Inactive Skiing

[Skaldarnar]

Okay, we have mountains, we have snow, and we have slopes...how about alpine skiing?

As I was watching the alpine skiing world cup this morning I thought about how skiing would be in TS (If you like the snowboard more, please replace skiing with boarding every time ).
What do you think about any "sports" in TS, what would you like to do?

 

[Nym Traveel]

Will be a bumpy ride with our blocky world
As it would mainly be a different steering of the character I generally see just the problem that we don't have real slopes, just many cubes that look like a slope on a larger scale...

 

[Immortius]

Well, if the world generator was updated to make use of the sloped blocks then that would take care of that problem. The issue there is you can't have vegetation growing on slopes.

Sliding already works when slopes are steep enough, but skiing/boarding would need to be more controlled I think (the sliding is actually just falling).

 

[Skaldarnar]

At least I could try to build my own track out of slopes

 

[A'nW]

Well, one possible (maybe) way around the "slope is made of blocks" problem might be something along the lines of this (described below).

What could be done (described in high level theory), is somehow get, say, the center coordinates of the blocks surrounding the player (center of the top face would be fine also), out to about 5-10 blocks in every direction. After that you could do a simple least squares fit or something on the returned coords to find the plane that best approximates them, and subsequently, the "lay of the land" around the player. Then, say while on skis, you could use this plane as the collision surface instead of the surrounding blocks. After that, all sorts of things might be possible, using the planes surface normal and stuff...

I have no idea if something like that would work, but it seemed like an interesting idea. And yes, even I can think of many things that would make it "harder said than done" but ...

 

[Skaldarnar]

Yeah, that may work, A'nW. Giving you the feel that your skis are "long enough" to span ~2 blocks, so that you can slide over them.
May this be useful to determine some flow and current propagation for liquid systems?