Cube mapping for planets.

[Robotengineer]

Pretty simple, I suggest that cube mapping be used for planets instead of rectangular projection. Would this fix the 'stretchy poles' issue?

[Thomas988]

That's actually a really good idea. A game called Seed of Andromeda does this, and the terrain is very good. Currently there are some strange terrain visuals at times, but that will be fixed in the next update I hear.

[Whirligig Girl]

They actually do kinda work like that. Not the map, but PQS does use "Quads" and basically a -1 Planet is a cube.

- - - Updated - - -

That's actually a really good idea. A game called Seed of Andromeda does this, and the terrain is very good. Currently there are some strange terrain visuals at times, but that will be fixed in the next update I hear.

I've been wanting round voxel planets for so long! Yes!

[comham]

mapping a cube to a sphere has its own problems with distortions along the cube edges. I'm not sure how this would look on KSP's scale however.

Eskil Steenberg's Love had a spherical world which was essentially a distorted cube, and pre-minecraft square terrain parts, and they got noticably diamond-shaped towards the "corners", but accuracy was never a huge issue for such an abstract game.

[ratchet freak]

mapping a cube to a sphere has its own problems with distortions along the cube edges. I'm not sure how this would look on KSP's scale however.

Eskil Steenberg's Love had a spherical world which was essentially a distorted cube, and pre-minecraft square terrain parts, and they got noticably diamond-shaped towards the "corners", but accuracy was never a huge issue for such an abstract game.

They currently use a rectangular projection with massive distortion on the poles, moving to a cube-map would move the distortion around and lessen it overall

You can play around with map projections on this page the link is set for cubemap and the current one is equirectangular first in the top most dropdown list

P.S.: this is essentially what I asked for in my different triangulation request

Edited March 30, 2015 by ratchet freak