how to design a block style base building system on a spherical voxel planet

Summary · qwen2.5:32b

The article discusses challenges in designing a base-building system for a spherical voxel planet, focusing on issues like connecting buildings across the curvature and maintaining proper orientation relative to gravity. The authors propose using anchor blocks that establish local grids for building placement but struggle with aligning separate structures, such as bridges, due to the planet's curvature. One concrete detail is the use of an initial "anchor" block to create a localized grid system for subsequent block placements, ensuring correct alignment and avoiding vertical axis distortion.

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game design, base building, voxel world

Excerpt

<!-- SC_OFF --><div class="md"><p>As the title says, I am looking for tips, ideas and game examples of how to design a base building system similar to Minecraft or Terraria that would work on a voxel spherical planet.</p> <p>Context: I have been working with my friend on a game for the past 3 years on Godot. We currently have a working destructible smooth voxel planet that by nature is spherical. As we implement more and more basic features, the nagging issue of how to handle base building keeps popping up. Unlike on a flat game world, a block grid cannot be cleanly mapped onto the surface of our terrain. This creates a few problems:<br /> - How to allow player to connect two different buildings placed on different points of the world?<br /> - How to make sure buildings are oriented properly (building aligned with gravity)?<br /> - How to avoid distortion in the vertical axis?<br /> - How to merge smooth voxel world with block buildings (weather aesthetically or with the collisions)?<br /> - How to deal with curvature on large builds?</p> <p>Current solution:<br /> The current solution entails placing down a first &quot;anchor&quot; block onto the surface of the terrain. This block will align with gravity and create a grid-map creating it's own coordinates with regards to it. Then the player can place &quot;normal&quot; blocks, which can only be placed onto an anchor block or subsequent normal blocks. These blocks will have the same orientation as the anchor blocks and so form flat walls/floors with regards to it. This solution solves the issues of orientation with regards to terrain and vertical distortion which would created by using a spherical grid that each block would snap to. </p> <p>The problem with the current solution:<br /> How to connect two separate buildings? For instance, a player is trying to build a bridge across a river and starts by building the ends of the bridge on each side each with their own anchor block (meaning the two ends will not necessarily be flat or parallel to each other). How can the player build the bridge so as to have both ends meat neatly and not intersect or have gaps?</p> <p>Anyways sorry for the long explanation, any suggestions or thoughts are appreciated!</p> </div><!-- SC_ON --> &#32; submitted by &#32; <a href="https://www.reddit.com/user/MLGiraffe101"> /u/MLGiraffe101 </a> <br /> <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1up7me4/how_to_design_a_block_style_base_building_system/">[link]</a></span> &#32; <span><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1up7me4/how_to_design_a_block_style_base_building_system/">[comments]</a></span>