Its quite hard to explain, but try to imagine what happens at the chunks at the corners and edges as you shift the grid in different directions.
Will you also need certain gear to survive in places like high mountains, or cold places? maybe you can have a body temperature variable, in deserts when doing physical work it rises and in cold places it goes down if not clothed correctly, or is something like this best left for mods?
No everything should map just fine along the edges! I just need to program the ability for the program to derive chunks from different cube faces with arbitrary rotation. Once I have that, they will be popped onto a normal grid, just like in the infinite plane version of the game. So it will in no way break any physics properties or cause any weirdness in the voxels at the edges, other than the distortion of course.
My opinion: leave round objects for voxels. Make cube planets instead. It just won't feel natural otherwise and I pretty sure there is no simple way of solving your problems. (without rewriting all the code and such)
I've been curious about something... Since you say there will be different sizes and shapes to the planets, moons, and asteroids in the system...will EVERY terrain that you can land on be M class? Or will a few and/or most be unworthy for 'human habitation'?
Adds some jam to the video, DJ DUB IN THE HAUS!
Ahhhh yes, this will be better in the future with better far terrain texturing and such
There will only be a few habitable planets in the story solar system, but due to the customizable nature of the game people will be able to create and explore their own planets and hopefully solar systems as well!
Interesting idea!
So as I will now over-simplify it, here's the problem, the voxels are generated properly, but with a size ofset, but the far-away model they generate in accordance to, is not being distorted. So instead of fixing the size of the voxels, how about fixing the size of the other stuff? So the far-terrain and textures are willfully distorted the same amount as the voxels.
I have put some thought into it, and I know how the noise can map in 3d, the issue is placing the cubes properly unfortunately. Also I would like to see your engine!
How about huge ravines or craters to cover up the biome change? That would be one big ravine though..
you should make it so you can go to other planets and find and explore aliens and there life style that would be so cool
Can you set the LOD terrain to scale larger the closer you get to the 8 vertices to combat the visual appearance of the chunks loading and sliding over what would normally be a smaller surface?
I am already storing the world space vector location of the player, and it is simple enough to reverse map it to cube space. The quaternions can be derived from the vector. I am not understanding how this would avoid any corner mapping problems though.
I'm not sure how it could be done, but would it be possible to shift the loaded chunks away from the corners to where what was the center of the face would become the corner and what had been the corner would become the center.
Ok then. The scaling of the player and blocks sounds nice but I don't know if I would like it. Also if a player where to enter into the rip in space and time then it would randomly teleport them somewhere. Maybe even underground! This would be a very interesting and cheap way to get to other planets. That is if you have the luck and make it out alive. How is that idea?
Yeah, I understand that. I'm familiar with vectors and normalization.
I'm not sure what you mean by circular cube face, since cube faces are squares. Also the seams between circles are much much harder to map over than the seams between cube faces, and I'm afraid I have no Idea how to do that. If you want to elaborate, feel free!
So, considering that surface area of the cube gets thinner as you approach the edges, does this cause the terrain features to appear skinnier (when viewed from afar, like from space) since it doesn't change the distance from the center of the sphere/the height of the features?
Hey Ben, something that's been bugging me for a bit. In your heightmaps, say you have a grassy hill. In the distant render, it's going to show up as green. But in the voxels, it's green, and brown, and even a bit of gray in there too.
Unfortunatly if you display cubes on a sphere with the goal of them fitting perfectly on the sphere, it is impossible. Where would your method be allowing distortion? And how would you know where the chunk boundaries are? If I am at 100, 90, 120 on a world with radius 100, what are the coordinates of the chunks that are loaded and saved? This is important to be able to know, or the world will not be persistent and probably would not be able to be stored at all.
You are correct, it is not possible to map cubic voxels to a sphere!
Hmm...all I think of at the moment is drawing a small circle using paint, zoom in, use that as the 'bedrock' and add single pixel layers surrounding this 'bedrock'.
Maybe you could obtain inspiration from this concept?