Spherical grids

[WhiteTheLink]

I haven't bought the game yet, so I'm just curious. How does the grid on every planet work? Considering the squares would get deformed near the poles, I don't get how it's implemented.

[celerypie]

exactly like you suspect. there are "faultlines": latitudes that have differently sized grids north and south of them. these faultlines occur more frequently near the poles.

[mreed2]

The grid realigns periodically as you move closer to the poles to keep the surface area covered by each square roughly the same.

Over and beyond that, the actual footprint of the buildings is constant regardless of where you place the building, so that means sometimes (near where a discontinuity occurs in the grid) the area of a square does change, which can have impacts on how far away a conveyor belt is from a building (which is very, very annoying).

Watching a Lets Play of this game (there are several) is probably the best way to see how this works in practice.

[Knottypine]

Yes, they do get deformed as you say. The grid will become misaligned, so not everything will line up perfectly. Which is fine, you can still easily work around it with how you manage your belts and sorters. I haven't had too many issues, just move things around a little bit and it all works out.

[Evilgenius]

It looks like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2383468079

You get a bit of wierd north to south construction, that is why east to west (or reverse) construction is prefered by most.

[Rhaane]

It works very well considering the issue with a sphere, just dont build any lines of production near the poles.. well you can but it would be a circle instead hehe. There is plenty of space to build and tons of planets youll go to anyway so the N and S poles can do something else like power , shooting stuff into space, logistic towers, artwork

the planets all have the exact same grid and are the same size, just the tilt, rotation, sun and wind vary as well as resources and such

[3Ddeath]

Hopefully in the next version they will give us a grid on a hyper sphere to make it even more confusing ;)

[WhiteTheLink]

Originally posted by evilgenius:

It looks like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2383468079

You get a bit of wierd north to south construction, that is why east to west (or reverse) construction is prefered by most.

So you just generally avoid the poles. Thanks! The image has been really helpful

[Mr. Fibble]

Building around with the longitude makes life much easier than going up or down the latitude. Any odd wiggles in belts can be absorbed by the space between sections of the factory.

The games also setup to encourage the use of logi-bots over a belt bus so again wiggles and wrinkles are smoothed out by the fleet of drones overhead and going between planets.

[Evilgenius]

Originally posted by WhiteTheLink:

So you just generally avoid the poles. Thanks! The image has been really helpful

You are welcome, for major assembly or smelter lines I avoid the poles, but they do have uses. Some planets have a tilted axis so that one of the poles gets alot more sunshine then the rest of the planet, so a solar array there is far more efficient. Like in my screenshot, those solar panels never shutdown completely. Also there are some buildings for interplanetary stuff that work far better on these poles if the planet axial inclination is suitable for it, but I am not that far yet, so haven't messed with those buildings yet.

It is a great game so far.

[celerypie]

also constructing circularly around the poles may be inefficient space wise, but looks awesome af

[Pyrrhic]

Originally posted by WhiteTheLink:

Originally posted by evilgenius:

It looks like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2383468079

You get a bit of wierd north to south construction, that is why east to west (or reverse) construction is prefered by most.

So you just generally avoid the poles. Thanks! The image has been really helpful

Yeah, don't avoid the poles. They can be very useful for solar panels and other buildings that require direct line of sight to the sun (Like EM-Rail Ejectors and Ray Receivers)

It gets a bit awkward if you build factories there, but that's not really an issue since they're so useful for other, non-factory related buildings

Here's the North Pole on my current planet. It's tilted toward the sun, so it never ever goes without line of sight to the system's star

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2383793489

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2383793491

[Kyuuby]

Originally posted by WhiteTheLink:

Originally posted by evilgenius:

It looks like this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2383468079

You get a bit of wierd north to south construction, that is why east to west (or reverse) construction is prefered by most.

So you just generally avoid the poles. Thanks! The image has been really helpful

It's not an issue for smaller factories. I have most of my small scale factory around poles (Graphene assembly, starting red and yellow) but the bigger ones around equator

[Nova]

I wonder how they will implement blueprints tho given the sphere issue as most layouts would be at least initially specific to the area you build it at maybe it has some automatic adjustment that makes it fit to the lowest common denominator of space required but that would mean the blueprints would have to dynamically adjust placements of buildings belts etc each time you mouse over an area to place it. I'm curious to see how they solve it

[Mr. Fibble]

I'd not be too surprised if blueprints were kept to non polar regions with the cut off being around the latitude where the grids get offset due to the sphere.

[mreed2]

Originally posted by Weswyn:

I wonder how they will implement blueprints tho given the sphere issue as most layouts would be at least initially specific to the area you build it at maybe it has some automatic adjustment that makes it fit to the lowest common denominator of space required but that would mean the blueprints would have to dynamically adjust placements of buildings belts etc each time you mouse over an area to place it. I'm curious to see how they solve it

Ehh...

In a theoretical way, the discontinuity in the grids shouldn't impact blueprints at all. The grid is arbitrary, after all -- take a world and rotate the grid by 90 degrees in any direction, and now its easy to build at the poles and hard to build on the equator. The issue arises from the snap to grid functionality rather than a change in the amount of space available to build near the poles. So, you could take a blueprint from buildings near the equator and plop it down right on the North pole and there is no reason for any issues.

However...

You wouldn't be able to edit (remove and replace buildings) a blueprint that worked that way. And connecting conveyor belts might be quite hard. But the blueprint itself would work as expected.