Greetings from 28 Herlig in beautiful Comma Satia! It got a little cooler in the mid part of this week, and the leaves are just beginning to turn their intense autumn colors. Give it about another month, take a walk through Merritik Park, and I promise that all your worries will disappear.

tl;dr

Dusted off social media and blogger, worked on a few bugs in the Game itself, and done some investigation on the space requirements for the eventual World design.

The Game

Not much was done on the game itself. I’ve gone through the list of issues on my Github account and fixed the ones that would have prevented a player from logging in. My first goal is to simply to let you create an account and a Virtuoid, log in, and – no more. I’m keeping this simple right now – now grandiose promises, no pie-in-the-sky dreams, just a easy, simple, base from which The Greatest Game In History will be built.

I have turned my attention to how the world will be built, and I had to start with the basics.

The Thinking

One of the fun things about this project is that I have no clue as to what I’m doing. It’s fun thinking and learning about “things” that will help me get the game moving. So this week I thought “How is the World going to be created?”

In it’s final form, the game will take place on a planet (Tesrandia, Omega Phi IV, or 197d Aquarii). It is also one of the Great Dreams to use VR (of FP) to navigate this world. As such, I need to think about the dimensions of the world and the potential space requirements.

In regards to the measurements of the world, I started with the assumption that the world is a perfect sphere (which I know is most likely impossible in the world of physics. But hey, it’s a fictional world. Relax). I also wanted to have a ground resolution of 1 square meter (each “point” on the world represents 1 square meter), and a height map resolution of 1 decimeter. Finally, I used the radius of the Earth (6,378,000 meters) as a starting point. Given all of that, what is the minimum space requirements?

Let’s run the numbers.

To find an area, we use 4 multiplied by pi multiplied by the radius squared (side note: I *really* need to figure out how to format equations on this blog). That number comes to …

511,185,932,522,525 (floored)

Holy Archimedes, Batman! 511 TRILLION?!

Yipes. We’ll need at a minimum of 12 bytes for each point (Longitude, Latitude, Height). Our final number will be:

6,134,231,190,270,306 bytes

Yes, kids – SIX QUADRILLION. That’s – get ready – 5,579 Terabytes.

Whoa.

I mean, seriously, I can expose just a small portion of the world in the beginning, then expand it as the game ages. But it sure would be nice to have the entire world ready on Day 1. I can only image the incredible cost of storage space on Amazon.

Social Media

I restarted my 7 year old Twitter account this past week, and started following some of the JavaScript Masters in the world. I firmly believe you can have anyone as a mentor, and these people have already taught me a lot.

This blog is also the start of my social media campaign to Rule The World.

Follow me on Twitter @thevirtuoid.

Giving Back

I’ve seen some posts on using async/await that, frankly, didn’t do a good job of explaining why you need to use it. I’m thinking of writing a post using my experiences with Virtuoid to tell you how great it is, but also the gotchas.

Conclusion

Heading back downstairs to watch a little collegiate sporting events. I hope the Cooter’s Pond Tech wins a game this year. I swear, I don’t think there’s anyone alive who remembers the last time the Possums won a game. If you remember, let me know!

Categories: VirtuoidWeek

Tagged as: tesrandia

thevirtuoid

Web Tinkerer. No, not like Tinkerbell.

Creator of the game Virtuoid. Boring JavaScript. Visit us at thevirtuoid.com