What if Minecraft was spherical - PlanetSmith Episode 1
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- Опубліковано 14 тра 2024
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This is the first in a series were I dive into the creation of PlanetSmith. Come follow the journey. - Ігри
12:37 "It doesn't matter that they're boring, it matters that they exist" hits hard bro.
In alpha chill is nice
Reminds me of a very old project for making Minecraft spherical that I saw way back. The Seed of Andromeda project focused on making Minecraft-like worlds at the ground perspective, but then gradually transitioned everything into a sphere as you increased in elevation. However, they suffered from rather bad distortion artifacts near where the corners of the cube would compress into the spherical shape. You still might check out that project for any inspiration or alternative ideas for solutions.
Took me on a bit of a rabbit, shame that project died. Looked interesting. But I guess that was probably bound to happen it had to wide of a scope and only sustained off volunteered labor.
Still shame it died :(
He actually then decided to represent the world as a torus, but map it to a sphere. That worked really well. Obviously you cannot map it in anyway that actually removes distortion, but this method lets you hide it really well, and let's you have all cube voxels (especially if the torus is big enough, or you just cheekily map a subsection back to a normal grid when close enough). Still doesn't solve the issues of digging down or building up too high. But I don't think those can be solved.
I thought of "Eco"
Holy shit, Ben was actually a friend of mine. Dude got me into opengl programming back when there was like zero online documentation for the API.
I was super bummed when he dropped SoA, but my understanding is he's current working with ArenaNet on Guild Wars 2.
oh realy? neat
i left the discord server long ago
i assume it still exist, probably not too akitv
I really hope that each world has newtownian physics, so for example a player can enter a stable orbit around a world
Maybe there could be multiple worlds that you could go to, imagine flying to the moon or another planet :)
What if the star system was randomly generated in each world :)
if the gravity is calculated with 1/r^2, you should be able to get into orbit with the right speed
Imagine building a Redstone rocket to launch yourself into orbit with a bunch of tnt.
that sounds an awful lot like a softlock to me lmao
5:28 A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON. Listen, hear me and obey.
Guess im off to play skyrim again..
Came down here to say this 🤣
looks uncannily like the beacon
I was looking for this comment
They really didn't even try with that gameobject huh
really clever solution to making a voxel based world on a round planet! at first when i saw you messing with cubes i sighed, thinking this was just another pointless attempt at wrapping a square grid around a sphere. glad i was proven wrong lol
it likely has the same problems
but it will get interesring how he would exept it into the design
Just so you know, the moment I saw that you were doing an icosahedron based hexagonal grid, I knew my first base (and probably most of the following ones) would be pentagonal - which will be a bit of a change from my current hexagonal minecraft base.
…though there is the slight possibility that I'll deliberately ignore the provided grid and make a square base instead…
for a round planet?
It might be fun, when expanding this to a full game, to give some significance to the 12 pentagons on the planet. To me, they suggest some kind of magical geometry--maybe sources of power, or ancient dungeons where you can fight bosses. (this is also a handy way to stop players building on them)
Yes I have this planned 😬
@@IncandescentGames Ley lines, maybe?
being in possession of all 12 means you can blow up the planet
@@coppertones7093 or better yet, command its entities and creatures. perhaps you could control the dead bodies of bosses.
@@IncandescentGamesalso, I think it would be a fun nod to this if you made one of the hexagons in the logo a pentagon (maybe the T's for symmetry?)
I was skeptical until you started showing terrain generation. It looks amazing.
Although it's not a spherical solution, making the base for the planet a torus, instead of a sphere, would reduce distortions drastically
This is such an amazing idea! would absolutely love to follow this into a full game! One thing i was wondering was that it's sad that you can't have flat walls with this. It might just be something players have to get used to but one way i thought of that might make it possible is if you could split the blocks in half. That way players can create flat walls and more intricate builds.
you could also make it so that stuff automatically connects into other blocks kinda like in townscaper
@@naiknaik8812 I have a prototype block that does this which will be in the next episode, I didn't like how it worked though so it's been shelved for now.... but maybe it comes back in the future with some changes.
@@IncandescentGamesYou're incredibly talented. I'm working on something similar, but not near as complex as this.
Considering the problems created by normalizing cube points onto a sphere, I decided to keep cubic voxels and use an interpolated marching cubes algorithm to generate the world. You've found a very neat way around that, and you can emulate voxel building like in micecraft. The method I've chosen means I need to have separate building mechanics.
