Making Minecraft Spherical (bowerbyte.com)

Article summary

The article discusses the creation of a tech demo called Blocky Planet, which maps Minecraft's cubic voxels onto a spherical planet. The author explains the challenges of creating a spherical blocky world, including mapping a 2D grid onto a 3D sphere and preserving block width as you move outward. The author describes their solutions to these problems, including using a quad sphere and adding more blocks to each layer as you move outward from the center. The result is a procedurally generated and fully destructible planet that can be played in a browser or natively on Windows.

Main themes

• Spherical voxel rendering
• Procedural generation
• Game development
• Geometry and mathematics
• Minecraft-inspired games

What commenters say

• The article's approach to avoiding rectangle size differences in a cubesphere can be improved using spherical linear interpolation.
• Limiting the depth of excavation can solve issues with gravity and block distortion near the core of the planet.
• A realistic gravity implementation would require taking into account the mass of all quads on the planet, not just the planet's core.
• The concept of gravity decreasing as you approach the center of a planet is not entirely accurate and depends on the distribution of mass.
• Some games, such as Astroneer, deliberately implement non-realistic gravity for gameplay purposes.
• The idea of a spherical blocky world is not new and has been explored in other games, such as Space Engineers and The Outer Wilds.
• The article's use of a quad sphere and shell-based structure is a good solution to the problem of rendering a spherical voxel world.
• The discussion of gravity and physics in the comments highlights the complexity and nuance of simulating real-world phenomena in games.