The world is round

[CHollman82]

It would be cool if travelling far enough in one direction eventually looped back to where you started, based on your chosen world size. That's all you'd have to change, I'm not asking to actually make the blocks curve away to a horizon or let you mine straight through and back out the other side or anything, just a simple looping mechanism on the cardinal axes. Instead of negative coordinates if you go beyond zero the next block would be at the world size-1 (so, if you choose a 100k block world size, and you headed east you would go: 2 -> 1 -> 0 -> 99,999 -> 99,998...).

[RobinHood]

this would be nice, especially in east/west direction, like in Civilization. 100%round would be very nice, but its not possible I think!? Cubes would be distorted and they would very small in the near of the poles and very huge at the equator. And instead of 4-sided cubic-voxels - VS must generate triangles or n-gons and (ecxtruded one) for the South Pole and North Pole.

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by RobinHood

[CHollman82]

I was thinking there was a way to just fake it without altering the geometry of the blocks, but if not then yeah just doing this in the east/west direction would be great too.

[RobinHood]

yes, east west would be sweet, if possible north/south also, it would be super sweeet.

east/west - the map gen should calculate these borders seamless. north/south could be calculate also seamless, but you would walk from north too south-pole without passing subpolar tundra ... taiga ... temperate zone ... subtropic ...equator ... subtropic .... and so on, that would be impossible (in a real round world) ... 

 

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by RobinHood

[Hal13]

i'm not sure, the default world is double the earths surface, is there really a need for looping? In a default world you could fly with top speed for reallife days from one border to the other (of course only if the map is completely generated already, else you will take weeks).

If there is no need to do it, it just would overcomplicate development and take away from implementing new stuff and fixing existing bugs. Looping the world is not a trivial matter and there are only 2 coders in the team, one of whom does the administrative stuff too.

 

a simpler looping mechanism (like the one suggested) might be doable, but even that creates big problems:

1. biomes/landscapes won't match, there is no blending from one to the other, making the border area ugly as hell with harsh cuts (people will complain about it)

2. if that would be fixed you wouldn't see where not to place stuff anymore, therefore chutes, axles, furniture (like beds that are more than 1 block big), but especially multiblock structures would need to be reworked to make them work correctly

3. Rendering new chunks will take more time, the engine doing the rendering would have to look if a newly rendered chunk is maybe on the other side of the map

4. Spawning new mobs will take more time, as the algorythm has to consider blocks several thousand blocks away from the player position to be viable spawning spaces

 

1 hour ago, RobinHood said:

north/south could be calculate also seamless, but you would walk from north too south-pole without passing subpolar tundra ... taiga ... temperate zone ... subtropic ...equator ... subtropic .... and so on, that would be impossible (in a real round world) ... 

you just would have to not loop from pole to pole but from equator to equator (equator -> north pole -> equator -> south pole -> equator -> loop to the beginning) but even that would create new inconsistencies someone will point out and complain about later (together the two loops would be more of a moebius strip than a sphere).

Edited March 24, 2021 by Hal13

[RobinHood]

ah, okay, lot of cons - this eats off the one pro for a round or semi-round-east-west-world.

[Hal13]

I know of only a single bloxel based game, where the dev wants to get to the point of creating actual planets with them, but even the ring world habitat that is in now, creates huge amounts of problems for bigger builds on it.

But doing that without having had the plans from the beginning?

 

Maybe some team of modders would take the idea to make a mod for it? They could concentrate solely on the issues and fixes for them, without needing to implement all the planned features yet to come too. Maybe they'd figure out ways to do it and it becoming an official option for worldborders later? It IS a nice idea for smaller worldsizes after all.

[Erik]

The idea of a "round" world isn't as complicated as it may seem at first. It would be a lot of work though.

This thread has some info on how to archive it, especially in the video in last post:

A torus (i.e. donut) would be chosen for the shape of the world. The world would need to be big enough so the same chunk (or even region) can only be loaded once at max viewing distance, as there may be strange bugs when it is loaded multiple times. World generation would need some tweaks, so the world generation does connect at the former borders, which for terrain shape just requires some tweaks to the noise to make tileable. However, making the other worldgen stuff tileable, like especially the landform mapping could prove to be rather difficult, the code as it is right now is already kinda daunting.

Though, to be honest, I don't see it happening ever. It is the kind of feature that needs to be build in from the start or very early, because with every new thing added to world generation it becomes more difficult to add and as the feature is not in right now and not even in the roadmap, I'm certain it isn't coming. It would just take months to develop something with minimal gameplay impact, there are more important features that deserve that time.

As for modders taking this idea, I highly doubt it. Modifying the chunk loading could would be required and that is part of the engine, so not easily accessible by modders. The maintenance for such a mod would also be kinda high, as updates are much more likely to break it.

[BearWrestler]

Some mad math genius already explored pretty thorougly in 2016 how to deal with the deformation of blocks caused by a round Minecraft-like world, as well as how to wrap N/S and E/S edges, making the world a torus (a sphere covered with a grid of uniform squares is unfortunately impossible... a mind-blowing problem when you think about it).

He even implemented the whole thing in Minetest! You could download it on their forums and check it out.

Some people are also making cubic planets with 6 flat faces... probably easier if you can handle the gravity switch. All those ideas are better suited for a space age planet-hopping game though.

I don't think it would be a good idea at all for this game though due to the massive effort required and the unintuitive behavior of a torus. I see it more as a curiosity. There are so many things to do to improve this game first such as water life and better spawning mechanics.

Edited March 26, 2021 by BearWrestler