An idea for your hexagonal voxels, though: Maybe when building with certain hexagonal prisms, you can use a wave function collapse algorithm to let the players choose smooth walled blocks without seams. Maybe even windows, doors, and decorative pieces could be placed like this. Many more assets, but a benefit to this is that you could add buildings to your procedural generation pretty easily and have settlements generate. Just a suggestion! Tons of other ways to do it too
This is an excellent devlog, normally I'd say making a steam page on the first devlog is a little hasty but you seem to perfectly understand what you're doing. Can't wait for episode 2!
one thing that came to my mind is, that if the player is "done" exploring the current world, or is "bored" with it, they can leave the planet and go to another one, one way to do this, is to have "stars" in the sky as white dots, each dot is a seed(has a seed assigned to it randomly), you could potentially get the distance of the player from the planet as they leave it(through a rocket or whatever) and get the seed of the star they are looking at and generate a new planet from it, I don't know just a random idea that popped up in mind, not really that easy to implement but just wanted to share.
Stuff like this is planned. But a long way off currently lots to do first.
reminds me of ne mans sky, where there's infinite planets to go to
i would like a more Terraria approach with a big enough world rich with stuff, would be aweasome
For a tech demo, this is a great idea and super fun.
But for a real game?
Look at Terraria vs Starbound for this:
Both at the core are very similar games.
In terraria you build a base for all your stuff, often near spawn, or spread out across key locations in the world.
In starbound.. you have infinite worlds to explore. You never really settle down, you never build a real base.
Eventually all the planets become samey, you spot the repeating patterns - and because you have no investment in any one of these worlds, you lose interest.
@@symmetry8049-- At the same time, many Terraria players create new worlds to harvest resources unavailable in their home worlds, like the other evil biome, sand and trees, and rare loot.
Fishing helps with the loot, but Terraria worlds are still a tad small. A small collection of worlds would be nice, like with the Aether and Twilight Forrest being on a different planet.
I think it would be neat if each of the twelve pentagonal points had a significance for the world, maybe they contain a unique structure or other point of interest, though it might be too predictable because once you find one, you can just run in a straight line and find the other eleven. Either way, this is a really cool proof of concept! As I was watching this, I wondered how complicated it'd be to continue curving the voxels inwards as you went further into the world, would they become warped until they became unrecognizable given how much they'd have to curve to fit inside each next layer?
The will get narrow, to prevent this you can only interact with the planets crust which is 512 blocks thick currently, over this distance the change isn't noticeable
You could play into the ease of finding the other points of significance when you've found one by having one main structure that can only be unlocked if you've gone to all the sub-points.
I think the better solution would be to just have a thick crust and the rest of the spheroid be Bedrock, instead of allowing the player to dig closer to the center of the spheroid.
Whenever I thought about something like this I always concluded that is would be best to tile up dodecahedrons and connect them by their centers with vertices, living with the rotation differences across the planet.
I was literally just talking about making a game like this the other day. I've been brainstorming on this exact concept for years and haven't mustered the might to start climbing the dev mountain. Great to see someone working on this, I'll be watching your progress!
I've thought about the problems of making Minecraft spherical before and I'm loving your solutions, and how well they seem to work. Subscribing.
hexagons r the bestagons
Wow, I didn't knew they were pentagons, cool vid :)
You can make a Pentagonal house around a pentagon if you find one. They are hard to find though ut you can use F3 to find a chunk border and follow that to the pentagons
@@IncandescentGames Yesss that would be cool :)
Amazing proof of concept! Sort of getting Astroneer vibes from this too- there's a lot of cool directions you could take this. Excited to see it develop!
Looks great! I made a spherical minecraft demo in Unity too! I stuck with warped cubes as the warping at the "corners" started to grow on me. Id love to know how you managed y levels as that is what was most challenging for me. The size of each block has to grow linearly with the radius, digging down makes the blocks literally smaller. I had to dynamically scale the player, but it looks lie you are avoiding the problem by limiting y to really far from the radius
Yes build height is from 5km from the center to 5.5km, so only a 10% change in block width over 0.5km which isn't noticible. On small worlds it is, but i will restrict build height here, Perhaps blocks fall off into space if you go to high
Absolutely loved the first episode! Your explanations on tackling each challenge were super clear and insightful. It's awesome to see the thought and effort you're putting into PlanetSmith. Really looking forward to seeing where this goes. Keep up the great work!
