Exploring alignment with Evoli

[erlend-sh]

Hi Jeff!

While our mutual projects might be on ice at the moment, there’s some fun possibilities for collaboration or cross-pollination in the future should the wheels start turning again. I designed a showcase game for Amethyst called Evoli:

https://github.com/amethyst/evoli

The longer term plan was always that we’d want to move to a globe-based playground. There’s no call-to-action for now, but I hope we might chat more in the future :)

[jeffparsons]

Hi there! 👋

That sounds like a really cool idea!

As you observed, PlanetKit has been on ice for a while, and I don't imagine having time to do really significant work on it any time soon. I could probably squeeze in some smaller bits and pieces here and there...

My rough mental roadmap for PlanetKit is:

• Finish splitting out separate crates (names TBD):
  • planetkit-grid: just the type and algorithms for dealing with points and movement on a geodesic grid.
  • planetkit-voxmap: voxmap globe / chunk types, without anything to manage what gets loaded / created when
  • planetkit-physical (?): mapping of grid coordinates to real space, and the kind of helpers you'd need for generating geometry from your voxmap
  • planetkit-terrain: terrain generation algorithms
  • planetkit-amethyst: all the integration bits for fitting into a standard Amethyst project
  • some browser-based demo / playground / terrain generation exploration crates
• Strip out as much of my half-baked networking stuff as possible, and embrace whatever Amethyst is doing.
• Play around with some hopefully-actually-interesting procedurally generated terrain

The biggest question in my mind right now is how to reconcile my hierarchical coordinate system with Amethyst; I haven't used Amethyst yet, but my understanding is that most of it is based around the assumption that you have a single coordinate space where all objects have an absolute transformation from the origin? Is that right? (EDIT: To clarify why this is relevant to PlanetKit... from the start I've imagined having procedurally generated universes where solar systems don't exist until you visit them, the planets don't exist until you visit them, etc.; so a single absolute coordinate system was never going to cut it. 😊)

What do you think you'd most need out of PlanetKit for it to be useable for Evoli? If you do start toying around with it at some point I'm happy to make you a committer.