Nah, it was in the works for a long time. All I did was cut some time from my normal schedule to work on it. Jury's still out on whether that's going to bite me next week.
Years ago, I experimented with something I called a folding drive. The problem I wanted to address was the fact that space travel is so boooooooring. I mean, there is nothing out there, nothing to do, nothing to see, just a whole lot of nothing, followed by a whole lot more nothing. Do you think the stars are pretty? Good, because that’s the only thing you are going to see for the next four years – nothing but stars. So I needed to make it more interesting.
The folding drive folds space, reducing it by some factor for each fold you pass through. One fold can not interact with another. So to engage a ship, you have to be at the same fold as it is. To see or detect a ship you have to be in an adjacent fold, either above or below.
But the way I wrote it was that as you descended through folds, it was a lot like submerging in the ocean in a submarine. You know… Aroooooga Aroooooga! Dive Dive Dive!! That is a tad bet more interesting than Zzzzzzzzzz.
But as you descended into folds, the nature of space geometry begins to change. You now have a kind of folded landscape, things to fly around, to avoid, to hide behind. The deeper you go, the busier your pilot needs to be or risk crashing on the rocks. You can start to include stuff to make space interesting. Things to look at. You might have eddy currents that sweep you in a direction, making for a short cut from point A to point B, or risk getting you completely lost.
The deeper you go, the faster you can travel with the same amount of fuel, but the riskier the navigation becomes.
At some point, you find your self flying through worm-holes that snake and bend and spiral. The ship shakes and rocks, steel girders grown from the stresses applied to the ship.
But this is where you go if you need to play cat and mouse. Shhh! No one make a sound so the enemy doesn’t hear us. Even as you strain to hear something, any thing, through the void, just something to shot at.
What happens if you get sucked outside of your spaceship in this "folded space"
Aroooooga Arooooooga! Dive! Dive! Dive! Oh ####!!! who left the back door entrance open? *gets sucked into folded space*
Now we're stuck in folded space without a way to get back into real space without the space folder machine on our spaceship.
This is the colored environment where the heightmap is at 32m resolution. As you can see, by this point, and to a lesser extent 16m, there is no advantage to block rendering because it might as well be guessing at this point. However, these ridges are still distinct at that distance with strong anti aliasing, so we can't simply remove it. To combat both, I think I am going to swap out ray tracing for normal mapping. The normal map doesn't need to be 1m resolution, but high enough to display ridges would be handy. Additionally, this will significantly boost the fps and remove the need for heavy AA, at the cost of some memory. Not a lot especially with compressed textures, but some.
On another note, I am experimenting with geometry shaders. Of course, not everyone will have access to this functionality, but I want to see what it is like for the first couple grid layers. The idea is each column will be represented by one point which takes one height sample, and that column is converted into a 3-sided rectangular prism via the geometry shader. Perfect edges, no raytracing, and the complexity is constant rather than screen space so performance goes way up if it mostly occludes the raytraced regions. Doing it for the first two layers gives it a range of 128m in every direction. In practice, this will also cover the range of traditional polygon chunks, but it can still be useful as a placeholder for any changes which happen before the polygon chunks can be compiled (any part of the heightmap terrain can be updated within a single frame).
Well have you considered a form of modified marching cubes? I know that would be a fundamental change of minecraft engine. But that is essentially what you are doing.
I have given scrumbleship a little look. But I like the way minecraft starts you off as a person with nothing. Steve rules. I don't really want to start with ship making. But that's me. Ship building feels like a late game creation, not a beginning game creation.
Yeah, agree. Things like Starmade and Scrumbleship start In the middle of space. It just doesn't feel right to find yourself in the middle of space with resources you just find in your inventory.
Yeah your right but the point still stands. You start off in the middle of space next to a big shop. You have no idea who made it and no idea why you have a spaceship core in your inventory. Its not like in minecraft how you have to mine resources and eventually get to space travel. Also I have a question about if there will be a tech tree and if so what will it be like?
Yeah your right but the point still stands. You start off in the middle of space next to a big shop. You have no idea who made it and no idea why you have a spaceship core in your inventory. Its not like in minecraft how you have to mine resources and eventually get to space travel. Also I have a question about if there will be a tech tree and if so what will it be like?
Why not start out in a hanger, with the core of a ship around you and some lockers full of used parts? You can even set up some lore. If you are a newbie, you are basically hired to run some one else's ship. The idea is to earn enough money or prestige to buy out your contract and become your own person.
