StarMade Preview: Introducing Planets! news

Hello and welcome to StarMade,

Planets

The reason for the long wait until the next update was, because I was working on a very special feature: Planets. It was very hard to implement, but I definitely wanted to include this feature into StarMade.

Problems

• Size: The first problem is pretty obvious. Planets have to be huge. I worked day and night to optimize the StarMade engine to generate, load and draw segments (chunks) a lot faster.
• Shape: This might not be a question since everyone's first intention would be: 'Round'. But round problems have a lot of serious disadvantages, both technical and in game play. One technical problem for example is, that most of a planets mass is under the surface, leading to a lot of data generated that won't be used at all. Another problem is gravity: A central force would only work on planets the size of actual planets. Though this might be possible to do theoretically, I thought that it's already difficult to find players in one world. On a smaller planet, central gravity would end up letting the player stand diagonally on surfaces, which one hand would confuse the player, and on the other blur the lines dimensions. You can't squarify a cycle.

Solution

I thought long and hard and finally came up with a solution both unique, and practical to use: Disk Worlds. Making planets disks would give me an efficient way to use surfaces, and also keep the game play simple by having only one up!

Teaser

We are working hard one a lot of other stuff, including a new trailer for StarMade (finally). The planet update will probably done within the next week, so I hope I can shorten the time with some development screen shots:

First Tests:

Taking its shape:

More shaping:

Adding some color & action:

New feature: Mixed colored lighting:

Adding atmosphere

View from far away:

The end of the world:

View on mars like planet:

View on earth like planet (dummy textures)

Thanks for playing StarMade!
- schema