It had a spherical 'block' world as well.
In case anyone else is curious, here is the description (one click away from the main page):
> LOVE is a cooperative online first person adventiure game. You play as a scavanger on a small planet who together with other scvangers will build a settlement by placeing a Monolith some where in the world. This Monolith makes the ground lose so that you can shape the environment around it in to what ever you want. Build walls, catacoms, houses and shape your settlement any way you want.
The vertical distortion is the biggest issue IMO, there are a few reasonably satisfying ways to approach the horizontal tiling of each “shell”. For example, you can make your world a donut instead of a sphere, and now you have a perfect grid at each level! Of course, this introduces a level of distortion between the interior and exterior, so you also twist the donut once, and now you’ve both solved your distortion problem and invented the stellarator fusion device.
As someone who is rather keen on space, gfx, and the algorithms that render them. Kudos. The problems were known to me, which is why I didn’t attempt it, however - the distortion correction, the chunking, I’m thinking if you just limit how far down you can dig (half way to the “core”) it will be fine. You won’t run into those tiny squished blocks that make up the core.
It’s also important to call out the quad-sphere. This is what makes it doable. Naive devs may just map lat long to sin cos spherical coordinates and call it a day, not realizing that their poles are jacked up. The cartography problem. I’m really glad to see that called out as people don’t realize WGS84 sucks for mapping a sphere.
As you dig down you would get lighter and lighter on your feet.
Any mass you are below (within the sphere of Earth) will exert a gravitational pull in one direction, while the mass above you (also within the Earth) will exert an equal and opposite pull.
the pressure would never lessen, just increase slower.
The gravity at the center is zero, but the mass above you is not exerting just gravity force (which gets cancelled out by the opposite side), but also pressure (from the weight of it falling down).
This means the water pressure would steadily climb, but at a slower rate as you move nearer to the center, and will be at maximum at the very center.
Fun fact: Gravity doesn't decrease the entire way down! Only when you get to the core does it decrease monotonically: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/18446/how-does-g...
But hollow planets are hard to come by so this is just my imagination, I'm sure someone has worked out exactly what would happen.
For ideal (spherically symmetric) planets where a point is underground, you can divide the planet into 2 regions. The shell of the planet "above" the point has no net effect, while the shell below has the full effect, resulting in the gravity falling towards 0 as you approach the center.
In practice, planets are not actually spherically symmetric, but are close enough for it to be a good approximation.
WGS84 is not a map projection, it's a geodetic reference frame prescribing a reference ellipsoid and reference positions of ground stations.
You might like Space Engineers.
Unfortunately Space Engineers is full of jank and random things will explode through no fault of your own. Actually, I guess that's on par with Kerbal Space Program-y. Also, Space Engineers will sometimes crash to desktop.
There's a Space Engineers 2 in development and I have good hopes for it.
This has plagued me for decades and I’ve been exposed to hundreds of projections. Probably thousands if you consider each UTM or MGRS zone to be its own projection.
God do I wish the Earth was flat.
also, the certificate on this website was created less than an hour ago: Mon, 01 Sep 2025 15:24:40 GMT
I don't know how to explain it better, perhaps I should try to write some code, lol
- https://youtu.be/ztAg643gJBA?si=8vDgg0rFCOj9I7no
This person has another, more technical video where they talk about the math behind it btw
At one point I flew far enough into space that I passed the star objects and everything got dark. That was a bit disquieting.
Very cool little game!
> You can even reduce the amount of visible distortion by restricting players to a portion of a shell, so they never see the full difference in block size at its top and bottom.
> From what I can tell, this seems to be the approach used by the upcoming game PlanetSmith for its hexagonal-blocky planets.
> Not currently, but I may make it public later. The current state of the code isn’t the cleanest, so my sense of pride prevents me from sharing it.
Felt that.
This demo is super cool! I’ve been dreaming about a game with an engine like this for the last 5 years. Super happy to see people experimenting with it!
It still has the tradeoff of making travel close to the center take longer than it should on a sphere (worked around by limiting diggable height), but i find it a more elegant solution.
One example of this: I would expect each location would not have a single antipode (opposite coordinate) but would instead have three. If you were to start at location A, rotate travel 180 degrees along the latitudinal axis to location B, then 180 degrees around the longitudinal axis... on a sphere you would expect to be back at location A, albeit upside down. But on a torus, you are in a completely different location, which is the 'C' antipode. Rotating 180 degrees latitudinally from here will bring you to point D, the last of the antipode set.
One of the worlds i played on had road planning from the start and a set of roadways covering the entire world in a 4x4 square grid. Pathing to point D was just a matter of going 2 blocks in one direction, and 2 blocks in an orthogonal to it.
In a world without such roadways, you'd look for landmarks such as oceans and continents instead.
Ultimately, you don't care if somewhere is antipodal or not because you never see the antipodes to where the globe is currently looking at without rotating the globe.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Hl4KapfAENAOf4gv-pSn...
