Merandix said: ↑ Would you guys care to shine a little light on the decision to go with spherical planets beyond 'sharing code' with Space Engineers? Or is that literally all there is to it? Because, and I know I'm close to whining at this point, I still think that having mini-planets in ME sort of beats the point of having a planet. Because, from my non-programmers programming logic... being on a spheroid screams 'pi'... and pi seems like an expensive number to do gravity-calculations with... in a game that has essentially no use for said calculations above having a flat map with fixed gravity and gravity direction. From a resource standpoint, it seems kind of wasteful and expensive to run calculations that are more complicated than necessary for gameplay. Click to expand...

Code sharing with SE is definitely one of the bigger reasons. A lot of time is being spent into making the planets look good, this benefits both of our games now, effectively doubling the programmers' and artists' time value. For a smallish studio like us that's incredibly valuable. Additionally, it simplifies future work because we don't have to account for two different gravity systems, world sizes, etc.The old worlds also worked on a fixed-grid system. This prevented you from building under all kinds of angles. Since we have planets now we had to rewrite this system, and as you could see in the dev diary.. I think 3 weeks ago? we can now build castles that follow the natural outline of the geographic features.Finally, the way planets are structured allows us to implement certain systems, like the claim system we will be explaining next week. This wouldn't have been as easily doable on the old worlds.Computing the gravity vector on a sphere does not involve pi, it's still pretty simple math. There is no pi involved, the direction to the center of the planet in ME is the negative of your position, since the planet is centered around 0,0,0. Admittedly, it's a little more involved than having one single gravity vector everywhere, but it's not really a performance issue.