Reply With QuoteI may not have mentioned it, but the shape in the image is a sketch, not the finished deal. I'll probably use more mapping-oriented approach for the highly detailed structure of the thing, unless that proves too complicated as well.
Need ideas for mapping a complex 3d world
Hello everyone, I'm new here and I've finally signed on to ask for ideas on a particular project I'm working on. Bear with me here, it's a complicated one.
Let me set the scene. This is the object in question: Dalbaz, a shattered world that was once a great big maze of interior and exterior spaces.
And here's a brief turnaround.
Here are the rules and constants:
- Gravity: Straight down, i.e. galactic south, NOT planetary. Magic, yall.
- Star orbits the main planet in epicycles that produce seasons.
- Dalbaz is about 6,000 mi in diameter. Because gravity is globally down, if it were a solid sphere, the only habitable land would be on top of the ball.
- Before the cataclysm, Dalbaz was like a many-story maze of stacked layers in the shape of a sphere. Most of the usable "land" was underground.
- Dalbaz is now a hollowed out shell of fractured parts. People now live wherever they can, on the top surfaces of the upper and lower shells and in the volume of the shell pieces.
- Output will eventually be 2d, RPG book in print and pdf/epub.
- In terms of climate/geography, Dalbaz is in awful shape. It was the center of magic until it was basically destroyed, now it's essentially a wasteland with interesting things to dig up. Low population.
Core Problem:
How in the heavens should/could I go about mapping such a thing? The other worlds are easy as pie, since gravity is flat, they are too, more or less. But this thing is multi-layered and in several pieces, each in a different orientation.
I'm planning to do world maps of each world, then regional maps for each of the regions as well, so the world map doesn't need to be fully defined, but still.
Bonus Points:
I'd also like to hear any interesting ideas about cultures, technologies, and/or magics that could or would arise on such a world. Sky's the limit at the moment, nothing's written in stone yet, so to speak.
Background Junk:
Gravity goes down more or less because the god responsible for creating this universe wanted it to be easy to navigate. The rings in the sketch show planes of force that hold up the various celestial bodies. There are three other worlds embedded in the rings around this central body. Note that these rings don't work like gravity-based rings like Saturn or Jupiter, they're basically enormous world-rune-magics that hold things in place.
Central body: Dalbaz. This used to be a spherical planet but got hit by a cosmic laser cannon thing that knocked it all to crap. Now the pieces are held together by giant World Chains forged by one of the gods.
Dalbaz has two inner rings, and the innermost has what used to be the planet's core embedded in it. The three worlds in the ring are Khrosadalt, Luonerre, and Kanneum.
The star is a binary object. One of the bodies is a solid one that shades the worlds when the sun is below the celestial horizon.
The rings rotate at different rates, generally getting faster towards the center.
I may not have mentioned it, but the shape in the image is a sketch, not the finished deal. I'll probably use more mapping-oriented approach for the highly detailed structure of the thing, unless that proves too complicated as well.
Here's where I'm at so far.
And here's the super-awkward projection object I'm using.
Can't help you because your universe is inconsistent...
"The other worlds are easy as pie, since gravity is flat, they are too, more or less."
So the shape of the planets in your universe are disks.
How does a sphere get created then?
Assuming it still does, it's just a stack of discks with a hole in them. Each "disk" would then be mapped top down as individual with disk layers.
the overall shape of the multi disked thing is inconsequential and the pieces are only dependant upon that particular layer and how it broke up...
Let's say somehow the laser created an explosion which cracked the planent a star shape... Layer 0's North star point would be disconnect from Layer 1's because even though it's the same shape there's still the fact that they're different disks.
Also if you hit this things from the top with laser beam that reached the center and then exploded, the bottom be greatly unaffected, but also the pressure wave would fire back through the open spaces and try to escape so that if you essentially had cylinder with thick top and bottm, then the sides would break out, separating the top and bottom in at least one place through creating a hole. The pressure from this weapon would travel back upwards and outwards, but the lower level wouldn't be wholy unaffected because it would have chuncks of the above rocks slamming down on it.
So... What I'm saying is that for what you're describing your shape is completely off