There was a dev blog or two I couldn't find in Wayback except a YouTube video [3] on how they mapped the sphere to voxels. Not that one would notice much local effects at these scales (Flat Earth illusion), but Blocky Planet showcases the other end of the extremes, where Distant Horizons' curvature option or some other rounded world shaders out there could never achieve! (+Outer Wilds vibes)
[0]: https://github.com/RegrowthStudios
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20210416224527/https://www.seedo...
[2]: https://youtu.be/qCoyNH6y7CU?t=529 + at 9:23
Obligatory awkward demo: https://youtu.be/PDZGzL4GRF0?si=K9vfMhbcg5Vvd1_A
Certain blocks corresponding to the corners of the cube, where despite anti-distortion efforts the blocks will have one corner at 120° instead of 90°,
Triplets of blocks at these locations, where turning twice gets you back to the first block,
Blocks that get smaller as you mine down, and then suddenly double in size,
Somewhere, down at the core, a regular polyhedron (what shape is it? Must be a cube) made of pyramid blocks that all come to a point in the center.
OK who's fucking downvoting me for thinking about geometry? If one of these assumptions isn't true, go ahead and tell me.
I'm saying "presumably" because of points the article didn't spell out. Edit: I re-read and it doesn't talk about the very much non-cuboid blocks at the corners, or the pointed blocks at the core. Not in words, anyway. They're implied in the pictures.
If you want comments that build on this ... it's the triplets of quads that really bother me. They only appear at eight places on the surface of the planet, but it would mess with strategy in a strategy game (my own efforts were inspired by trying to create Civ on a true sphere) if routes between tiles are sometimes short-circuited. It would also distort house architecture in a sims-like, and mess up city grids if one of these triplet corners happens to be in the middle of your city, which would then go from having north-south and east-west streets to having ... six cardinal directions?
> When it comes to placing block structures, there are two (2) edge cases that can throw a wrench into things:
> 1. The corners where three (3) sectors meet break the regular horizontal grid topology, since three (3) blocks meet at the corner instead of four (4)
> 2. Vertical shell boundaries break the regular vertical grid topology, since a block can have four (4) vertical neighbors instead of just one (1)
> This means that there are places on our planet where it’s impossible to define a box-shaped zone of blocks that corresponds to the block structure’s source zone. I could just detect and prevent structures from being placed at these locations, but I opted for a more general solution.
> Placing structures will now “work” everywhere, though it can get a little wonky around the problematic areas. Still, I prefer this to having dead zones where no structures can be placed at all.
Anyway, you're never going to avoid the existence of some special nodes where three corners come together, and this does nothing to address the altitude problem, but I think it might result in a more uniform surface especially as the overall diameter goes up.
Quick experiments in blender show me that you can create a cube, then use subdivision modifier to get a fake sphere like the one in the article. Then put camera close to the surface and give it very low focal length. This way it looks like a sphere but the strange points where 3 quads meet are way out of the view so I basically see just one face of 6 sided sphere.
If I now textured this side so that it displays roughly 50% of the square texture containing the world map and scrolled and rotated the texture as I try to "rotate" the sphere I should pretty much not be able tell it from a real sphere but have a 100% normal 2d square Minecraft grid on top of it.
It looks quite nice, even and natural:
Texturing is a bit weird because polar caps are just two regions of the world with stuff in between them in all directions so you need to put them at the right distance and size them properly so they show up. And even then they disappear as you rotate the world by scrolling in W-E direction. To make them visible at all times, you'd need to make them half of your world. Which might be fine for your game to have vast, icy biome connecting north and south of your planet. Or even two separate zones of the planet separated by northern and southern walls of ice.
I'm not sure how well lightning is going to work with such low focal length but it might be fine.
I think the only thing that could dethrone Minecraft would be a voxel game with much smaller voxels (relative to the first person view). Maybe 1/8th the size of Minecraft blocks.
[1]: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kmcrane/Projects/RectangularSurfaceP...
this did not end well, but was hilarious. just to visualise the stuff I had to spend a week gluing cardboard rhombododecahedrons from pizza boxes.
what I learned is that they make much more fun toys than plain old cubes.
and that shallow sparse octtree-like things are in fact better for those kind of games (or GIS for that matter).
My approach was to build a hex grid on a geodesic sphere. It's a very different trade-off.
Are there any Minecraft clones that operate on a cubic world? Could be really fun building out a base on an edge, or on a corner!
Then you get automatic LOD.
(and the HEALPix projection)
That’s less than those buildings are probably expected to sway in a strong wind, but probably outside the tolerances for modern construction so theoretically measurable as an average deviation.
[1] https://ericweinhoffer.com/blog/2017/7/30/the-whitworth-thre...
exDM69•2d ago
The bad way: - Generate a cube - Subdivide each face using linear interpolation (lerp) - Normalize each vector to put it on a unit sphere
The good way: - Generate a cube - Subdivide using spherical linear interpolation (slerp) - done!
The cubesphere has lots of interesting geometric properties, particularly in texture mapping.