Progress Update #9

Well, as I have sadly been too busy with things to work on this game since the last update, but I have been at least setting aside time to learn how to art. However just leaving the post at that seems kind of lame, even though no one reads these. So after some thought, I have decided I'm going to talk about some thoughts and ideas that I have for this game as filler. Hopefully the occasional person that accidentally finds this project with think it interesting.

To start off with, I would like to talk about the shape of the world. As I stated in the first post I made, I'm going for a voxel box aesthetic kind of like Minecraft. It's a simple look that is easy to code and simple to art. But unlike Minecraft, I would also like to have a planet that is about the size of earth and is a sphere but voxel box worlds don't really do round. So how do we solve this? Well we can start by connecting the east and west edges of the map, turning it into a cylinder (or more accurately a conveyor belt). This gives us a roundish map that if you travel east or west long enough you'll eventually get back to where you started, but isn't a sphere. The first thing that dose come to mind to make it a sphere is to pinch the ends, but buildings built on the surface will start to look kind of weird as you approach the poles, so we can't do that. The only solution I have been able to think of is actually to just fake it. By that I mean we take the X, Y, and Z position of the player and convert that into Longitude, Altitude, and Latitude and then use that to figure out what angle everything in the sky should be at if you were on a sphere. The problem with this is that the closer you get to the poles, the more the illusion breaks down. At the pole it's self the illusion would produce such a horrid nightmare that I think it might be best to set up an instant kill zone long before the player reaches it. But between the north and south of a particular latitude (which should be further north/south then any player would have reason to travel) it should look quite nice as the position of the sun, moons, and other planets change to reflect your current position.

With that I'm afraid I need to get back to work and will have to wait until the next update for more of my thoughts and ideas.