Planets

Just as with the problem of map projection, creating planets shows a fundamental fact with voxels: As they are regular grids, shaping the actual grid into a planet, without distortions or discontinuities, is mathematically impossible. As such, we need to employ different methods depending on what we ultimately want to achieve.

Here are some considerations when choosing a method:

1. Perpendicularity:
   Whether building on the surface will be perpendicular along the voxel grid.
2. Continuity:
   Stitching together the planets volume from multiple sub-volumes, will create many edge-cases all over the code/logic, no matter how well hidden from the player.
3. Distortion:
   A good approach should reduce distortion. How distortion is valued depends on the game. There are a few considerations with distortion:
   • Distortion at the centre of the planet.
   • Distortion very far away from the planet.
   • Distortion on the surface of the planet in specific areas,
     such as poles and 'corners'.

The following sections show some of the possible solutions...

Faked

One can fake the appearance of a spherical planet, by visually curving the rendered blocks 'downwards', the further away from the camera they are, creating the illusion of a sphere. The downside being, of course, that one cannot go to space and observe the planet as a whole.

Naïve

A naïve approach is to generate the entire planet within a single enormous voxel grid; when rendering the voxels as smooth(-ish) surfaces, this causes no significant issues and can work rather well, as the game Astroneer shows.

For cube-like voxels on the other hand, parts of the map will become jagged, due to gravity pointing to the centre of the planet; this can and will create severe disorientation for the player, making for quite a terrible experience.

Example: Creating Voxel Planet.

Torus

By wrapping around/repeating the coordinates of a flat voxel grid in the cardinal directions (North/East/South/West), a torus-shaped planet is formed, creating the illusion of a planet.

While this does not create continuity issues, it is still a torus, meaning:

• Moving in a straight line along any cardinal direction, will put the player right back where they started.
• There are no poles.

Plates / Pyramids

By creating a small-ish set of interlocked 'plates', shaped like regular polygons, each being an independent voxel grid, all oriented outwards from a central point, a planet-like shape can be approximated.

While this does work well for cubic voxels, it has discontinuities at all plate intersections, across which one cannot build continuous structures.

The game StarMade uses this method with it's unreleased 'universe update'; see Video of Caves.

Inflated Cube

The inflated cube consists of six independent voxel grids, one per face of the cube; by (visually) normalizing the planes, a very-close to sphere-like shape is created.

Although this approach creates distortions near the corners, it is a usable approximation of a round planet for cube-shaped voxels; see for example: Seed of Andromeda.

See also

• Coordinate Systems