This project looks so cool! Subbed! Looking forward to more.
Dude, I love this! I just wishlisted on Steam.
Can't wait to play. I actually really like the shape of the blocks, can't wait to fly around my world.
Happy coding!
5:04 a new hand touches the beacon!
Man I've been diving into voxels recently and this is so awesome! Will definetly keep an eye on this!
Sounds dope, looking forward to more!
insane work u are brilliant
This looks incredible! Great video
This project is soo cool and I cant wait to see where it goes!
this is a type of Minecraft I never even imagined was possible, this is remarkable!
This is awesome! Keep it up!
Very interesting ❤ Love how you came up with your own voxel solutions, for creating a spherical world. Had similar thoughts with my voxel world, but in my case it’s all data points instead of blocks. Really awesome and love it!
Looks really good so far!
This is one of the coolest things i've ever seen
Wow so cool concept! There's so much fun things you can do if his project succeeds. I'll follow you i want to see how you make this.
Quite the interesting project, mate. I look forward to the next episode 👍
we will follow your development eagerly
You are a legend my dude
Awesome work, man
this is such a sick project, I am fully invested
This is REALLY cool. Can’t wait for early access
Damn i really cant wait, i have been dreaming of a circular minecraft but got my hopes dashed after a few videos but with the switch to hexagons, its reignited my interest
hexagonal voxels (hexels?) look surprisingly good
I like hexels, going to call it that from now.
Damn, this looks like something amazing coming together. I got to sub now
I would love to see more of this!! Perhaps one day it could work as a 3d equivalent of Starbound but like,, actually good.
oh dang! i had actually been looking into this exact thing for fun recently. the game "dyson sphere program" is a factory game that takes place on spherical planets, but they use a square grid, which kind of resets at each latitude mark, meaning that you can't build in a straight line from pole to pole. so i was like "what would a better solution to a grid on a sphere be" and i found geodesic polyhedra like the one you're using here.
There have been a couple minecraft remake projects I've seen recently -- it would be really cool if all the creators worked together to create one massive project!
Too may cooks, would make cooperation hard as we will each have a difrent vision.
Literally a day after you posted this I started working on a game for a game jam that is a survival game that I’m projecting onto a sphere! A pretty different way to execute this concept, as I’m just using shaders to make a flat plane look spherical.
You earned a sub from me. If this turns into a full fledged sandbox survival game like Minecraft, you'll have earned several purchases from me and my friend group. Love the progress you've shown off already!
Looks great!
5:07 A NEW HAND TOUCHES THE BEACON
If you turn this into a full game ill pay for it lmaoo
This game seems like it is going to be incredible. I am excited for the first playable version.
Amazing work! I imagine how it's hard to deal with triangular chunks and pentagons in corners.
this is incredible o.O
great job
2:30 imo the edge problem gets fixed if you increase the scale a lot, the angular difference will shrink down immensely and the edge will be nearly nonexistant, furthermore, you can make "flattened terrain" instances on it, areas that you could place on the land and that override world geometry to make it so tall buildings don't flare out the taller they are
i'd personally make some kind of "hollow earth" where the diameter of the earth is a dozen kilometers, with bedrock appearing a kilometer deep, so block size difference at the bottom is only 15% smaller than ones at the surface, and with the right LOD, you can still easily see beyond the horizon with a hundred or so blocks over the surface
it'd also allow you to have some places in the bedrock where there's holes, allowing you to get deeper into the mantle, and allow you to reset the scale by having a different grid, and a few "connector" blocks that'd allow you to connect some things like pipes etc between, or using the "flattened terrain" to keep a consistent grid
there could be a total of 3 layers, the surface one going from 100% to 85% size from 0 to -1km, a "deep layer" from 100% to 82% size (-1->-2km), and "core" or "hell" layer from 100% to 80% size (-2->-3km), or to go crazier, adding the 9 layers of hell, all the way down to -10->-11km going from 100% to 50% at the bottom before the last kilometer of core that would be unreasonably hard to render given size goes to 0%, leading to divisions by 0, so i guess making it an instakill molten thing, or a no-build zone where some huge megaboss creature lives, would be a good idea
5:04 A New Hand Touches The Beacon...
This is really really cool and I'm excited to see where you take this, but would it not be easier to just fake the effect with a vertex shader for curvature and like a modulo function on the player's coordinates for the wrap-around?