Your owner then gives you assignments to accomplish. You are free to follow those assignments, or strike out on your own. One of your assignments (if you are in MMP mode) is to find other newbie's that fail to make payments to their ship-lords and get the money out of them.
Why not start out in a hanger, with the core of a ship around you and some lockers full of used parts? You can even set up some lore. If you are a newbie, you are basically hired to run some one else's ship. The idea is to earn enough money or prestige to buy out your contract and become your own person.
Your owner then gives you assignments to accomplish. You are free to follow those assignments, or strike out on your own. One of your assignments (if you are in MMP mode) is to find other newbie's that fail to make payments to their ship-lords and get the money out of them.
Eh, just thinking aloud.
That sounds pretty cool. We should suggest that to the Starmade devlopers.
Ironically, in a surprise twist, Futurecraft takes place in the far far past, long before Steve's spacecraft crash-lands on a strange planet in an uncharted system at the edge of known space causing him amnesia and to there-after forever wander this strange planet all alone. Forever alone...
Combine this with my Sci-fi explanation of Minecraft from loooong ago and it all ties together perfectly! Now if only I could find that old story.. Found it!!
[Click below to read the Minecraft Sci-Fi explanation summary]
This isn't in story format but is a summary concept of what is going on in the world of Minecraftia:
-----------------------------------
Creepers are the left over soldier caste of an alien intelligent plant civilization that killed off most of the native pig-men's advanced society on Minecraftia. Steve is a human astronaut that crashed on this planet. The fact that he keeps getting resurrected after he dies would be a clear sign of a still functioning super high-tech infrastructure still operating on or around the planet. Perhaps that Resurrection facility actually operates from the moon?
It also explains why Steve looks the way he does; he died when his ship crashed onto Minecraftia and the Resurrection facility, having never seen a Human before but finding the DNA similar enough to what it did know, reinterpreted his body into a slightly different form.
And the Nether portals, they access a Quantum transport facility that is underneath the "Bedrock" which the advanced pig-men layed down to protect such infrastructure and is why it mostly still works.
The zombies and skeletons are also left over products of the war with the aliens. They were "people" purposely infected by a nano-tech plague as a desperate last ditch effort which was supposed to be a way to make them be able to survive any attack and not die, but it had unforeseen consequences...
* Story Copyrighted by MineCrak @ 2011
-----------------------------------
Oh yeah people, when you look closely enough at it, Minecraft has Sci-Fi written all over it!
Or, for those preferring a more Religious explanation for Minecraftia:
This is the appropriate place for this, and proves that chickens ARE, in fact, Evil...
This was found on a scroll in a deep dark abandoned Dungeon:
-----------------
Genesis 3:1 (The New Minecraftia Edition)
Now the chicken was more crafty than any of the wild animals the lord notch had made. He said to the woman, “Did notch really say, ‘Thou must not walk next to the Lava lest thee fall in’?”
The woman said to the chicken, “We may harvest the lava from the lava pools with buckets, but notch did say, ‘Thou must not walk too close to the lava, and thou must not touch it, or you will die.’”
“You will not certainly die,” the chicken said to the woman. “For notch knows that when you touch it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like notch, knowing Java and Swedish.”
When the woman saw that the lava of the pool was bright and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she reached out to touch it. It was then that the chicken bumped her from behind, and thus did Eve fall fully into the fires of the forbidden lava and die. The chicken did clucketh to itself in glee then did seeketh out Adam to provide him consolation and advice.
In his loneliness did Adam listen to the advice of the chicken and did lay with the swine of the earth and begot the Nepigilim, the race of accursed Pigmen. For this was he chased out of Eden, chased by notch's holy servants the Creeper Angels which arose from the creeper vines of Eden itself to enact notch's RageQuit.
Said notch unto Adam, "Thou shalt forever more be known as Steve, and cursed to roam the lands Forever alone and fleeing the consequences of your actions until the end of time."...
* Story Copyrighted by MineCrak @ 2011
------------------------------------------------------------
See people? This is why we can't have anything good. Damned chickens!
Ironically, in a surprise twist, Futurecraft takes place in the far far past, long before Steve's spacecraft crash-lands on a strange planet in an uncharted system at the edge of known space causing him amnesia and to there-after forever wander this strange planet all alone. Forever alone...
Combine this with my Sci-fi explanation of Minecraft from loooong ago and it all ties together perfectly! Now if only I could find that old story.. Found it!!
