[29] L'lasons de Aether ver Beinags #11

One thing about rendering a spherical looping universe is that it is very hard to do.

It's one thing to declare it in lore, but to actually make visuals that abide by that rule is something completely different.

To simplify this for the game, I could treat the loop as cubic, rather than spherical.

From left, the image above shows the lore representation, and the game's implementation.

The black diamond in the middle shows the discrepancy in how you'd map one side of the surface to the other when rendering. There is no such area in the cubic version, where every side conveniently maps to another cube.

While the spherical method might be trivial if you were only supposed to calculate player position when looping, it's the visualization that makes this so hard.

This is of course shown in 2d for the sake of simplicity.

A good visualization the cubic version is present in CodeParade's video on 3d fractals:

(Source: https://youtu.be/svLzmFuSBhk?t=242)

Cubic or not though, what I have in mind might be really hard to do if I don't have lower level pipeline access. I might be able to accomplish a more limited-range version of this with geometry LODs however. I think Unity does this on its own, though more explicit usage might be more optimized.

I can't easily use the spherical method of rendering, but that doesn't mean it can't be used for the player's position.

To keep the player within bounds seamlessly, I could determine the location of the player in the cubic space, then rotate that position from center 180 degrees. At that point, the Aether clone you were seeing is now the real one.

Combining a cubic render model, and a spherical position model, I can meet a middleground in terms of how easy it is to implement, versus its function.

Again using an external example, this seamless teleportation is present in Super Mario 64.

(Source: https://youtu.be/wjge1bVobN0?t=2195)

Shown here, Mario seems to be climbing a stairway with infinite steps.

In reality, he's simply being teleported back just enough to give the illusion of infinite steps.

I don't know what this would look like in practice, if it works at all, but that remains to be seen.

I have many lines of notes, and I just explained 2. As much as I'd love to describe all of the rest in more detail, I don't have an extra 3 days to write this. I'll give most of the remaining concepts in (lengthy) bulletpoint form:

• Deities and other beings don't need to take the shape of what would be considered a conventional creature, but most usually are. Entities can take the form of things like lakes, buildings, et cetera (I might have said somehting like this before, but I'm rephrasing it now.)

• Maybe certain substances you need to acquire are in the form of a lake (or other form of strykon pool), though if that lake is more or less considered a single entity, they might become angry from you technically removing parts of their body.

• The transparent soup that would best be described as Aether's 'air' is actually made up of clouds of entities, whose components trade associative ownership at random. Not only does this air lack any physical bonds, their associative bonds are highly weak too.

• One of the reasons Kommiagana has lived for this long (while having a wide scope) is because they aren't a part of this air. Rather, they're made up of things akin to dust particles, which move freely through it.

• Aether tends toward a perfectly neutral pressure, where every discrete point has an accompanying strykon. As such, low pressure conditions rarely occur naturally. Artificial pressure conditions (low or otherwise) might be needed for some alchemical reactions.

• The center of Aether contains a pool of liquid, where various creatures live. Most of these have some form of motility, but it's usually microbial in nature, like flagella, cillia, or pseudopodia. Another method I thought of and might or might not exist in real life, is like those gel wiggler toys, which are basically tubes that wrap into itself, like this:

• Most of Aether's liquid core belongs to a single deity known as Menngana. They know of Kommiagana's plan to effectively restart the universe, and wishes to stop it at any cost. Menngana will try to destroy you if you attempt to break the primordial strykons. Completion of Kommiagana's route might require you to dissociate Menngana with Aether's version of poison, acid, or some other dangerous substance.

• One way to take advantage of the universe loop, is for transportation. Let's say that you've synthesized an unstable substance you can only create in one spot, but you need to bring it somewhere else before it decays. To get from that area to your destination, you might need to do something like climb the minaret of Tati's house. The spire of the minaret scrapes the border of the loop, and by jumping above it, you wrap around to the other side, making gravity work in the opposite direction relative to you as you fall back down to the ground.

• Following the theme of transportation, there could be some paths that need to be set up in advance, and can only be used for a certain amount of time, or has a limited number of uses. For example, there could be a path that's cleared by removing some rapidly growing vines or something, and you only have so much time to use that path before it grows back.

• Some things would require knowledge on what they are, sometimes for the purpose of trading with an NPC. Specific items might need to be taught to the player contextually rather than explicitly.

That's it for this week.