Yes and no if you did this you would be on the surface of a donut not a sphere, but i want planets which you can physicaly fly to and from so the elusion would be lost as you fly up.
This what i searching for.. thank you
Was making a planet game and came up with the same exact way to create planets, would love to see how it evolvs !
Omg I just started a project where i tried to generate a planet proceduraly and though of using hexasphere and prism by following the same rules as minecraft map generation, and then just like a few days after that : your video comes out !
Now i’m interested to see how you’ve done this because i’ve spend some time on optimisation by now and its starting to look quite nice on my side!
i never got anywhere past the idea stage but this is something i’ve thought about quite a bit, as i would like to make a voxel space game thing someday. the idea i had was to keep cubes and keep a cube planet, but not 100% a cube, more of a rounded cube, and also distort gravity somewhat (how this would interact with space physics, im not sure, maybe some morphing depending on distance, idk). that way most of the world is regular voxel generation, with variable height offset, but with only special casing on the edges and corners, to round them off. it’s not perfect, but i think cube planets makes diegetic sense for a world made of cubes.
I've always wanted to do this when planning to make a proper space exploration in a voxel world. So far, my best idea had been to make a cube world and just put a hard boundary on the gravity direction, but that would have meant that the blocks on the edge somehow need two different up directions. Though I guess that's actually not impossible to deal with
Yoooo!!
I've wanted to try a project like this for a while!
I've done some research, and I think it might be possible with cubes, but with worse singularities than the pentagons, so idk for sure lol.
If I ever do it I want to add multiple planets and some way to travel and maybe even attack between them for awesome pvp battles!
Keep up the good work!
This really reminds me of astroneer, but I’ve always wanted to see a version of it that was more like a sandbox experience.
imagine this in 4D -next project 🤓😎
The hexagonal map made me think how cool it would be to get a big globe as a map in Civ VII, which would obviously be a lot easier than Minecraft since it's flat.
5 star idea. I can't wait for part two. Who knows. If Mojang sees this they might hire you to make minecraft 2.0!
Just a cool thing you could add is a slight fog so people don't see the ugly chunk loading and at each pentagon, there's some special structure!
how do you prevent gaps forming between the blocks as you get further from the core of the planet if they have these smooth layers? if they get wider as they go up that could get weird, you could be building a pillar and it would be getting wider as you go up. but if they stay the same thickness gaps would form between them. and it looks to have smooth layers for any distance from the core where all those blocks could form a solid shell, and beneath that is a smaller shell but with the same amount of blocks, so how? I guess you could scale the player by their distance from the core, and warp the camera along the vertical direction, to make the world seem square, but surely that would cause issues if you look around at certain angles.
idk but its a cool concept, and I can't wait for how you'll implement slabs that can also be vertical to make smooth walls, if you're gonna do stuff like that
Yes blocks do get wider as you go up, Its not really an issue at the % change is small. Build height is 512 blocks so for a planet with a 5km radius that means there is only a 10% difrence between bedrock and max build height. However on tiny planets this can get extream if you planet has a 100m radius blocks will be 6X wider at build height, to combat this I will limit build height on tiny worlds and the smalest world you will be able to make will have a radius of 300m. Haven't decided if im doing vertical slabs yet, but its on the maybe list.
@@IncandescentGames cool, and thanks for answering.
now its just a question of what to do with the pentagons, you could maybe embrace their specialness and make them like this games version of the strongholds, with a portal right at that point. but that's just ideas, I'm sure you have ideas already
@@IncandescentGames A possibility to combat this further would be to subdivide after a certain point as well as merge, no easy things of course, though not especially difficult either.
Looks really interesting.
I'm just worried that buildings will look bad if you only have access to hex blocks.
The only solution that I can think of is to create a different shape depending on the surrounding blocks, but that might be a lot of work.
I would have really like to see one of the pentagons in the game view. I also think those would be interesting locations to put special points of interest in a final game. They would be evenly spaced out and be unique
Seems that Globesweeper helped you refine this idea. This is a good example of how a skill can be used for different things.
Congrats.
Was kinda other way round actually. I saw I could easily make globesweeper from the shape and I knew that was a lot easier.
Oh my, I have questions.
- How deep can you dig? Is there a kind of "End" after an arbitrary point X layers deep into the crust?
- If there isn't is it possible to dig through the planet and out through the other side?
- If you dig straight down deep enough is there a primitive solid at the planet's core?
