Floating voxels in gravity should turn to pick-up deposits.

Wilhelm shared this feedback 20 days ago
Not Enough Votes

This is largely a cosmetic feedback. There are naturally occurring voxel blocks of earth that sit and float in defiance of gravity. If you fly into one with the jetpack or a ship, prepare for damage. These happen naturally, or when someone is drilling.

Essentially the request here is that if in non-zero gravity, any voxels that are determined to be not connected to the core planet (or asteroid) anymore, should vanish, or ideally turn into a deposit of whatever ore it might be made of that you could pick up . In SE1, there was always that maddening tiny chunk of floating stone that was too small for your drill to drill and would forever be a hazard to buggies or low flying grids/space buddies. The engine should recognize when a voxel is 'unsupported' and make it go away or if someone is nearby make it turn into something that would fall to the ground and be able to be picked up.

Replies (5)

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To clarify the feedback, any time you get into natural (or artificial?) gravity, the game engine should find any floating voxels that are unsupported and convert them automatically to chunks of ore as though you dropped it out of your backpack. It's going to clean up the magical floating rocks that get left behind after mining, explosions of just during world creation.

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Thinking about it, this would also mean that we'd not have those gravity-defying asteroids that hover in the gravity well. In an extreme example we'd get to see these turn into giant deposits of (if we had stone, stone) ore that may be in it that then falls to the planet's surface and eventually vanishes. Always found it weird that these space rocks could hover in the gravity well.

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Those small floating cubes or spikes that will not budge are.....aaaarrgggghhh rickin poop da garoomph.

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In principle, it would be possible, but the game engine would have to continuously check the "static voxels" for their connection to the "main/parent static voxel object" and/or, at the same time, check for the minimum volume of the "static voxel object."

Voxel objects that lose connection with the "main/parent voxel object" should be "handled in some way" by the game engine. First and foremost, perhaps by converting them into "movable" voxel objects... I can't quite picture how that would work... Visually, the effect is obvious—a collapsing ceiling or pillar, and so on—but how do you implement that in the game engine...?

Converting static voxel objects that are too small into "free-floating objects" would probably be easier, if only because it’s enough to monitor the immediate surroundings of the active player (whether as a character or a ship pilot), since small "static cubes" and "static spikes" appear only there...

In most cases, static voxels seem to have "infinite strength and cohesion"—you can build caverns and underground halls of any size without the risk of them collapsing or the ceiling caving in. With a little effort, you can even cut through a mountain, severing it from its roots. Or cut a large asteroid into pieces... (which leads to another problem—what will be the "main" object?)

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It's simpler if it's only in natural gravity wells and only run the calculation when a player is within the area. Thus the only 'main'object would be the source of the gravity (i.e. the planet) and any voxels inside said gravity well that aren't connected to 'planet' are converted to what you'd get when you dump a bunch of ore out of a connector and dropped by a player. For planets it's a one-time check that simply cleans up the ones that are leftover from game creation. After that it's only a matter when a player is in the area and drilling actively. Anything that gets separated from 'planet' turns into something a player can pick up. i.e. there is some advantage to chopping off that pillar, since the extra stuff would also turn into pick-up-able stuff. From SE1 engine, there is also a risk of these floating falling objects falling on (injuring) your space buddy, which adds a level of risk to such things as well.

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...That seems like a huge amount of programming-work to resolve an issue you could also resolve by just letting the drill excavate voxels in its drill-radius without the tip of the drill being pressed in to voxel...

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Best evaluate the idea on the practical merits of its impact and benefits on gameplay/user experience, and let the devs evaluate how hard it is to do on their new game engine.

As for the drill radius, this suggestion also captures the scenario for say someone drills under a large hill until the whole hill is unsupported by anything 9maybe using some giant vehicle drill setup). All the unsupported stuff should vanish into a puff of programmed logic and fall to the ground as resources.

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Tael - In principle, yes, that would be a good, simple, and straightforward solution to the problem of hidden and leftover voxels. The drill function in "voxel destruction" mode (without resource mining) would remain unchanged.


Wilhelm - It's basically the same problem with grids.

You create a support, place a static grid on it, and then dismantle the support... And voilà! You have a levitating palace.

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That's a setting in SE1, though, 'allow unsupported grids', in either case, free floating stuff in gravity always breaks my immersion, whether it's grid or voxel.

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True, hitting those floating voxels can be quite difficult. Refining the code for that would mostly solve the problem. Perhaps not as satisfyingly, but you could at least get rid of loose voxels.

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Well, if you explore verdure (for example) for a little bit you see caves that have hovering voxels also, so it's not just player activity creating them. This baseline logic would clean it all up.

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take it further, just make floating voxels get deleted after 20 minutes

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yeah, agree. My visal feedback making them pick-upable deposits is the visual when mining and the (slim) possibility that if you don't plan carefully you could get crushed by giant falling rocks of massive iron ore boulders that fall on you if you're carving a ledge away at the base. That too is engineering.

Also, in theory when the explosives get put in place soon, you could blow up the base of some pillar and then alk around and pick up the 'debris' of the rest of the pillar, and maybe any floating voxels that get converted to ore get blasted in every direction as flying debris.

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Edit: meant to reply to the whole original post.

I like where you're going with this, but along with the performance problems, there's also the issue of where you draw the line for size. If I dig in a plane under an entire mountain and disconnect it from the planet, should it go "poof" and drop a bajillion loose rocks on the ground? Which part stays and which disappears? Because my second instinct is to troll everyone on a server by drilling to the middle of a planet and carving out the core, which might make the entire planet disappear.

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In reality, it is impossible to create a hollow space underground on Earth at a depth greater than approximately 8–10 km. When filled with water or a liquid of similar density, it is possible to drill to a depth of 12–14 km. The pressure from the surrounding rock is so immense (hundreds of MPa) that the borehole would close up in a very short time (and thus cease to exist).

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Not suggesting they do stress calculations on the voxels to see if they are 'supported enough'. Simply, if they aren't connected to the main planetary voxel, they they go poof. Feel free to dig your underground base.

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