Anyone working on Sphere terrain yet?

#1 Spherical terrain? that would take alot of work, the current terrain system renders out of a two-dimensional plane map, not to mention the problems with gravity.You could try to create the illusion of spherical terrain by altering the FoV and curving everything.

#2 I think what he is asking is:
Has anyone made a terrain model that is like a real world planet
spherical surface contained and endless travel in any direction
with crossing over original starting point like a longitude latitude
sorta reference

the simple fact is for design of a MMO this is very inefficient way
to create a "world"

great for a pen and paper game where orbital templates may be used
but for a MMO it is not

or perhaps he just meant a curved horizon type of terrain
not really convinced he meant that as from what I see of
the TGE it already simulates a horizon

given that waterblocks without any modification to your engine code
have a undocumented need for the default square or block size of 8
the actual surface one would have for a "curved" terrain model
producing a sphere would be an extremely small world.

If one was to forego waterblocks or revamp the TGE so that water was producable by
other means .. other than default conditions

basically designing the planet surface to be like a sky dome
only at a lower radius so it was under the sky
this is totally a waste of time

the present system of horizon rendering outside the bounds of the mission area
produce a very realistic illusion without all the added geometry problems
created by triangles that have circular calculations tied to thier rendering

to try and add real life physics of mass density and diameter to a worlds geometry system
only complicates the process of calculating and producing "lifelike" versions
of real life physics

#3 No I really am looking for a sphere terrain world. I am working on simulator and since it is not a FPS gravity does not effect the player.

#4 I'm sketching some work around this area. I'll make sure to tell you more as soon as I've got something concrete to show off. Which will be soon enough I hope, if work and woman lets me.

It requires a large portion of the TGE to be rewritten (a little more than 1Mb of code)....

#5 There are two issues with spherical terrain :

1) You need to implement it in the first place - i seem to recall the Nebula engine (v1 at least) has some implementation of spherical terrain, which might help you. Waterblocks of course are a whole other issue.

2) If you want players to walk round it, you'd need to practically rewrite the player physics code (including supporting rotation relative to gravity direction), and of course write a spherical gravity solver (i.e. something that tells the object which direction the gravity is acting, how much acceleration needs to be applied, etc).
(IMO, Serious Sam implements this quite nicely)

#6 Mat I sent you an email did you get it?

#7 Gravity is achieved by a central node on the sphere, all objects that are effected by gravity are then "pulled" toward the central point. There are a few ways to create the central point: Placing one node on the top, and two on the sides (x,y,z) so the meeting point for all three will be the vector of the center of the sphere. Or, if you already know the size and placement of the world, manually.

That is how I would do it anyway.

#8 You could do this if you based your player object off of the vehicle class and made the appropriate physics changes to attract to a centroid that represents your gravity. It will also have to make it stand up straight, and up will be down, sideways, etc if your camera is not always tied to the vehicle. : ) Definitely a game that would potentially make people barf.