- Is every layer/shell of the planet it's own Goldberg polyhedron? How did you achieve such granularity? Is it possible to generate a Goldberg polyhedron of any given size such that they can be perfectly stacked concentrically above and below one another (the layers) without gaps?
- It looks like voxels in Planetsmith can stack into perfect pillars from core to sky, how does this work if every voxel is the same size? Shouldn't each layer's voxels be a little offset from the adjacent layers voxels?
- Why hexagonal prisms instead of cubes? Is it not possible to approximate the centre of a cubic voxel to the centre of a hex/pentagonal one? Was this for aesthetic or geometric reasons?
I guess I'm mostly curious about how you got voxels at every layer to seamlessly align into perfect pillars. It's my impression that as you get further from the primitive solid you require more voxels to tile the larger surface area, and you can't do this without introducing at least some misalignment with the voxels in the layer just beneath.
This is a really cool project and I'm looking forward to messing around with it. You've done something very geometrically curious and I'm excited to learn more. Please enlighten me you wizard.
Hello, I'm a Alpha Tester in the game, and I will answer you gladly :)
The height of the world is of 512 blocks, beneath that there's an invisible and indestructible wall, you can't build/go beneath it, in the top of the world there is a build limit
What
Yes, the higher you go, the flatter the blocks are.
Geometric reasons
ty for not flashbanging me and dimming the white :D
Ive actually tried to solve the minecraft sphere world problem myself. but in a different way. For me it was not the goal to build a world that is sphere shaped with optimal vosel shapes but rather to take the cube world of Minecraft and make it appear as sphere shaped and have the feature to walk around it. Doing this would allow me to implement the sphere features in form of a mod without having to rewrite the whole game. Making the world appear spherical was something that some mods could already do a few years ago and I didn't want to write some code for something that someone already made, so I focused on making the walking around mechanic:
The minecraft world has a limited height and can be seen as a 2d plane. Because the world would be finite, the normal minecraft world would be cut into a square with a configurable size. The problem was now to map this square onto the surface of a sphere without the weird effects that were happening at the edges of the world at some point in the developement process. I finally decided that I couldn't figure out the projection onto a sphere since (if we would for example use orthographic projection) at the north and south pole there would be many as many blocks touching each other as the square is wide. I solved this problem by taking a different approach:
I wanted to walk around the world in a straight line and the edges of the world should not end up in weird intersections, so I took a piece of paper and folded it in a way that the edges oposite to another would touch. Now I had a cylinder and I could walk around the world in one direction but not in the other. Now I wondered what to do if I wanted to connect the upper edge (which was a circle) and the lower one. With a real piece of paper this was not possible, but in theory this would create a Thorus shape.
This was the solution: A Thorus surface can be tiled with a grid of only rectangles (Chunks that would have 4 neighbors (one on each side))(no weird intersections). If one would display this world as a Thorus, of course the inner chunks would e squished, but this does not matter to us, since the world is mathematicalls a Thorus (so you can walk around in any straight line) but we display the part of the world that is currently loaded like a part of a sphere.
In theory this should work perfectly. One Problem would be weird chunk borders at the "Edges" because of inecrafts terrain generation, but we can easily trick the generation into using the new chunk blending feature by telling Minecraft that the next chunk out of the world border square is already generated like the chunk on the opposite world border. The game then automaticly tries to blend them.
Unfortunately I currently have no time to implement this, so if someone who reads this would like to make a mod based on this comment, feel free to do so
I once attempted to make spherical minecraft too! My concept was to have a whole solar system of unique planets, and my goal was to give the player a telescope that they could use to look back to their home! I took the approach of wrapping the 2D cartesian plane of voxels into a taurus so the north end connects to the south end, and the east to the west. I just never managed to wrap my head around the issues of perspective warping with height and how to explain intuitively why the world is a taurus but still appears as a sphere. In the end I abandoned the project, but I always keep it mulling around in my mind in case I think of a solution!
Another really cool Minecraft clone made by a youtuber, and even better - it's made out of hexagons!
Nice
This is really interesting! I liked the original idea of making the world spherical and just having slightly warped cubes. I wonder, if the world is big enough then the warping shouldn't be noticable right? Of course, the deeper you go, the more warped it would get, so you could make it so that the sphere is hollow and you can only go to a certain depth like in Minecraft anyways. Maybe you could make it so that in the perfectly aligned points of the planet there is a tunnel leading to the other side, just so that potential isn't wasted.
