Toroidal world maps

[Brook]

Not that immersion is the #1 thing in a voxel environment, but having edges and corners to the world does destroy the illusion somewhat. Is the renderer capable of using modulus arithmetic during ray-casting (or however the engine works) so that the worlds are seamless? Modulus math nets a toroidal world surface, which would certainly be good enough. It’s a little less anamorphic than spherical mapping, and comparatively cheap to compute.

(I’m not even going to guess what the primary star and moon would have to look like from a rotating torus. And we’d have to kind of skip over that part where one can see the rest of the world across the donut hole. We’d just pretend it was spherical.)

[Kuma]

They are working on spherical worlds which wrap around so you’ll end up where you started if you walk in the same direction. But why not have a donut shaped world where you can see the world on the other side of the hole? That would look awesome!^^

[Brook]

It certainly would.

I suspect the worlds would end up (logically, not physically) cylindrical, because it’s very difficult to map spheres using orthagonal coordinates–the preferred system would be polar coordinates, and I don’t think the engine works in polar coordinates. (Or, to put it another way, I’ve never seen a voxel engine that uses polar coordinates.) The advantage of a cylindrical world is that all the blocks are the same area, which they aren’t on a proper cylinder. From there, when you cross the north “pole” if (X,Y) => ((X + W) mod W,Y) then you’re on a cylinder; if (X,Y) => (X, 0), then you’re on a torus. (Even though the map axis coordinates appear to range from -4095->4095, internally they’re probably 0->8191 at the current size of Vaisier [the only map whose corner I’ve visited], and eventually 0->16383 if the memory scaling isn’t an issue. That’s why I didn’t go from Y to -Y.)

[Kuma]

Well last time I saw Luca working on spherical mapping and I think he can do it. But who knows what will come^^

btw what stands the W for?

[Author]

Posts