[Click below to read the Minecraft Sci-Fi explanation summary]
My brother and I have the theory that the End is literally a place at the end of time. Endermen are the descendants of mankind in this era but have long since forgotten what they are. Only a vague memory of picking up blocks and setting them back down remains. Over an inconceivable amount of time they have tirelessly and mechanically redistributed all of the world, and even the stars in the sky, evenly throughout the universe. The static you see in the sky is all that remains.
My brother and I have the theory that the End is literally a place at the end of time. Endermen are the descendants of mankind in this era but have long since forgotten what they are. Only a vague memory of picking up blocks and setting them back down remains. Over an inconceivable amount of time they have tirelessly and mechanically redistributed all of the world, and even the stars in the sky, evenly throughout the universe. The static you see in the sky is all that remains.
I thought everybody knew that and that was the way is was created to be thought of
I don't mean to sound uninformed, because I have been following this mod for while now and just came to check up on it and it's progress, but is the mod out? I mean there are forums with ship design sub forums, soooooo.......?
Why not start out in a hanger, with the core of a ship around you and some lockers full of used parts? You can even set up some lore. If you are a newbie, you are basically hired to run some one else's ship. The idea is to earn enough money or prestige to buy out your contract and become your own person. Your owner then gives you assignments to accomplish. You are free to follow those assignments, or strike out on your own. One of your assignments (if you are in MMP mode) is to find other newbie's that fail to make payments to their ship-lords and get the money out of them. Eh, just thinking aloud.
I guess since this is total conversion tier, starting somewhere other than planetside is not out of the question, but I think most people will still be interested in building their way up to the space stage rather than starting there. A lot of work is going into planets. It would be nice if players spent some time on them.
Also I have a question about if there will be a tech tree and if so what will it be like?
There will be a tech tree, but we keep changing it and I don't know what it currently looks like. But the idea behind it is that as you scale the tree you don't become higher level but more specialized. Sensor abilities or firepower, speed or durability, Mining, manufacturing, support. The further you go in one way the less you can do in other categories, and if you want the top tier abilities you need to form teams to balance out your shortcomings. Or you can stay in the middle and be a jack of all trades.
We'll have to see how that works in practice, but the primary goal is to create a niche for different play styles, and not have pvp ruin pve gameplay or vice versa.
I don't mean to sound uninformed, because I have been following this mod for while now and just came to check up on it and it's progress, but is the mod out? I mean there are forums with ship design sub forums, soooooo.......?
Lol, no. You can go back to sleep. Or if you are curious about development, hop back about 5 pages. There are pictures.
I guess since this is total conversion tier, starting somewhere other than planetside is not out of the question, but I think most people will still be interested in building their way up to the space stage rather than starting there. A lot of work is going into planets. It would be nice if players spent some time on them.
Different players are going to have different ideas. Some may want to work their way up to space. Others are going to be lining up at the space dock right out of the spawn point.
But that is one of the great things about this system is that we don't have to make that decision. It will all evolve organically. It's the job of the game-creator to provide the fertile field for such ideas to take root.
Iv has been campaigning for spherical worlds since forever, but I think I might have actyally found a way to pull it off.
Say hello to the the Peirce Quincuncial projection.
The midpoints regions are compressed to a point when projected onto a sphere, but this map tessellates (left to right, top to bottom), and does so as squares, meaning there is no conflict in mapping it to chunks. There's no guarantee it will look good in practice, but I'll certainly give it a shot.
*Edit*
In the above diagram, the orientation was selected to keep the midpoints as far away from any landmasses as possible. To avoid the distortion showing up in our implementation, it may be possible to tweak the terrain generation to discourage anything interesting from popping up in those areas.
That is, of course, assuming the planet in question has oceans.
So will planets get larger the more explored they are? And what if I walk in one direction for a while, what about the chunks not generated beside line and how will it be displayed.
Not sure I understand the question. Planets will be finite in size, and the surface is pre-generated to a degree. Size is going to be ~20km along the equator with either model.
What happens if you get sucked outside of your spaceship in this "folded space"
Aroooooga Arooooooga! Dive! Dive! Dive! Oh ####!!! who left the back door entrance open? *gets sucked into folded space*
Now we're stuck in folded space without a way to get back into real space without the space folder machine on our spaceship.