Distortion stays the same no matter the size of the cube. This is because as you approach the edges the cube has to be rotated 45 degrees, size doesn't smooth that out
This kind of reminds me of another Minecraft like game being developed that has voxel planets. Currently it’s very early on in its development and is focusing more on orbital mechanics and the like. It doesn’t have a name yet, but I believe it’s videos on UA-cam are titled “voxel project”
Great video! Was wondering if at any point you considered making a donut-shaped world? (A benefit being that you could possibly still use cubes.)
Yes cubes would work ok on a donut world providing it was large enough. I wanted to keep it planet like so the space travel makes more sence in the future.
Hey just wanted to say bro, your voice, your skills very much enhance the watching experience of this video. What I'm trying to say is that great potential to become a big UA-cam channel :)
Very cool
looks a lot like a mindustry planet map
neat
Pretty cool
i've been speculating on the possiblity of making something similar to this while keeping the cubic voxels, so far i think taking a cylinder as a base and warping it into a sphere might work fine but i'll would still have to deal some issues with the top and bottom of the cylinder
Hexagons are truly the best-agons
0:30 I can see the curvature of the earth. Take that flat-earthers!
bro cuts the video and proceed to make the most complex minecraft game
00:40 Bro is another kind of human if he build his base in a birch forest.
I use octohedral mapping, it's used in shader because the math is simple and don't break in precision at big number, and it has minimal stretching. Using two hemi octohedral I minimize the pole and still get a 1:1 xy correspondence with flat projection, better crossing the edge is seamless in one axis and basically just a reflect with an offset in the other axis. One trick is to merge the tilesnat the corner of the 2d map that create the poles into in single tile by taking half of each corner...
I have thought about this problem a lot and have some ideas you might like: First off, try making the voxels not cubes but instead a different space tiling, and make them smaller. Then, you could place and break multiple blocks at a time whenever you interact with the world, and these shapes you make approximate a cube relative to gravity. You also wouldn't need to distort anything this way, if you didn't want to. Instead, you'd have the whole world approximate a sphere with its voxels.
Maybe I should clarify some of the reasoning: You would use a space tiling that you never mess with or distort at all, to make everything look the same no matter where you are. This also has the benefit of allowing you to have any arbitrary gravity you want and have everything still make sense.
Seeing how this world is more focused on going up and down, perhaps its best of you could instantly go up any one block talk surface? Sorta like how slabs work in Minecraft?
Also maybe a half black of some kind, like to fill in the sides of blocks? I think that would be cool but no clue if it would be good or not.
When I thought of this I just thought you could keep the world flat, loop the edges and render it slightly curved, so you can still use cubes
I have also thought about this question of making a voxelated planet.
I had the idea of using a subdivided *octahedron* to split the sphere into many *triangles* (specifically, triangles, not any other polygon), each of which would be handled as a separate "grid" of blocks.
The reason they're triangles is that three points are always in one plane, which means each triangle can be modeled as if it was *flat.* So a sphere is replaced with a very sphere-like polygon consisting of flat triangles, each of which is a regular old cubic world.
The only problem is that the player won't be able to build anything on the boundaries between the triangles. In practice this no-build zone might be, like, 0.01% of the planet's surface area, but it is still conceptually annoying.
Why don't you make the world a big torus that's mapped to a sphere? That way you could keep the cubes and also have it look like a sphere. Still distortion but you could move much of it onto the sphere projection rather than the voxels.
Edit: after more research it turns out my stupid ass didn't actually think this up just now. Found a video on it from "Seed of Andromeda", a really good (now abandoned but at least open source) voxel engine. I think I originally saw this idea back then, but forgot about it.
That stops you be able to fly away and see a planet which is somewthing i want in the future
@@IncandescentGames no you can still do that? That's the entire point of mapping it to a sphere?
Yo wtf, this is literally what I was thinking about like one week ago 💀
It should be the best minecraft mod ever made.
I highly recommand you to rework your water shader, water isn't transparent so it makes it look weird when you can see things through it that are at the opposite of the planet.
It's possible in unity to create water shader with fresnel, depth etc...
Otherwise, cool concept !
I had the idea some times ago, but the way I saw it was to just warp the world in the direction your facing (so by still using cubes) but have the world so big that the 256 bloc heigh would all look ok without block going through each other.
Definatly, water has a long way to go, plan is to have some sort of volumetric effect, but its not a current priority.