alt Hacker NewsEco: Global Survival (https://play.eco/) bypassed the distortion problem entirely by using an undistorted flat voxel grid, but rendering the globe view as a torisphere.
It still has the tradeoff of making travel close to the center take longer than it should on a sphere (worked around by limiting diggable height), but i find it a more elegant solution.
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superb_dev • yesterday at 8:53 PM
I had a similar idea while reading this article, it’s very cool to see someone implemented it!
It's an elegant rendering trick, but if their worlds are represented as a torus, then I expect this would make rotation on a spherical globe view unintuitive.
One example of this: I would expect each location would not have a single antipode (opposite coordinate) but would instead have three. If you were to start at location A, rotate travel 180 degrees along the latitudinal axis to location B, then 180 degrees around the longitudinal axis... on a sphere you would expect to be back at location A, albeit upside down. But on a torus, you are in a completely different location, which is the 'C' antipode. Rotating 180 degrees latitudinally from here will bring you to point D, the last of the antipode set.