Planets³ is full of worlds packed with trillions of mineable cubes, and with other planets to explore. It’s an RPG with quests and skills to master, and objects to build.
Their latest Kickstarter update explains their systems for featuring such large cubed worlds, and how viewing distances help keep the game from melting PCs.
”In Planets³ we wanted to be able to interact with the entire environment so we decided to use voxels. Moreover we had this amazing gameplay constraint : to be able to see the entire solar system at all time wherever you are. The development of our custom voxel engine required hundreds of hours of work,” explained Cubical Drift.
”To make it possible to see everything, we had to implement a sub-resolution system so that landscape elements that are far away are drawn with less precision (thus reducing required resources a lot). In our game, changing the view distance, only changes the boundary where the first resolution switches to the next.”
View distance = 12m on the left and 40m on the right”However sub-resolutions alone weren’t enough to make the game playable, because of the massive lighting and generation computation. Multithreading was the solution but also the most difficult task to implement,” they continued.
”Today’s result is that we have a multithreaded voxel engine that enables us to have an “infinite” view distance in real time.”
”Additionally, our engine enables us to travel long distances and even to go from planets to planets without any loading time. If you want to explore the planet you are seeing in the sky, you just have to fly over there and land on it.”
Check out the Planets³ Kickstarter for more. A $20 pledge rewards both beta and alpha access.