This is the colored environment where the heightmap is at 32m resolution. As you can see, by this point, and to a lesser extent 16m, there is no advantage to block rendering because it might as well be guessing at this point. However, these ridges are still distinct at that distance with strong anti aliasing, so we can't simply remove it. To combat both, I think I am going to swap out ray tracing for normal mapping. The normal map doesn't need to be 1m resolution, but high enough to display ridges would be handy. Additionally, this will significantly boost the fps and remove the need for heavy AA, at the cost of some memory. Not a lot especially with compressed textures, but some.
On another note, I am experimenting with geometry shaders. Of course, not everyone will have access to this functionality, but I want to see what it is like for the first couple grid layers. The idea is each column will be represented by one point which takes one height sample, and that column is converted into a 3-sided rectangular prism via the geometry shader. Perfect edges, no raytracing, and the complexity is constant rather than screen space so performance goes way up if it mostly occludes the raytraced regions. Doing it for the first two layers gives it a range of 128m in every direction. In practice, this will also cover the range of traditional polygon chunks, but it can still be useful as a placeholder for any changes which happen before the polygon chunks can be compiled (any part of the heightmap terrain can be updated within a single frame).
Yeah, agree. Things like Starmade and Scrumbleship start In the middle of space. It just doesn't feel right to find yourself in the middle of space with resources you just find in your inventory.
Why not start out in a hanger, with the core of a ship around you and some lockers full of used parts? You can even set up some lore. If you are a newbie, you are basically hired to run some one else's ship. The idea is to earn enough money or prestige to buy out your contract and become your own person.
Your owner then gives you assignments to accomplish. You are free to follow those assignments, or strike out on your own. One of your assignments (if you are in MMP mode) is to find other newbie's that fail to make payments to their ship-lords and get the money out of them.
Eh, just thinking aloud.
That sounds pretty cool. We should suggest that to the Starmade devlopers.
Ironically, in a surprise twist, Futurecraft takes place in the far far past, long before Steve's spacecraft crash-lands on a strange planet in an uncharted system at the edge of known space causing him amnesia and to there-after forever wander this strange planet all alone. Forever alone...
Combine this with my Sci-fi explanation of Minecraft from loooong ago and it all ties together perfectly! Now if only I could find that old story.. Found it!!
[Click below to read the Minecraft Sci-Fi explanation summary]
[ Original Post ]
Or, for those preferring a more Religious explanation for Minecraftia:
[ Original Post ]
- The Cubic Chunks Mod is back! Be a part of it's rebirth and Development.
-- Robinton's Mods: [ Mirror ] for some of his Mods incl Cubic Chunks Mod, due to DropBox broken links.
- Dungeon Generator for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
- QuickSAVE-QuickLOAD for the Open Cubic Chunks Mod
That sounds AWESOME!
I thought everybody knew that and that was the way is was created to be thought of
I guess since this is total conversion tier, starting somewhere other than planetside is not out of the question, but I think most people will still be interested in building their way up to the space stage rather than starting there. A lot of work is going into planets. It would be nice if players spent some time on them.
There will be a tech tree, but we keep changing it and I don't know what it currently looks like. But the idea behind it is that as you scale the tree you don't become higher level but more specialized. Sensor abilities or firepower, speed or durability, Mining, manufacturing, support. The further you go in one way the less you can do in other categories, and if you want the top tier abilities you need to form teams to balance out your shortcomings. Or you can stay in the middle and be a jack of all trades.
We'll have to see how that works in practice, but the primary goal is to create a niche for different play styles, and not have pvp ruin pve gameplay or vice versa.
Lol, no. You can go back to sleep. Or if you are curious about development, hop back about 5 pages. There are pictures.
Different players are going to have different ideas. Some may want to work their way up to space. Others are going to be lining up at the space dock right out of the spawn point.
But that is one of the great things about this system is that we don't have to make that decision. It will all evolve organically. It's the job of the game-creator to provide the fertile field for such ideas to take root.
Say hello to the the Peirce Quincuncial projection.
The midpoints regions are compressed to a point when projected onto a sphere, but this map tessellates (left to right, top to bottom), and does so as squares, meaning there is no conflict in mapping it to chunks. There's no guarantee it will look good in practice, but I'll certainly give it a shot.
*Edit*
In the above diagram, the orientation was selected to keep the midpoints as far away from any landmasses as possible. To avoid the distortion showing up in our implementation, it may be possible to tweak the terrain generation to discourage anything interesting from popping up in those areas.
That is, of course, assuming the planet in question has oceans.