The main reason I stopped working on the planets was due to the technical limitations of the TGE. I was essentially stuck using interiors for the surface of the planets. Why is this a problem? Several reasons:
- The lighting on interiors is awful, if one player turned on his player light half the planet was bathed in the glow.
- They had to be mostly flat, or at least very dull.
- Building on interiors doesn't work unless they are aligned exactly right and can still produce errors and glitches.
- Vehicles often failed to collide with the surface so you'd just end up flying straight on through the planet.
Other problems included: Couldn't add water effectively to the map, navigating around in Zero-G as a player was almost impossible, large objects like the planets outer surface "demanded" the use of large textures in order to look decent which caused ingame downloads to be incredibly slow, and limitations on how many objects could be included in the map robbed it of authenticity.
I would have liked to include a variety of other objects in the map like asteroids, speeding comets, and particle clouds. I did experiment with using terrain as the surface of the planets but the "hole" tool is tempermental and the terrain repetition would have limited the size of the map. My one true success was with that final version of earth that you see in the video. It took plenty of trial and error in order to get the transparency of the cloud layer working but when it finally did it looked awesome.
A space/solar system map is a great idea and has been done well before in other games (Like the "Spacebuild" gamemode in Gmod) but it might not be suited for use in Blockland. Best of luck.
